American Dreamer

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf. President Obama has been touting middle class economics a lot lately and needling GOP rivals about it whenever he gets the chance.

BARACK OBAMA: But I will say this. So I’m encouraged that they’re speaking about middle class. But you can’t just talk the talk. You got to walk the walk.

PETER: Today on BackStory, we don’t just talk the talk, we walk you through a history of the middle class in America. We’ll comb through the faintest, middling aspirations buried with an 18th century shopkeeper, go in search of the roots of the African American middle class, and consider how class is always more than a marker of economic status.

CORNELIUS BYNUM: There’s always been a black middle class. But it hasn’t always been pegged to income.

PETER: The challenges and dreams of the middle class today on BackStory. Don’t go away. Today on BackStory, we’ll be right back.

Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh. And I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: There’s a journalist for Politico named Tim Noah. A few years ago, he published a book about inequality in America. And in that book, he wrote about a man you’ve probably never heard of. I certainly hadn’t heard of him. He’s a guy named James Truslow Adams.

TIM NOAH: We don’t know his name. What we do now is the phrase that he created. And that phrase is “the American dream.”

BRIAN: That’s right. This Adams is the originator of the American dream. And so you might guess that Adams was around in the nation’s early years or certainly a few decades later in the heady days of Manifest Destiny. And if you guessed that, you would be wrong.

TIM NOAH: Interestingly, he coined that phrase in 1931. Two years after the–

BRIAN: Odd time to coin the phrase of the American dream, not nightmare.

TIM NOAH: Exactly, exactly, yeah, unemployment was headed towards 25%.

BRIAN: But even in the depths of the Great Depression, the dream of making it in America would have resonated with many, many people. The nation was coming off several decades of unprecedented growth. And a lot of folks had directly benefited from that growth. So much so that James Truslow Adams figured it would be a no brainer to call his book “The American Dream.”

TIM NOAH: And his editor said, oh, don’t call it “The American Dream.” We’ll never be able to sell a book called “The American Dream.” And of course, all these many years later, nobody remembers Adams. Nobody remembers the book. Everybody remembers the phrase, the American dream. So much for editors wisdom.

BRIAN: Despite the books new title, The Epic of America, the dream had staying power. But for Adams the dream wasn’t as simple as we often make it out to be today.

TIM NOAH: He said it was it’s not quote “a dream of motor cars and high wages merely.” But rather quote “a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they’re innately capable and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

PETER: When he wrote that, James Truslow Adams was living in his own version of the dream. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of his birth. Adams’s father was a well to do stockbroker. But still, Adams the younger had amassed a small fortune on the stock market and at age 35 had left Wall Street to pursue a writing career in Europe. He was living in London, in fact, when he wrote The Epic of America.

BRIAN: Now, it might sound a little, let’s just say, cynical for this guy Adams to be pumping his vision of the American dream from England, while the economy was still in tatters. But he had good reason for being optimistic. Adams had been born at a time when upward mobility was a fairly common thing in the United States. For instance, farmers’ sons around the turn of the century were 25% more likely to advance into white collar jobs than they would be half a century later, in a time we usually associate with the golden age of the middle class.

PETER: Since the turn of the 21st century, the middle sector of wage earners in America has contracted, with families more likely to move down out of the middle class than they have been to move up. And yet Americans still think of their country as James Truslow Adams once did, as the land of opportunity. A recent Pew poll found that 40% of Americans think it’s common for people to start poor, work hard, and become rich.

TIM NOAH: That’s the Supreme irony, that Americans are less fatalistic than Europeans are about their chances of moving up. But if you look at the statistics, most countries in Western Europe that are comparable to our economy have more rapid upward mobility at this point than the United States does.

BRIAN: So Tim, is this the American dream of the American delusion?

TIM NOAH: Well, I think that it is a bit of a delusion.

BRIAN: Take, for instance, what Tim Noah refers to as income heritability. That’s the likelihood you’ll make roughly what your parents made. So the higher income heritability is the lower social mobility is. In recent years, economists have crunched the heritability numbers for the 20th century. And what they found isn’t very encouraging.

TIM NOAH: Previously, studies had shown that income heritability was less than 20%. So everybody thought, hurray, the United States has–

BRIAN: You made it on your own.

TIM NOAH: That’s right.

BRIAN: 80% chance of making it on your own.

TIM NOAH: 80% chance exactly. To quote that famous poem Invictus, “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain my soul.” You could say I am master of 80% of my fate. I am the captain of 80% of my should pretty good, right?

BRIAN: So I might inherit male pattern baldness from my parents. But I’m not going to inherit their income status.

TIM NOAH: Right, but then the problem was they found out that heritability was much higher, about twice as high as they had thought. So it became I am the master of 60% of my fate. And then it dropped even further to about 40% or 50%. And there was actually one researcher– he was looking at income among brothers. And he found that you were likelier to inherit your parents place in the income distribution than you were to inherit their height or weight.

ED: There’s been a lot of talk lately about the plight of America’s middle class. President Obama has made middle class economics a priority of his last two years in office. Even Republicans like Jeb Bush have been highlighting the struggles of Americans who can’t seem to get ahead, no matter how hard they work.

PETER: This is a favorite theme of politicians, in part because it resonates so widely. Almost half of Americans identify as middle class. And yet it’s always been incredibly difficult to pin down what exactly we mean by middle class. Median income varies enormously by region, ranging from $37,000 in Mississippi to $69,000 in Maryland. In New York City alone the middle 60% of income earners– one common definition of middle class– ranges from about $20,000 to $170,000 a year.