James Truslow Adams

James Truslow Adams was the historian who gave America its most enduring national myth — the phrase “the American Dream,” which he coined in The Epic of America (1931) and which has since become one of the most used (and most contested) phrases in American public discourse. He defined the Dream as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” — a vision that was explicitly not about material wealth but about “a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.”

Wall Street to History

Adams was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1878, to a prosperous family (no relation to the presidential Adams family, though he later wrote about them). He attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and Yale, graduating in 1898, and spent the first two decades of his adult life in business, working on Wall Street as a stockbroker and then in investment banking. He served in military intelligence during the First World War, and it was the war that turned him toward history.

He published his first book at forty-three — The Founding of New England (1921) — and it won the Pulitzer Prize for History. The book was a revisionist account that challenged the standard narrative of New England’s settlement as a story of religious freedom, arguing instead that economic motives were at least as important as religious ones and that the Puritan oligarchy had been as intolerant as the English establishment from which it had fled.

The New England Trilogy

The Pulitzer-winning Founding of New England was followed by Revolutionary New England, 1691–1776 (1923) and New England in the Republic, 1776–1850 (1926), completing a trilogy that traced New England’s development from settlement through revolution to industrial maturity. The trilogy was notable for its rejection of the “filiopietistic” school of New England history — the tradition that treated the Puritans as secular saints and their descendants as the natural leaders of American civilisation.

Adams argued that New England’s contribution to American life had been more ambiguous than the standard account allowed — that Puritan intolerance, commercial avarice, and racial exclusion were as much a part of the story as democratic idealism. This argument, which now seems unremarkable, was genuinely controversial in the 1920s.

The Epic of America

The Epic of America (1931) was Adams’s masterwork and the book that made him famous. Written during the first years of the Great Depression, it was a single-volume history of the United States from the discovery of the New World to the present, organised around the theme of the American Dream.

The book was an enormous bestseller — one of the most widely read works of American history ever published — and its success rested on Adams’s ability to write serious history in a style accessible to general readers. He was not an academic historian (he held no university position and had no PhD), and the professionals sometimes looked down on him, but his work was rigorously researched and his interpretations were original.

The phrase “the American Dream” — which Adams used as the organising concept of the book and which appeared on nearly every page — entered the language immediately. Adams explicitly distinguished the Dream from mere material prosperity: “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.” This definition has been quoted, misquoted, invoked, and contested ever since.

The Adams Family and Later Work

The Adams Family (1930) was a history of the presidential Adams dynasty — John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams, and Henry Adams — that traced the decline of an American aristocratic family through four generations. The book was admired for its literary quality and its unflinching portrait of a family that, as Adams argued, had been simultaneously indispensable to and incompatible with American democracy.

The March of Democracy (2 volumes, 1932–1933) was a popular history of the United States. Provincial Society, 1690–1763 (1927) was a contribution to the History of American Life series. Building the British Empire (1938) and The Empire on the Seven Seas (1940) turned to British imperial history.

Adams was also the editor-in-chief of the Dictionary of American Biography (20 volumes, 1928–1936), a monumental reference work that remains one of the standard sources for American biographical information.

Legacy

Adams’s reputation has suffered from the general decline in respect for popular history among academic historians, and from the uncomfortable fact that “the American Dream” — the phrase he invented — has become so thoroughly absorbed into political rhetoric that its original meaning has been largely forgotten. Scholars of American intellectual history have begun to recover Adams’s contribution, particularly his insistence that the Dream was about equality of opportunity and social dignity, not about wealth.

Collecting Adams

The Epic of America (Little, Brown, 1931) is the primary collecting target — a common book in later printings but scarce in the first edition with dust jacket. The Founding of New England (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), as a Pulitzer winner, is also sought. The Adams Family (Little, Brown, 1930) is collected for its literary quality. The Dictionary of American Biography (Scribner’s, 1928–1936), while not a work by Adams in the usual sense, is collected as a reference landmark.