American Dreaming

"Kill my boss?  Do I dare live out the American Dream?"
                                                              Homer Simpson

We hear about this thing called the American Dream on almost a daily basis.  A fellow wins the lottery, it’s the American Dream.  An athlete signs a pro contract; he’s achieved the American Dream.  A young family moves into their first home and they’ve bought into the American Dream.  An immigrant gets his citizenship and with it, a shot at the American Dream.

What is the American Dream? Is it success, is it wealth, is it fame?  Is it something you can lay your hands on or is it an ideal?

In 1931, James Truslow Adams, in his book, Epic of America, coined the phrase and gave it his own definition.  Adams described The American Dream as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, also too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” Expanding on the idea Adams wrote, “The American Dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.”

James Adams coined the phrase, the American Dream in 1931 but what he did was merely to attach a name to an ethos that was described 100 years before when a young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States to study American democracy and culture. His subsequent book, Democracy in America was his seminal commentary and the first major study, one that was both laudatory and critical, of American Society and what would eventually become known as The American Dream. More than 200 years before Tocqueville, Puritan minister John Winthrop had his own American Dream, one of a New World settlement which would become Plymouth Massachusetts. In his dream, the Puritan community would be a “city upon a hill” with “the eyes of all people upon” them.  In the intervening years between Winthrop and Tocqueville and Adams and in the period since Adams the American Dream has become different things to different people.

I don’t think that in his wildest dream, American or otherwise would Adams have thought those three little words would be so widely used, by such a broad range of people and with so many different connotations.  Its mention seems almost indispensable in a presidential speech.

Jimmy Carter in his inaugural, “The American dream endures. We must once again have full faith in our country—and in one another. I believe America can be better. We can be even stronger than before.”

Ronald Reagan in his State of the Union, “As we work to make the American Dream real for all, we must also look to the condition of America's families. Struggling parents today worry how they will provide their children the advantages that their parents gave them. In the welfare culture, the breakdown of the family, the most basic support system, has reached crisis proportions — in female and child poverty, child abandonment, horrible crimes and deteriorating schools.”

Bill Clinton in his State of the Union, “Martin Luther King’s dream was the American Dream. His quest is our quest: the ceaseless striving to live out our true creed. Our history has been built on such dreams and labors. And by our dreams and labors we will redeem the promise of America in the 21st century.”

Barack Obama in his State of the Union, “As Robert Kennedy told us, "The future is not a gift. It is an achievement." Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age.”

I'm sensing a common theme in these speeches that the American Dream, is there, it’s out there, we haven’t reached it yet so we have to keep striving.  And oh by the way if you give me another four years I pledge to get us there.  Maybe I'm just an old cynic.

At least presidents see it in a positive if distant light as opposed to say, George Carlin who in condemning a society he saw ruled by big business said, “The owners of this country know the truth.  It’s called the American Dream, cause you have to be asleep to believe it.”

And song writers?  Well they can be a curmudgeonly lot when it comes to matters of American culture.  Neil Young’s American Dream is about a crooked politician while Christian rock group Casting Crowns portrays a man’s quest for the American Dream as the cause of the breakup of his family.

The dream is seen through the cynical eyes of a character called The Engineer in the musical, Miss Saigon.

what's that I smell in the air?
the American dream
sweet as a suite in Bel-air
the American dream
girls can buy tits by the pair
the American dream
bald people think they'll grow hair
the American dream
call girls are lining time square
the American dream
bums there have money to spare
the American dream
cars that have bars take you there
the American dream
on stage each night: Fred Astaire
the American dream

Writer Ursula K. DeGuin in a 1983 commencement address at Mills College in Oakland Ca, "Success is somebody else's failure.  Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty."

Journalism professor David Abrahamson has an idea that the quest for the dream leads to crime, "The American Dream is in part, responsible for a great deal of crime and violence because people feel that the country owes them not only a living but a good living.”  

Novelist J.G. Ballard took Abrahamson a step further with assertion that the dream isn't just a national problem, its a global problem, "The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam." 

To hear all these folks tell it why in the hell are any of us working, striving, saving, cheating, robbing, gambling and finagling to get a piece of that broken promise?  And make no mistake most of us are trying mightily to get as big a piece of the dream as we can.  Do you know anybody who actually buys a lottery ticket because he wants to support the schools?

Are Neil Young, J.G. Ballard, et al, correct in their derision of the dream?  I suspect that most, if not all of those folks who so roundly and cavalierly castigate the American Dream are living pretty American Dreamy lives themselves.  And if they aren't living the dream in the traditional sense I would bet my little slice of the dream that they have the means to do so it they so wish.  It's an easy thing to look down your nose at what you consider bourgeois materialism when the old stock portfolio is secure and the wolves aren't baying at the door.

What's most important, to my purposes here and to my readership (Scant as it may be. Hey share the wealth, pass the link to this blog around), is what everyday America thinks of the American Dream and not what a comfortable rock star thinks is his uniquely clever criticism.  This blogger hopes to cover on a fairly irregular basis in the forms of interviews, my own personal experiences some comments from readers and some historical perspectives that oft coveted and elusive of dreams, the American Dream.