The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation

Cullen explains that Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is the influential core of many American Dreams, from the American colonies’ 18th century revolution against Britain to the civil rights protests of the 1960s and beyond. Most importantly, the Declaration’s famous second paragraph, which includes the phrase “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” is the section of the document “that survives in collective memory and which underwrites the American Dream” (38). As a kind of constitution of the American Dream, the Declaration of Independence has highlighted the gap between current conditions and future possibilities for generations of activists.

For the US Founding Fathers—a group of men that included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams—the American Dream was freedom. Increasingly direct British supervision of the governance of the Thirteen Colonies, including the raising of colonial taxes to recuperate British financial losses during the Seven Years War, inspired pamphleteers like Thomas Paine to convince Americans that their arrangement with Britain was a kind of slavery—and that Americans would stand to gain freedom by leaving the British Empire. Before the Declaration of Independence was published, “the