The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

Volume 1

Robert Hauhart, Mitja Sardoč, Robert C. Hauhart, Mitja Sardoč

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000385526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

What do we mean by the American dream? Can we define it? Or does any discussion of the phrase end inconclusively, the solid turned liquid—like ice melting? Do we know whether the American dream motivates and inspires or, alternately, obscures and deceives? The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream offers distinctive, authoritative, original essays by well-known scholars that address the social, economic, historical, philosophic, legal, and cultural dimensions of the American dream for the twenty-first century. The American dream, first discussed and defined in print by James Truslow Adams's The Epic of America (1931), has become nearly synonymous with being American. Adams's definition, although known to scholars, is often lost in our ubiquitous use of the term. When used today, the iconic phrase seems to encapsulate every fashion, fad, trend, association, or image the user identifies with the United States or American life. The American dream's ubiquity, though, argues eloquently for a deeper understanding of its heritage, its implications, and its impact—to be found in this first research handbook ever published on the topic.

1
Introduction

What Is the American Dream?

Robert C. Hauhart and Mitja Sardoč

Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz …

Janis Joplin, Michael McClure, and Bob Neuwirth (1970)

Jim Cullen, in his aptly named book The American Dream (2003), observes that when first researching his work, he placed the phrase into a library card catalog, which promptly returned 700 items. It was not the number, however, that impressed him. Rather, it was the fact that none of the books he looked at in the further course of his research made what he characterized as a “systematic attempt” to define the term (5). Cullen noted that all the books virtually took the meaning for granted, as though any fool would know what it means.

Nearly twenty years later, Cullen’s admirable effort to say what the phrase “American Dream” means has not substantially moved the ball forward—or the needle in any direction—for much of the country or the world. (See, for example, Hauhart 2017, 11–26, and other papers collected in Šolsko polje, Letnik XXUIII, Številka 3–4 (2017).) This is not Cullen’s fault, however. In his introductory comments, Cullen suggests that ultimately we must acknowledge that “beyond an abstract possibility, there is no one American Dream” (2003, 7, emphasis in original). With respect to James Truslow Adams’s celebrated (at least among “American Dream” connoisseurs) definition (“that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man”) (Adams 1931, 404), Cullen’s willingness to concede there is no single exact meaning of the phrase “may be fine as far as it goes” (2003, 7).

Where does it get us, though, to just say, as Cullen does, “there are many American Dreams” (7)? Admirably, while Cullen lets the cat out of the bag early that we can’t expect to find a single definition of the phrase, he is unwilling to stop there. Indeed, his intellectual journey through a number of specific American dreams (whereupon he changes from the capital “D” to the lower case “d”) more than capably distills some of the themes that have given visible form to the idea. Consequently, in our own effort to be comprehensive and authoritative about its meaning, it behooves us to retrace some of that journey and see what, if anything, we might be able to add to what he and others have already said.

Antecedents

Cullen, writing a self-described “history” of the American dream, finds it useful to begin before the founding of the republic by tracing the dream of the Puritans to practice their strict religious beliefs without domination by the Anglican Church and its leaders that brought them to Massachusetts (11–34). Yet, while offering glancing reference to the Puritans’ separatist theological cousins, the Pilgrims (5, 8, 15), and acknowledging that the Virginia colony, motivated by the investors and indentured workers’ equally intense desire to profit materially preceded the Puritans’ arrival, Cullen does not appreciably develop either of their stories. Rather, he finds in the Puritans alone the early colonial foundation of the values infused in the American dream. Other commentators differ.

The attribution of cause or motivation with respect to historical movements is, at best, a tricky business. Hall, in his authoritative history The Puritans (2019), agrees that religious motivation was ascendant in those Puritans who chose to cross the Atlantic but notes, “[O]nly a small fraction of the godly” chose to make the journey (221). For others, whether they chose to make the journey or stayed in England, Hall suggests that their decision “emerged out of careful consideration of the merits and risks” of one decision over the other (221). One member of the kirk contemplating the trip mused that perhaps it was better to stay in England and “suffer than to cast himself upon dangers in flying (i.e., fleeing)” (Shepard 1981 quoted in Hall 2019, 222). John Winthrop, who led the expedition, was arguably responding as much to his own straightened financial prospects if he remained in England as he was to any religious or moral impulse. His biographers rather uniformly mention a number of financial demands Winthrop was facing. These included reduced income from the farming operations at his Groton estate; financial demands from his three adult children; a long-running lawsuit in Chancery Court; a dowry for his marriageable daughter; increased pressure to purchase a second home in London in support of his position as a magistrate; and many lesser claims and obligations for revenue that he struggled to provide (Bremer 2003, 122, 125–32; Rutman 1975, 24–26). Indeed, even though Winthrop issued a lengthy public justification focusing on his religious and moral motivations for choosing to emigrate to North America, Rutman (40) persuasively argues that his speech—delivered to a religious conference of fellow believers—was carefully calculated to provide only the explanations that he was happy to offer, and that would be equally happily received, before that audience. In sum, while religious dissent and the official disapproval and censure that followed from the Church of England was clearly a core factor in inspiring the journey to Massachusetts for the Puritans, it is perhaps reductionist to idealize it as the sole motivating influence.

