The American Dream….Yesterday

I want to start out by thanking those of you who have voted in my poll! You still have a few more days to vote on the defining symbol of America! I’ll have another poll on the American Dream in a few days. But speaking of “the dream”…

The American Dream has captured the imagination of millions of people across the world for centuries now. What it looks like and whether or not it’s still possible today and tomorrow is a matter of debate for a later date (but one I will tackle in due time). But how did it start, and what did it look like and mean to the citizens of this country in the past?

We commonly associate the American Dream with concepts like hard work, skill, luck, and imagination. When you say “American Dream,” folks instantly conjure up images of immigrants making their way past the Statue of Liberty to New York in search of a better life. Or, we think of settlers in covered wagons heading west in search of new land and resources. Today, it’s even associated with home ownership.

But the American Dream starts with the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. That “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet the phrase “American Dream” would come almost 60 years later when James Truslow Adams coined it in his book “Epic of America.”

He wrote that the American Dream has, “lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century (and) 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.”

Yet, it has evolved into a dream of material plenty in addition to the development of mankind.

The ability to make a life for oneself based off your own hard work and determination was a foreign concept in the world. For the first time, people in the world were given the opportunity to succeed or fail based on their own sweat and grit with little interference from the government or anyone else. The buck stopped with you. In the nineteenth century, Americans were so giddy at the chance to own and work a piece of land that they virtually ignored the dangers of what that life might bring. Long oceanic passages brought on sickness in their quest to make it to America. And settler’s heading west saw threats from wildlife and weather systems. But the concept of prosperity for anyone who was willing to lay it all on the line overwhelmed any danger one might face.

Land itself was essential to the American Dream even after the frontier was closed. The idea of owning a plot of land is something that still drives Americans to work hard. We have historically been resource hungry and that need has only increased over the years with North America’s plentiful resources.

From its beginning the American dream has been found with the middle class and poor as some bar of achievement they should strive to reach. Millions of Americans bettered themselves because of the idea of the American Dream, it pushed them into a new mindset of what they thought was not possible before. The American Dream’s ability to transcend gender and racial boundaries is also important to note. Following the Civil War, many blacks headed west in search of the same life white’s hoped to cultivate. The women’s rights movement in the early 20th century also falls in line with the American Dream.

What does it look like today though? As time has gone on, more and more people have questioned the validity of the American Dream. But that’s a discussion for my next post…