In the decades that followed the publication of “The Epic of America,” the American Dream became one of the nation’s great exports, an advertisement for a prosperous, socially mobile way of life unavailable elsewhere. The members of America’s postwar population boom came of age during one of the greatest periods of economic expansion in human history. From 1945 to 1975, the U.S. economy more than doubled, accounting for roughly a third of the world’s industrial output. These gains were shared across socioeconomic strata, as people moved from farms to cities and from cities to suburbs. Working Americans had access to affordable homes, college educations, and jobs that provided a clear path to middle-class stability. People grew accustomed to the expectation that each generation would surpass the horizons of their forebears. According to a 2016 study led by the economist Raj Chetty, Americans born in 1940 had a ninety-two-per-cent chance of earning more than their parents had.
The idea that anyone could bootstrap their way to affluence had profound effects on how people treated one another, something Adams noted in “The Epic of America.” He wrote of a Frenchman visiting New York City who expressed astonishment at “the way that everyone of every sort looks you right in the eye, without a thought of inequality.” Rich and poor, he thought, shared a kind of dignity.
These opportunities were not equally distributed, of course. As America’s middle class underwent an unprecedented expansion, African Americans remained subject to discriminatory housing, employment, and banking practices. In 1965, William F. Buckley, Jr., and James Baldwin debated the proposition “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro” at the Cambridge Union Society. Buckley argued that African Americans had not fully taken advantage of the opportunities available to them. Baldwin’s own success, he said, was evidence that one could rise above one’s circumstances, and he cited the advances Black Americans had made since emancipation. “The most mobile society in the world is the United States of America,” Buckley proclaimed, “and it is precisely that mobility which will give opportunities to the Negroes which they must be encouraged to take.”
Baldwin’s position was that the centrality of slavery and racial subjugation in American history could not simply be reversed by legislative fiat. “I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing,” he said. “For nothing.” What Baldwin described was not only the denial of economic opportunity but the discovery that America had not, “in its whole system of reality, evolved any place” for Black Americans. He recalled the “great shock” of realizing, as a child watching a Gary Cooper movie, that he had more in common with the Indians than he did with the cowboys. Baldwin did not dismiss the American Dream as a fiction. But, he argued, until the nation reckoned with how deeply the enslavement and continued degradation of Black people had shaped its history and prosperity, “there is scarcely any hope for the American Dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.” The students at the Cambridge Union, asked to decide the debate’s winner, voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin’s favor.