American Dream

For many immigrants, the Statue of Liberty was their first view of the United States, signifying freedom and personal liberty. The statue is an iconic symbol of the United States and of the American Dream.

The American Dream, sometimes in the phrase "Chasing the American Dream," is a national ethos of the United States in which freedom includes a promise of prosperity and success. In the American Dream, first expressed by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. [1] The idea of the American Dream is rooted in the second sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence which states that "all men are created equal" and that they are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights" including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."[2]

Home ownership is sometimes used as a proxy for achieving the promised prosperity; ownership has been a status symbol separating the middle classes from the poor.[3] Sometimes the Dream is identified with success in sports or how working class immigrants seek to join the American way of life.[4]

Contents

History

Since its founding in 1776, the United States has regarded and promoted itself as a beacon of liberty and prosperity.

The meaning of the "American Dream" has changed over the course of history. While historically traced to the New World mystique — especially the availability of low-cost land for farm ownership — the ethos today simply indicates the ability, through participation in the society and economy, for everyone to achieve prosperity. According to the dream, this includes the opportunity for one's children to grow up and receive a good education and career without artificial barriers . It is the opportunity to make individual choices without the prior restrictions that limit people according to their class, caste, religion, race, or ethnicity.

Historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "American Dream" in his 1931 book Epic of America:

“ The American Dream is 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.[5] ”

He also 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. ”

Martin Luther King in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963) rooted the civil rights movement in the black quest for the American dream:[6]

"We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. . . . when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."

Criticism

The American Dream has been credited with helping to build a cohesive American experience, but has also been blamed for inflated expectations.[7] Some commentators on the political "left" have argued that despite deep-seated belief in the egalitarian American Dream, the modern American wealth structure still perpetuates racial and class inequalities between generations.[8] These commentators note that advantage and disadvantage are not always connected to individual successes or failures, but often to prior position in a social group.[8]

Recent research suggests that United States and Britain show less intergenerational income-based social mobility than the Nordic countries and Canada. These authors state that "the idea of the US as ‘the land of opportunity’ persists; and clearly seems misplaced."[9][10]

Since the 1920s numerous authors, such as Sinclair Lewis in his 1922 novel Babbitt, satirized or ridiculed materialism in the chase for the American dream. In 1949 Arthur Miller wrote the play "Death of a Salesman" in which the American Dream is a fruitless pursuit. Hunter S. Thompson in 1971 depicted in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey Into the Heart of the American Dream a dark view that appealed especially to drug users who emphatically were not pursuing a dream of economic achievement.[11] George Carlin famously wrote the joke "it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."[12] Carlin pointed to "the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions" as having a greater influence than an individual's choice.[12]

Many counter-culture films of the 1960s and 1970s ridiculed the traditional quest for the American Dream. For example Easy Rider (1969), written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, shows the characters making a pilgrimage in search of "the true America" in terms of the hippie movement, drug use, and communal lifestyles.[13]

Europe

Britain

The American dream regarding home ownership has been emulated in Europe. In the 1980s, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher worked to create a similar dream, by selling public housing units to their owners [14].

Russia

In 2008, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev bemoaned the fact that 77% of Russia's 142 million people live "cooped up" in massive apartment buildings. In 2010, his government announced a plan for widespread home ownership. "Call it the Russian dream," said Alexander A. Braverman, who directs the Federal Fund for the Promotion of Housing Construction Development. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, worried about his nation's very low birth rate, said he hoped homeownership will inspire Russians, "to have more babies."[15].

See also

International:

Notes

  1. ↑ Library of Congress. American Memory. "What is the American Dream?". Accessed August 26, 2010.
  2. ↑ Kamp, David (April 2009). "Rethinking the American Dream". Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904. Retrieved June 20, 2009. 
  3. ↑ William M. Rohe and Harry L. Watson, Chasing the American Dream: New Perspectives on Affordable Homeownership (2007)
  4. ↑ Thomas M. Tarapacki, Chasing the American Dream: Polish Americans in Sports (1995); Steve Wilson. The Boys from Little Mexico: A Season Chasing the American Dream (2010) is a true story of immigrant boys on a high school soccer team who struggle not only in their quest to win the state championship, but also in their desire to adapt as strangers in a new land.
  5. ↑ Library of Congress. American Memory. "What is the American Dream?". Accessed August 21, 2008.
  6. ↑ Quoted in James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (1998) p. 147
  7. ↑ Greider, William. The Nation, May 6, 2009. The Future of the American Dream, Retrieved on June 20, 2009.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Johnson, 2006, pp. 6–10. "The crucial point is not that inequalities exist, but that they are being perpetuated in recurrent patterns—they are not always the result of individual success or failure, nor are they randomly distributed throughout the population. In the contemporary United States, the structure of wealth systematically transmits race and class inequalities through generations despite deep-rooted belief otherwise."
  9. ↑ Jo Blanden; Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin (April 2005). "Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America" (PDF). The Sutton Trust. http://www.suttontrust.com/reports/IntergenerationalMobility.pdf. 
  10. ↑ Obstacles to social mobility weaken equal opportunities and economic growth, says OECD study, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Economics Department, 10/02/2010.
  11. ↑ Stephen E. Ambrose, Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) p 518
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Smith, Mark A. (2010) The Mobilization and Influence of Business Interests in L. Sandy Maisel, Jeffrey M. Berry (2010) The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups p.460
  13. ↑ Barbara Klinger, "The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider" in Steven Cohan, ed. The Road Movie Book (1997)
  14. ↑ Michael Poole, Human Resource Management: Origins, Developments and Critical Analyses (1999) p. 159
  15. ↑ Anastasia Ustinova, "Building the New Russian Dream, One Home at a Time," Bloomberg Business Week, June 28--July 4, 2010, pp 7-8

References and further reading