America’s Moment - Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age - A Book by Rework America

I never had an idea that it was about one generation doing better than the next.” To him the essence was in the “prophetic and poetic” words of the Declaration of Independence on the inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In a time of great change, it is not the dream that has changed. [...] This theme— threat and salvation—is the narrative line of the bestseller that first popularized the term “American Dream.” The book, by James Truslow Adams, came out in 1931, while the country was in the depths of the worst economic depression in American history.7 Entering one of the few truly fundamental periods of change in the history of America’s economy and society can be scary. [...] These causes marked the “national Republicans” of the 1820s, the Whigs who came next, and the Republican Party built from the wreckage of the Whigs. [...] The second economic revolution set the terms that would dominate the rest of the 19th century and almost all of the 20th.14 Americans experienced it as • the rise of mass production, ranging from much more steel to canned goods to Coca-Cola to automobiles and beyond, with the supply chains, mass marketing, and distribution that went with that; • greatly improved communication, through the cabling. [...] the pirates and the pioneers, the tinkers and the traveling salesmen.” But then, the Barnard College president Debora Spar has noted, someone usu- ally called for the sheriff.