Jillson (2004, 16), taking a broader view, makes an important distinction early by noting, “The first settlers into North America came either for quick wealth or to live in ways not permitted them at home.” Eschewing the narrowness of Cullen’s focus solely on the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s founders, Jillson elects to examine those who emigrated from England to the United States to settle Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, finding in each both common themes and notable differences (17). As Jillson notes, the North American wilderness the early settlers crossed the Atlantic to colonize “seemed to hold out unlimited promise” (23). The promise, according to Jillson, was not restricted solely to those who came to profit materially but rather included each group of settlers, essentially any of those who sought a grant of “religious authority, economic opportunity, [or] social status” (23). What these different groups shared according to many who have studied the matter was hope (1).

It was hope, based on faith, that permitted the Puritans to believe that in the New World they would be able to “make the word of God live in their lives” without the oppression forced upon them by the Church of England (24–25). As Cullen expresses the idea, using the word that has come to symbolize the Puritans’ vision for themselves as well as the collective myth that is said to be quintessentially American, “[The Puritans] had a dream …. you’ll never be able to understand what it means to be an American of any creed, color, or gender if you don’t try to imagine the shape of that dream” (2003, 13; emphasis added). The Quakers, who settled in Pennsylvania, sought peace and prosperity, based on the hope that they might escape the “outward cares, vexations, and turmoils, which before we were always subject unto” and from this peace they hoped “plenteous prosperity” would arise (Tolles 1963, 33–34). Thus, the Quakers sought to perfect the “inner plantation of the heart and soul” (Jillson 29) but willingly accepted the material benefits that flowed from the diligent, frugal manner of living they established in the new land. The Virginia colony, in contrast, opened up by the London Company, drew men seeking profit and economic opportunity, not communal religious exaltation, whether as investors or bound laborers. The hope for these men was that they would become rich quickly or, lacking that, “hope[d] they would be rewarded with a materially better life in what was then a largely unknown land” (Hauhart 2016, 4–5; emphasis added).

Isenberg (2016), rewriting our nation’s history with a focus on class—particularly the lowest class—turns her attention to the fact that in many ways the hopes of the settlers were disappointed. She notes, “[D]ozens who disembarked from the Mayflower succumbed that first year to starvation and disease linked to vitamin deficiency; scurvy rotted their gums, and they bled from different orifices” (10). The settlements the New Englanders established, putative followers of Christian ethics, consisted of a hierarchical society of ranked “stations” according to Isenberg. The elites who ran New England in 1630 owned Indian and African slaves, exploited child laborers, and visibly declared their high status through occupying their church-designated seating, carefully selected for them due to their wealth and prominence (10–11). New Englanders were not alone in their disappointment either. Rather, Isenberg declares, “Virginia was even less a place of hope” (11). Most were expecting to find gold, as were the profit-driven investors who coerced many of the early “first comers” into debt servitude and indentured contracts (11, 25–31). But as Isenberg reports, what they found instead at Jamestown was privation and starvation with “80 percent of the first six thousand dying off” (25). Yet, however disheartening the actual experience of the settlers turned out to be, settlers continued to come from England. Isenberg explains this not due to elevated ideals relating to the Puritans’ and Pilgrims’ desires to practice their religion free of oppression, or purely the lure of great wealth promised to new Virginians, but rather to “England’s opportunity to thin out its prisons and siphon off thousands … an outlet for the unwanted, a way to remove vagrants and beggars, to be rid of London’s eyesore population” (10). For Isenberg, our mythical fables regarding early settlers erase much of the harshness and coercion behind the crossing and substitute instead the lure of opportunity and upward economic mobility in their place (11). In her retelling, the early colonists were predominantly “waste men and waste women” who were an expendable class of laborers subjected to the organizers’ obsessions with class, rank, and profit (26–8, 30, 33, 42).

While the dreams each group envisioned for themselves differed, they were alike in one other respect: all three of the dreams were founded on the belief that leaving England and starting over in a New World would give them the liberty necessary to establish the life they sought. In England, one must recall, none of the three groups were fully free; rather, each was constrained by the society and its established social order. As non-separatists and a small minority, the Puritans were unable to reform the Church of England as they believed was critical to living the life God ordained for them. As separatists, the Pilgrims were reviled and the object of official Church censure and oppression. Thus, neither the Puritans nor the Pilgrims were fully free to practice their religion in the way in which they interpreted God’s commands. And as landless and often unskilled free laborers, the men who shipped off to Virginia under the London Company were little short of a destitute, roaming mob constantly seeking work in the cities they fled to when England’s rural economy changed and then collapsed. Rather than a respite from religious oppression, those who indentured themselves to make the journey principally sought economic opportunity in the liberty the New Land would give them, a greater freedom to work and thrive rather than the sort of freedom they possessed in England, which was closer to the freedom to idle and starve.

