Is America still a land of promise? The biblical metaphor was used in 1785 by George Washington, who described the new United States as a “second land of promise.” More than a century later, the progressive journalist Herbert Croly wrote: “From the beginning the Land of Democracy has been figured as the Land of Promise.”The promise might seem to have been broken to many Americans suffering the effects of the Great Recession, the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression.