The tradition that we could all become millionaires never had much to do with forming the American character, because no one took it too seriously; the serious thing was that Americans all believed they could prosper. Those who did not, suffered a double odium—they were disgraced because they had failed to make good and they had betrayed the American legend. The legend existed because it corresponded to some of the facts of American life; only it persisted long after the facts had been changed by industrialism and the closing of the frontiers and our coming of age as a financial power had changed the facts. We were heading toward normalcy and the last effort to preserve equality of opportunity was choked off when Wilson had to abandon domestic reform to concentrate on the war.
Social security, a possible eighty dollars a month after the age of sixty-five, are poor substitutes for a nation of spend-thrifts; we accept the new prospect grimly, because the general standard of living and the expectation of improvement are still high in most parts of America. In spite of setbacks, the general belief is still, as Herbert Croly said it was in 1919, "that Americans are not destined to renounce, but to enjoy".
Normal as enjoyment seems to us, it is not universal. There have been people happier than ours, no doubt, with a fraction of our material goods; religious people, simple races, people born to hardship, have their special kinds of contentment in life. But with minor variations, most Western people, since the industrial revolution, are trying to get a share of the basic pleasures of life; in a great part of the world it is certain that most people will get very little; in America it is assumed that all will get a great deal.
The struggle for wealth is so ingrained in us that we hate the thought of giving it up; we are submitting reluctantly to rules which are intended to equalize opportunity, if opportunity comes again.
In this new organization of our lives, money becomes purely a device of calculation, since the costs of the war exhaust all we have; we can now look back on America's "money-madness" with some detachment; without balancing the good and evil done to our souls by the effort to become rich, we should estimate how powerful the incentive still is—and then use it, or defeat it, for the best social advantage. For it has its advantages, if we know how to use them, and fear of money is not the beginning of a sound economy. People occasionally talk as if the desire for money is an American invention; actually our invention is the satisfaction of the desire, which we call prosperity.
For prosperity is the truth of which wealth is the legend, prosperity is the substantial fact and wealth the distorted shadow on the wall.
The economics implied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution alike indicate a new intent in the world, to create a prosperous people. The great men who proclaimed liberty in 1776 have often been blamed because they did not create "economic freedom" to run beside their political freedom. Actually they did not create either, leaving it to the separate States to say whether one man with one vote was the true symbol of equality, whether he who paid ten times the average tax should have ten times the voice in spending it. As for economic equality, which is what later critics really want, it would have been inappropriate to the undeveloped resources of the country and impossible in the political climate of the time. The people of the new nation had suffered from centralized government; they would not have tolerated the only practical way of establishing economic controls—a highly concentrated government over a single, not a federated, nation. The men who fought the war of Independence did not even set up an executive, only a committee of thirteen to act while Congress was not in session; they erected no system of national courts; and Congress, with the duty of creating an army and navy, could not draft men to either, nor pay them if they volunteered. When this system of Confederation broke down, the Constitution was carefully built up, to prevent Government from regulating the lives of the people; and the people, who were confident that they could make their own way, wanted only to be secure against interference. They did not ask Government to equalize anything but opportunity.
The "rich and well-born" managed to turn the Constitution to their own advantage; their opportunities were greater than the immediate chances of the poor farmer and the city rabble; but government by the men of property was never made permanent, and the most critical historian of the Constitution is the one who says that "in the long reach of time ... the fair prophecy of the Revolutionary era was surprisingly fulfilled."
The intention, so commonplace to us, was wildly radical in its time; poets and philosophers had imagined a world freed from want (usually also a world peopled by ascetics); the promise of the United States was a reasonable gratification of the desires of all men. That was the reason for giving land to migrants, and citizenship to foreigners, and Statehood to territories. When the French Revolution began to settle down, the people had acquired rights, they had been freed of intolerable taxes, the great estates had been cut up; but the expectation of steadily improving conditions of life did not become a constant in the French character; nor did the upheaval in England in 1832 and under the Chartists leave a permanent hope for better things in the mind of the lower classes. The idea of class and the idea of a "station in life", a "lot" with which one must be content, persisted after all the Revolutions in Europe in the 19th century. Only in America the Revolution set out to—and did—destroy the principle of natural inevitable poverty. We have not actually destroyed poverty, and this gap between our intent and our achievement has been publicized. But what we intended to do and what we accomplished and what we still have power to do are more significant than the part we failed to do. We created for the first time in history a nation which did not accept poverty as inevitable.