The American Dream

In History, Politics, and Fiction

Cal Jillson

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780700623112
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: these words have long represented the promise of America, a "shimmering vision of a fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest, and play by the rules." In 2004, Cal Jillson took stock of this vision and showed how the nation's politicians deployed the American Dream, both in campaigns and governance, to hold the American people to their program. "Full of startling ideas that make sense, " NPR's senior correspondent Juan Williams remarked, Jillson's book offered the fullest exploration yet of the origins and evolution of the ideal that serves as the foundation of our national ethos and collective self-image.Nonetheless, in the dozen years since Pursuing the American Dream was published, the American Dream has fared poorly. The decline of social mobility and the rise of income inequality—to say nothing of the extraordinary social, political, and economic developments of the Bush and Obama presidencies—have convinced many that the American Dream is no more. This is the concern that Jillson addresses in his new book, The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction, which juxtaposes the claims of political, social, and economic elite against the view of American life consistently offered in our national literature. Our great novelists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and beyond highlight the limits and challenges of life—the difficulty if not impossibility of the dream—especially for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as well as women. His book takes us through the changing meaning and reality of the American Dream, from the seventeenth century to the present day, revealing a distinct, sustained separation between literary and political elite.The American Dream, Jillson suggests, took shape early in our national experience and defined the nation throughout its growth and development, yet it has always been challenged, even rejected, in our most celebrated literature. This is no different in our day, when what we believe about the American Dream reveals as much about its limits as its possibilities.

1 | The Ambiguity of the Dream in American History

The new world . . . once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent . . . face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

No phrase captures the distinctive character and promise of American life better than “the American Dream.” As Bill Clinton said in his 1997 State of the Union address, “America is far more than a place. It is an idea.” And as Barack Obama said in a 2007 campaign address entitled “The American Dream,” “Americans share a faith in simple dreams . . . American dreams.” Throughout our national history, and even earlier as we shall see, our leaders have lauded the broad promise of American life, what we have come to call “the American Dream,” but dreams have to be embodied in the lives of real people before they have substance and weight. Our dilemma is that while our American hearts swell to the idea of the American Dream, we know it was denied to many Americans for most of the nation’s history. So how are we to think about ourselves and our history: with undiluted pride, with deep shame and remorse, or with some complicated and evolving mix of pride, shame, and hope?

Fortunately, hope is justified, because a society born in hierarchy and exclusion has become dramatically more free and inclusive. As Barack Obama said in the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign when he was called upon to disclaim the incendiary racial comments of his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity of hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”¹ That America has changed over the course of its history, all agree; but what were the forces of exclusion that historically barred some from full access to the American Dream, and what were the alternative forces of inclusion that promoted, sometimes haltingly and often only partially, equality and opportunity for the formerly excluded? And, because we know that the inclusion of some has been only partial, what remains to be done? To answer these questions we must first unpack two related ideas: the American Creed and the American Dream.

The American Creed

Louis Hartz, one of the leading American historians of the mid-twentieth century, described colonial America as a “fragment” society.² Hartz meant that the Englishmen and women who immigrated to America in the seventeenth century did not represent the full range of English, let alone European, political, social, and religious opinion. The fragment of English society that fled the tensions and conflicts of the Old World to seek a better life in the New World was composed mostly of middling men, small landowners, artisans, and tradesmen. In the political battles of the 1620s, these men placed their hopes with the reformers in Parliament and in the Church of England. When King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud began to resist reform with force in the 1630s, John Winthrop, John Cotton, and more than 20,000 of their followers removed to North America.

The liberal fragment of English thought that wave after wave of settlers carried to the New World drew heavily but selectively upon the Old World. First, the seventeenth-century Protestantism that the Puritans and Quakers shared, even when leavened by the Anglicans in Virginia, the Catholics in Maryland, and the thin smattering of Jews and others throughout, stressed covenanted communities, Christian millennialism, and a consuming sense of God’s immediate presence in the world. Second, the early eighteenth-century focus on Enlightenment ideals highlighted the individualism latent in Protestantism while bringing increased attention to natural rights, popular sovereignty, and limited government. And finally, throughout the colonial period, most Americans maintained a deep reverence for English political and legal traditions. For example, the English common law tradition lay behind American reverence for such ideals as a government of laws, not men; law and order; and the rule of law.

Colonial Americans drew on this cultural and intellectual heritage to create communities that then developed and evolved in interaction with the continent itself. By the late eighteenth century, America’s self-image, its political creed, was set. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and their revolutionary colleagues in the Congress of 1776 grounded the new nation’s independence on the declaration “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The luminous phrases of the Declaration of Independence put liberty, equality, and opportunity at the core of the American Creed. While Jefferson and the Founding generation knew that they were articulating an aspiration rather than a current truth, that aspiration has been resonant and powerful throughout U.S. history.

