Trump has invoked the “American dream” and “America First” repeatedly in his addresses, often citing both in the same speech. From the floor of a tool factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to the stage of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump has deployed these phrases and, more important, linked them together for his audiences. Pushing the country inward, he has suggested, would pull its citizens upward.
In Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “the American Dream,” Sarah Churchwell traces the origins and evolution of both of these expressions. “There is great power in loaded phrases, as anyone willing to pull the trigger knows,” she observes in her introduction. For Trump and his allies, these two phrases combine in a simple and simplistic formula for success: The American dream is dead, but Trump will make America great again by putting America first. This mantra not only echoes the patriotic chorus of an arena chanting “USA! USA! USA!,” but it also carries the same underlying appeal. Audiences seem to understand these phrases instinctively and reward their use with an almost reflexive response. Yet as Churchwell makes clear, neither expression is as straightforward as it seems, and both come with a long and complex past:
The evolution of these two sayings—both their myths and their truths—has shaped reality in ways not fully understood. We cannot understand the subtexts of our own slogans if we do not understand their contexts; we risk misreading our own moment if we don’t know the historical meanings of expressions we resuscitate, or perpetuate.
Behold, America is the author’s effort to offer this context and to map out both phrases’ multifarious meanings. Moving back in time from the early 21st century to the early 20th, Churchwell shows that these expressions were originally used in ways that are significantly different from our current understanding of them.
Churchwell has cast a wide net in her research, drawing into account not only politicians and pundits, but also journalists, novelists, ministers, and ordinary Americans. The result, appropriately enough, is a bit messy. Readers hoping for a tidy etymology will doubtless find themselves frustrated at times. But that messiness illustrates the ways in which these phrases have always been, as the historian Daniel Rodgers memorably put it, “contested truths.” They stand at the heart of the American experience, and as a result, the struggle over their meaning has, in many ways, represented a struggle over the meaning of the United States itself.