Defining the Dream

The American Dream

What people mean by success or the American Dream embodies fundamental assumptions about moral action on the public as well as the individual level. Yet tragically, there is almost no place in American public life where these issues can be discussed...[Only when] people are open to question the cultural ground of their lives...will Americans have public purchase on how to enact new definitions of success, the good life, and the American Dream that may restore a broader sense of purpose to our individual endeavors.

Elizabeth Long
The American Dream and the Popular Novel, 1985

What is the American Dream?
Interrelations of Freedom-Equality-Success
by Charles Brock

INDIVIDUAL DREAMS

From Horatio Alger to the present day we have pushed at the dream of success. Many associate successes with moral virtue – your victories show that you are a good citizen, a loved child, an upright parent, and favored by God. This has energized millions and doubtless has helped America socially and economically. Hard work, reliability, and inventiveness are claimed to be the mainstays of American international success as well.

But what if you fail? Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is an American classic. Christopher Bigsby writes in the Introduction to the Penguin edition [1998]:

...Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old salesman, stands baffled by his failure...The American Dream faded. And yet, not so. Myths as potent as that, illusions with such a purchase on the national psyche, are not so easily denied. In an immigrant society, which has, by definition, chosen to reject the past, faith in the future is not a matter of choice. When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing. Arthur Miller knows this. When Charley, Willy Loman’s next-door neighbor, says that "a salesman is got to dream," he sums up not only Willy’s life but a central tenet of his culture.

Willy ran his car into a tree. Was that because of a constricted, or damaging, or even hollow American Dream? We must ask, what are the criteria of success in America? Are they healthy criteria? What alternative definitions of success might we collectively embrace? Does our wealth and security depend on motivating people to pursue a potentially harmful dream of success? Is this a sly way to keep the rich in place?

NATIONAL DREAMS

Malcolm X said: ‘I don’t see an American Dream–I see a nightmare.’ Yet from the beginning America had visions of itself as a chosen and successful nation set apart to show the world the virtues of democracy, capitalism, individualism, and service to others. Internally, Americans prided themselves on the ability to turn the country around on social issues, but even though slavery ceased, Abraham Lincoln called America the "almost chosen people" realizing many faults were not yet overcome.

The lesson of Lincoln’s life [was]...that the quest for prosperity is no remedy for melancholy, but that a passion to secure justice by erasing the line that divides those with hope from those without hope can be. [The Real American Dream, Andrew Delbanco, Harvard, 1999]

Martin Luther King, Jr., standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, called for a restatement of the dreams of the founders and Lincoln so that freedom and equality could be gained for African Americans and other oppressed American groups:

So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed – we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal... [let us] speed up that day when all of God’s children – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants – will be able to join hands and to sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

We can ask if America has a mission to the world to promote the dream of success, freedom, and equality as many Presidents and others have claimed. If so, how can the Dream creatively relate to competing ideologies and religions without being imperialistic? It is always time to look again at the ways of understanding the American Dream spiritually and materially, to its positive and negative aspects, and to ask the founders’ question – what is America for?