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

Perhaps the most famous Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the third US president and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. As president, he oversaw massive American land expansion through the Louisiana Purchase, which extended the American frontier into modern Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and beyond.

Despite his brilliance as a political leader and the imperishability of his Declaration, Thomas Jefferson’s legacy is mixed. He was a slaveowner despite his lifelong uneasiness with slavery, which prompts the question of how severely we should judge historical figures who engaged in deplorable activity that was condoned or even encouraged in their time. In this book, his role as the author of the Declaration—which many consider the essential document underpinning the American Dream—makes him in some ways the author of America itself. (Author of America happens to be the title of a separate biography of Thomas Jefferson.)

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was the 16th US president. Coming from modest beginnings, Lincoln launched an unsuccessful campaign for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly and worked as a lawyer before winning a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1846 and becoming president in 1861. Lincoln held the office of the president during the secession of the American South from the Union and made the difficult decision to go to war to hold the US together and to keep his vision of the American Dream intact.

In this book, Lincoln functions as both a representation and expositor of the Dream of Upward Mobility. Lincoln’s humble origins and eventual election to the country’s highest office reinforced his conviction that America was a land of upward mobility for anybody willing to work hard for it. Lincoln’s reputation for freeing the slaves is deserved in the sense that the abolition of slavery was one of the outcomes of the Civil War, but freeing the slaves was a means to keep Lincoln’s version of the American Dream alive. For Lincoln, the unfair economic disadvantage that slavery caused for white laborers was at least as much of a concern as the injustice of slavery itself.