HC Russell

“Beginning in the 1930s, an incipient American welfare state took shape. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” described the shift from imperial expansion to social mobility. For many Americans, these were the decades of the American Dream. Through the 1970s, the gap between the richest and the rest was closing, enabling ever more Americans to join a broad middle class. The American Dream meant social mobility. Rather than promising more land forever, it offered a sense of unpredictable but possible social advancement on the present territory of the United States. Mobility was no longer about families settling down on land but about new generations creating new kinds of lives.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom