Behold, America
A History of America First and the American Dream
Sarah Churchwell
Having read it
★★★★☆
An impactful and challenging read that delivers many interesting facts and a few surprising revelations. America is a truly troubled country with a history that needs to be more widely known. The epilogue, focusing quite well on D. Trump (and his father) is brilliant and helps bring modern context to a lot of America’s past and a seemingly contemporary expression for its reasoning.
A good passage
...when the ‘American dream’ was used in a context that referred to economic prosperity, the expression usually suggested that the accumulation of wealth was ‘un-American’, that the American dream was opposed to economic inequality and laissez-faire capitalism.
A second good passage
The American dream was about how to stop bad multimillionaires, not how to become one.
A third good passage
[F. Scott] Fitzgerald was responding to a culture that had, for twenty years at least, been arguing for a larger American dream, one that protected the American creed against the encroachments of the mechanistic spirit that was overtaking the country. Fitzgerald captures a moment when materialism was taking hold of the dream – he registered it, and saw what its costs would be: the death of hope, and endless disappointment; the loss of wonder, not the realisation of it.