The American Dream, wrote James Truslow Adams, is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”
It is that dream of land in which every generation will do better than its parents’, and where, for any and everyone who works hard enough, success will come. It is that dream of unlimited upper mobility, socially and economically, where the son of a pauper can end up the father of a multimillionaire.
And it is a conviction held by hundreds of millions, which, although it might have been coined in 1931, dates back hundreds of years, dates back to when Thomas Jefferson wrote down his self-evident truths – foremost, that all men are created equal.
That was, and still is, the great goal of American democracy: a society of innate equality, free from the aristocracy and hierarchy of the European ones, where the first Secretary of the Treasury could be an immigrant, and the man whose face now adorns the hundred dollar bill started as a penniless runaway.
But is that goal now hopeless? Given rising income inequality, low levels of social mobility, and the indisputable disadvantages faced by minorities, is it time to declare the American Dream dead?
To both of these, I answer a resounding no. In fact, it is better and stronger than ever before. To argue that the American Dream was once real, but is now unachievable, is to fundamentally misunderstand it and what it represents to American society. It is so much more than many might think.
There is an inherent contradiction, for instance, in claiming that the Dream once thrived but is now gone and dusted. To say so is to paint a halcyon image of the past. Because there is something else to the American Dream: it must apply to everyone, regardless of sex, race, or sexual orientation.
So take Jefferson’s America. It was an America that incorporated slavery into its very Constitution. It was an America led by a group of almost exclusively upper class, land- and slave-owning white men, who by and large only let other land-owning white men vote. Its dream was a dream stillborn, un-actualised for all the slaves, women and poor living in the country.
Nor, even in the soaring heights of postwar American economic growth, could one say that the American Dream was alive and well. It was certainly not in 1963 as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail; as a man, imprisoned for his race, wrote that the actions of protesters were the actions of those “standing up for what is best in the American dream.”
And was it a dream fully realized for homosexual men and women until just this summer, when millions were finally given the right to participate in the millennia-old institution of marriage? Opportunity for each is not solely about money, as Willy Loman learns at the cost of his life in Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman. It’s about fulfilment as well.
Even, however, if we judge just by economic opportunity, James Adams’ American Dream was also stillborn. Stillborn, because in 1931, the only economic mobility in a country roiling in the middle of the Great Depression was down and further down still.
And though real wages have barely risen for the average worker since the 1960s, there was a market failure of a different sort at that time: barely over 33 per cent of the labour force was comprised of women in 1960. At least between then and 2010, that number rose to 47 percent – and the wage gap has closed considerably as well.
So what do we make of this? That the American Dream was only ever a myth, a mirage? That not only is it dead, but it was never even really alive? Exactly the opposite.
Because above all, the nature of dreams is that they are not reality. They are hopes, prayers, and aspirations. And our loftiest dreams – the ones about which we declare, “I have a dream!” – are ideals. We strive for them, believe in them, and in our belief, make fiction into fact. This is a gradual process – and every step brings us closer to our destination.
The American Dream is not, and never has been, a state of existence. There is no point in the textbooks to which we can point and say that “here, right here, we have equal opportunity for all”. It is instead an ethos, and a commitment. Even if we waver in our obligation to uphold its values, it remains part of the American national consciousness – the American identity – in a way that is impossible to shake.
The United States is at a precarious point in its history. It faces threats – social, economic, and political – both within and without, but at the end of the day, they are not existential ones. Great concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, a sluggish recovery from economic calamity, discrimination against immigrants, and divisive party politics in Washington have all been met and dealt with before.
There is a tendency to say of the present moment that it is the best of times, or the worst of times, when really, it is neither. History’s tide pushes forward, and though Americans’ belief in our Dream falters today, today won’t last forever. A nation that has had so firmly ingrained in it over the course of centuries the mentality that success should be obtainable by all will eventually overcome, as it always has.
In the meantime, let’s celebrate the progress made and wait for the next chapter in the American Dream, that dream of a land in which life is rich and full and where the streets are paved with gold.
