The following is entirely quoted from the highly recommendable book "Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream" by Sarah Churchwell:

The earliest use I have found of the ‘American dream’ to denote a mutual value system – one akin to the older idea of the American creed – is from 1895, when a celebration was held in Chicago on what would have been the seventy-third birthday of Ulysses S. Grant. The festivities included a (very long) commemorative oration thanking Grant for protecting the Union, first as a general in the Civil War and then as president. At one point, the orator turned his expansive attention to the character of the nation Grant was being lauded for having saved: Oh, critic and cynic, dreamer and doubter, behold America, as this day she stands before her history and her heroes. See her millions of people, her free institutions, her equal laws, her generous opportunities, her schoolhouses and her churches; you see misfortunes and defects, for not yet is fully realized the American dream; you surely see her mighty progress toward the fulfillment of her philosophy. The nature of that unrealised dream, that unfulfilled philosophy, is unspecified, taken as a given – but a shared value was being assumed. The national philosophy being summoned is obviously not limited to economic success or upward social mobility: this is a speech about the ideal of American democracy, of which ‘generous opportunities’ are just one aspect, alongside institutional freedom, religious freedom, equality under the law and universal education.

And when the ‘American dream’ was used in a context that referred to economic prosperity, the expression usually suggested that the accumulation of wealth was ‘un-American’, that the American dream was opposed to economic inequality and laissez-faire capitalism. In 1899 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published an item criticising a Vermont landowner’s decision to build an estate of four thousand acres with sixty rooms, which would make it the largest individual property in America. ‘Until a few years ago the thought of such an estate as that would have seemed a wild and utterly un-American dream to any Vermonter,’ protested the reporter. Vermont had always been ‘a state of almost ideally democratic equality, where everybody worked and nobody went hungry’.

If the concentration of wealth was an ‘un-American dream’, then preserving the American dream would mean resisting individual success at the expense of others. This vision looks a lot more like social democracy than free-market capitalism – and it’s a vision that continues through the earliest uses of the phrase. A Kansas editorial asked in 1908 why a baseball pitcher earned twenty times more than a settlement worker, why the president of an insurance company made so much more than a headmaster. ‘Why does the world offer fortunes to the man who shows us how to make money and starvation wages to the man who shows us how to make beautiful lives? Why do we accord highest place to money mongers and lowest place to teachers of ideals?’ False standards were leading people astray; but ‘thank goodness, a change is coming over the spirit of American dreams’.

The country was beginning to concern itself with more than ‘the material things’. Having ‘solved the problems of the production of wealth’, ‘now we must stop!’ The country had bigger problems than making money, contended that editorial from the American heartland. It was time to enable ‘the equitable distribution of wealth’. Enough Americans had been dreaming of material wealth for an editorial to praise a change in their spirit; there is no question that American energies have always been focused on acquisition, but the idea of the ‘American dream’ was summoned as a corrective, not as an incentive. Individual Americans’ dreams would need to improve to live up to national ideals of equality and justice, or toxic inequity would blight the American dream of democracy.

The symbol of the ‘one per cent’ that so dominates discussions of economic inequality today comes, like the American dream it accompanies, from a century ago. The difference is that a hundred years ago many people considered billionaires un-American.

Any thoughts?

By the way, Churchwell is a scholar. Her style is somewhere between that of Noam Chomsky and Strunck/White.