Nor is the importance of the Declaration to the American Creed simply American mythology. A long line of foreign observers have pointed to the Declaration as the wellspring of American values. The British sage G. K. Chesterton, in his 1922 classic What I Saw in America, declared, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with . . . theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.”³ Another prominent foreign observer, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, writing during World War II, declared that the American Creed was grounded on “the essential dignity of the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity.”⁴

Moreover, contemporary analysts still point to the same familiar ideas and concepts as being fundamental to the American Creed. Samuel Huntington concluded his study of the American Creed by declaring that “the same core values appear in virtually all analyses: liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, and the rule of law under a constitution.”⁵ Seymour Martin Lipset concluded that “the American Creed can be described in five terms: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire.”⁶ Both Huntington and Lipset highlighted liberty, equality, and individualism. These are the Jeffersonian core of the American Creed. Finally, Lipset’s inclusion of laissez-faire (by which he means a dedication to capitalism, markets, and competition) and Huntington’s of rule of law under a constitution draw attention to our base commitments to democracy, limited government, and free markets. Hence, a general description of the fundamental values of the American Creed would include liberty, equality, individualism, populism, laissez-faire, and the rule of law under a constitution.

Yet even as we proudly describe the American Creed, we know that these ideals have never been fully embodied in our public life. Consider three of the authors and books referred to in the paragraphs immediately above. Myrdal’s famous book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy is a landmark study of the continuing presence of racism in a society that boasts of its commitment to liberty, equality, and opportunity. Huntington’s study of the American Creed is entitled American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, and Lipset’s study is entitled American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. All three titles exude ambivalence about the state of our national life. The source of this ambivalence is not hard to find. America has never fully lived up to its creed.

One of the most insightful analyses of the conflicting strains of thought and action in American life is Rogers M. Smith’s Civic Ideals (1997). Smith described the American civic culture as made up of “multiple traditions,” including the liberal individualist tradition that Hartz highlighted, the hierarchical tradition of civic republicanism that scholars identify with Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, and an exclusivist (nativist, racist) tradition that he calls “ascriptive Americanism.” In Smith’s description of American history, the hierarchical influences of republicanism and the exclusivist strains of nativism and racism are woven throughout American culture, thought, and action, are always present, and often triumph.⁷ Moreover, as we shall see immediately below, they explain why the American Dream was denied to many, including women, minorities, and poor white men, for much of American history.

The American Dream

At the dawning of the eighteenth century, decades before American independence, Virginia planter Robert Beverly (1673–1722), building on William Penn’s description of America as “a good poor man’s country,” described America as “the best poor man’s Country in the World.” Benjamin Franklin made a similar point in assuring immigrants that though many arrive in America as poor “servants or Journeymen, . . . if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become Masters, establish themselves in Business, marry, raise families, and become respectable Citizens.”⁸ Penn, Beverly, and Franklin were at the head of a long line of commentators who have seen America as holding out a distinctive promise of opportunity to citizens and immigrants alike. Throughout the nineteenth century, Franklin was the most widely cited exemplar of opportunity and success in the society. One nineteenth-century orator lauded Franklin as “a man who rose from nothing, who owed nothing to parentage or patronage, who enjoyed no advantages of early education, which are not open,—a hundredfold open,—to yourselves, . . . but who lived to stand before Kings, and died to leave a name which the world will never forget.”⁹ By the end of the century, Emma Lazarus’s famous lines “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . . Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me” adorned the new Statue of Liberty. America’s reputation for openness to the dreams and aspirations of common men made it the destination for many in Europe and, later, elsewhere.

While the idea of a distinctive American Dream has been central to our national history, the phrase itself did not come into common use until the twentieth century. Still, both J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, the author of Letters from an American Farmer (1782), and Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, in his magisterial History of the United States during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson (1889), described the powerful American ethos of freedom and opportunity as a “dream.”¹⁰ The young Walter Lippmann used the phrase “the American dream” in Drift and Mastery (1914) to condemn the Jeffersonian localism of the nineteenth century and to call for a new “dream” worthy of the new century.¹¹ James Truslow Adams’s classic Epic of America (2001) popularized “the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”¹² While the exact phrase “the American Dream” may have been popularized by Adams, the idea, the insight, and the feeling have been present from first settlement.