Yet, while each group exercised its liberty to leave England, neither hope nor hope and liberty were quite sufficient to fulfill their respective dreams. In addition to the hope each group entertained for a better life in the New World, one that would be fostered by the liberty to live more as they liked, all three groups also shared a willingness to take risks. It is difficult today for us to imagine the courage, perhaps the recklessness, it took to board what today would be small wooden sailing vessels with room for only modest stores, crowded with settlers, and launch off across the storm-tossed North Atlantic. At the end of their journey, the new colonists would find a forested but otherwise untamed and unwelcoming shore that required domestication to support their new settlements. John Adams, in his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, published in 1765 to inspire his fellow countrymen to unite against King George III’s ill-usage of their loyalty as his subjects, reminded his readers of the desperate straits their ancestors had traversed:

Recollect their amazing fortitude, their bitter sufferings—the hunger, the nakedness, the cold, which they patiently endured—the severe labors of clearing their grounds, building their houses, raising their provisions, amidst dangers from wild beasts and savage men, before they had time or money or materials for commerce.

(Cullen 2003, 17)

Indeed, Adams cleverly incorporated the early settlers’ bravery in the face of the most severe adversity by uniting their hopes and expectations for a new, better life in the new land with the hope and initial exercise of their freedom that supported their journey:

Recollect the … hopes and expectations which constantly supported and carried them through all the hardships … Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty, for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials.

(17; emphasis added)

Moreover, while all three groups faced risks, some settlers had more to lose than others did. Both the Puritans and the Pilgrims included many adherents who had substantial means and risked the comfortable life they had achieved in England to throw their lot in with their respective community of believers to subdue and make fit for human habitation the rugged, unbroken wilderness found on a foreign shore.

Thus, the groups that first arrived from England to settle the eastern seaboard of North America shared abundant hopes for a better future, a desire for liberty beyond what they had known before, a willingness to risk their future in a speculative venture, and the willingness to cast aside any ties to family, community, and nation that they left behind. As Philip Slater (1990, 18) reminds us, though, the many admirable qualities the early settlers possessed were not fully descriptive or exhaustive of who they were:

This nation was settled and continually repopulated by people who were not personally successful in confronting the social conditions in their mother country, but fled in the hope of a better life…. [Our ancestors included] an unusual number of energetic, mobile, ambitious, daring and optimistic persons…. But … [i]f we gained the energetic and daring, we also gained the lion’s share of the rootless, the unscrupulous, those who valued money over relationships, and those who put self-aggrandizement ahead of love and loyalty. And most of all, we gained an undue proportion of persons who, when faced with a difficult situation, tended to chuck the whole thing and flee to a new environment. Escaping, evading, and avoiding are responses which lie at the base of much that is peculiarly American.

This portrait of the American character, sharpened by poetic license, is now acknowledged as fittingly characteristic of one set of the values ascendant in our culture, to such a degree that nearly the entire cast of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2004) fits neatly into the aforementioned profile. As Nick Carraway informs us, he hails from the Midwest but having come east to participate in World War I, he “enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that he came back restless” (3). He leaves the Midwest and his family a second time to return to the East Coast. There he meets other transplanted Americans—Gatsby, also from the Midwest (and all over), Daisy and Tom Buchanan (first from Louisville and New Haven, then from Chicago, and then the West Coast), and Jordan Baker (from Louisville). All have cut their ties to their past. Gatsby himself is a magnet for the rootless and unconnected, who attend his parties in droves without knowing him, and in many cases, not making any effort to meet him. The unscrupulous are well represented, too: Wolfsheim, the gambler who fixed the World Series, but Daisy, Tom, Jordan, and, of course, Gatsby himself all display a predatory ruthlessness that broaches no interference from human values other than self-interest. Klipspringer, the piano-playing party guest who took up residence in Gatsby’s house after one of his parties, perhaps epitomizes this unprincipled amorality best. When Nick contacts him after Gatsby’s death, Klip-springer explains he won’t be able to attend the funeral because “there’s sort of a picnic or something [tomorrow]” (169) but unashamedly, in the same breath, asks that a pair of tennis shoes he left at Gatsby’s house be forwarded to him because “I’m sort of helpless without them” (169). Gatsby, with his “extraordinary gift for hope,” (3; emphasis added) is perhaps, then, the fitting profile for an American, someone possessed of a “romantic readiness” (3) to boldly throw everything aside and strike out for his American dream, a “dream [that] must have seemed so close that that he could hardly fail to gras...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraphs
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: What Is the American Dream?
• Part I Economic Success, Upward Economic Mobility and the American Dream
• Part II Contemporary Issues in American Dream Studies
• Part III Migration and the Immigrant American Dream
• Part IV Marginalized Americans and the American Dream
• Part V The American Dream Goes Global?
• Part VI Sustainability and the American Dream
• Author Notes
• Index