India, July 3 -- What was the American Dream?

The term itself is younger than it sounds.

Historian James Truslow Adams coined it in 1931, in his book The Epic of America, insisting the Dream was not merely about "motor cars and high wages" but a "better and richer and fuller life for everyone", a life not hostage to the "fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

The raw materials of the Dream are older still. They live in the US Declaration of Independence, with its ideas of equality and unalienable rights, its republican ideas of ownership and its conviction that America was a new world in the most literal sense: a clean page upon which effort and providence would write a better story.

In 250 years since that declaration was ad...