Moreover, contemporary analysts describe the American Dream in terms almost identical to those used by Franklin, Lazarus, and Adams. Harvard political scientist Jennifer Hochschild’s prominent book Facing Up to the American Dream (1995) declared, “The American Dream . . . promises that everyone, regardless of ascription or background, may reasonably seek success through action and traits under their own control.”¹³ John Schwarz wrote that the promise of the American Dream is that “everyone who steadfastly practices certain practical virtues will find a place at the table. . . . These virtues—self-control, discipline, effort, perseverance, and responsibility—stand at the core of our . . . idea of good character. . . . The notion that people do have a capacity to control their own destinies is an enormously strong, almost insistent feature of our American culture.”¹⁴

The American Dream is the promise that the country holds out to the rising generation and to immigrants that hard work and fair play will almost certainly lead to success. All who are willing to strive, to learn, to work hard, to save and invest will have every chance to succeed and to enjoy the fruits of their success in safety, security, and good order. Education (physical and intellectual skills), good character (honesty, cleanliness, sobriety, religiosity), hard work (frugality, saving, investing), and a little luck form a broad pathway to the American Dream. Some start life with more wealth, more prominence, and more influence, but the opportunity to rise in society is promised to everyone—and not just to rise but, if the breaks go right, to have a shot at the top. If Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama could become president and if Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates could become the richest men of their times, then others can reasonably seek to rise as well.

So that is the dream—a shimmering vision of a fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest, and play by the rules. The reality, as we all know, has had darker dimensions. The continent’s original inhabitants were slowly but inexorably dispossessed by a rising tide of alien settlement. Of the new arrivals, not all came in any meaningful sense: some were brought, held, and used. Others were barred. Only America’s most fortunate sons and few if any of her daughters were allowed, at least initially, to compete for her accolades and prizes. What influences and forces limited the application of the dream to some Americans while barring others?

Patterns of Exclusion

The American Dream has always been more open to some than to others, more open to wealthy white men than to women or people of color. In fact, Howard University’s Jane Flax argued that “the normative American citizen has always been a white man and, though others have won rights, he remains so.”¹⁵ Moreover, when immigrants, minorities, and women did achieve new rights, those rights usually amounted to the right to compete against well-entrenched white men in a matrix of established law and policy that they had developed to protect their current interests and future prospects. Hochschild reminded us that throughout American history, “the emotional potency of the American Dream has made the people who were able to identify with it the norm for everyone else. . . . Those who do not fit the model disappear from the collective self-portrait.”¹⁶

Others might have a place in society, but it was a limited and subordinate place. Race, gender, wealth, ethnicity, and religion have all been used to exclude persons and groups from the community of American citizens.¹⁷ The treatment of blacks has been the most glaring deviation from the American Creed. The Virginia House of Burgesses formalized chattel slavery in 1661, Maryland followed in 1663, and over the remainder of the century, the “peculiar institution” spread throughout the South. The Constitution recognized slavery, without ever mentioning the word, in its provisions on continued importation, representation, and taxation and in subsequent legal guarantees concerning the return of fugitive slaves. Even though the slave trade formally ended in 1808, slavery continued to expand right up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Moreover, throughout the nineteenth century, even after the end of slavery, most blacks continued to live in the agricultural South, and most were tied to the land almost as effectively by the sharecropping and crop-lien systems as they had been by slavery. Early in the twentieth century, the black social scientist and social activist W. E. B. Du Bois declared that the movement to erase the “color line” from American society would be the defining struggle of the new century. As America entered the final decade of the twentieth century, the legal scholar Derrick Bell declared, “Racism is permanent.”¹⁸

Women’s struggle for equality in America, while less overt and less obviously intense than the struggle of blacks, has in its own way been just as difficult. Women were held in subjection at least partially by religious and cultural assumptions in which they shared. The Christian teaching that wives were to love, honor, and obey their husbands was powerfully reinforced by the common law principle of “coverture.” Coverture held that a woman was subsumed, or covered, by the legal personality of her father until marriage and of her husband after marriage. With limited exceptions prior to 1850, a woman’s p...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Ambiguity of the Dream in American History
• 2. The Promise and Peril of Life in the New World
• 3. The Founders’ Dream and Its Limits
• 4. Democracy and Melancholy: The Visions and Fears of Emerson, Melville, and Lincoln
• 5. Individualism and Combination in the Age of the Robber Barons
• 6. The Dream in Prosperity and Depression
• 7. The Dream Unmoored: The Rise of Entitlement from Truman to LBJ
• 8. The Dream in Doubt: Opportunity to Uncertainty from Reagan to Obama
• 9. American Dreams and Doubts in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover