He was fed up with the store-bought duck calls he used during duck hunting season.
A new book from historian Sarah Churchwell examines the etymologies of two ubiquitous phrases
I can build a better duck call. So he disappeared into the ramshackle work shed in the back of our property and started tinkering around with materials and tools. Eventually, he worked out a sweet design made of two separate cedar-tree-cut reeds rather than the usual one, plus the ingenious twist of carving a dimple in the reeds to hold them separate.
It was a design so special that he got a patent for it. He put a lot of hard work and patience into his duck call. He just wanted to make a great duck call for the average hunter.
THE EVOLUTION OF SHOPPING + ENTERTAINMENT
The result was the backwoods Stradivarius of duck calls, a duck call that sounded more like a duck than a duck did, a sound that reached far up in the sky and invited ducks to come on down, relax, and spend some quality time with new friends, who actually turned out to be the business end of a shotgun. Ducks loved the sweet music the instrument made, and so did the hunters.
My mom pitched in to run the business, handling orders, paying the bills, and balancing the books on the living room couch. He said he thought America would be first, not in the selfish spirit, but first to be in Europe to help whichever side won. Not to take sides, but to be there to promote justice and to help rebuild after the conflict.
How the American Dream Works
That was what he was trying to say in These were presidential slogans, it was really prominent, and it was everywhere in the political conversation. Around the same time, between and the mid s, the Second Klan was on the rise. They even claimed to hold the copyright. When the America First Committee was formed in , it became a magnet that attracted all of these far-right groups that had already affiliated themselves with the idea.
American Dream - Wikipedia
The story about Lindbergh and the Committee suggests that the phrase cropped out of nowhere, but that just isn't the case. The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. It takes hold as people are talking about reacting to the first Gilded Age when the robber barons are consolidating all this power. You see people saying that a millionaire was a fundamentally un-American concept.
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It was seen as anti-democratic because it was seen as inherently unequal. That was thanks to the historian James Truslow Adams who wrote The Epic of America , in which he was trying to diagnose what had gone wrong with America in the depths of the Great Depression. He said that America had gone wrong in becoming too concerned with material well-being and forgetting the higher dreams and the higher aspiration that the country had been founded on.
They both started to gain traction in the American political and cultural conversation discernibly around To others, it's the belief that everyone in America has the opportunity to pursue his or her great passion. But not everybody thinks the American dream is a positive thing. Some say it's degenerated into a compulsion to amass possessions and property, and is leading the nation to ruin.
For example, Harvard University business professor John A. Quelch writes that our political leaders are guilty of "defining the American Dream in material terms, in encouraging Americans to live beyond their means in its pursuit, and then putting in place policies that enable them to do so" [source: Other opponents, noting that ethnic and economic inequality persists in America, dismiss the American dream as nothing more than a cruel myth. Comedian, author and social critic George Carlin once famously wisecracked: