The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation

“In the twenty-first century, the American Dream remains a major element of our national identity, and yet national identity is itself marked by a sense of uncertainty that may well be greater than ever before. Over the course of human history, peoples have used any number of means to identify themselves: blood, religion, language, geography, a shared history, or some combination of these. (Japan comes to mind as an example that draws on all of them.) Yet the United States was essentially a creation of the collective imagination—inspired by the existence of a purportedly New World, realized in a Revolution that began with an explicitly articulated Declaration, and consolidated in the writing of a durable Constitution. And it is a nation that has been re-created as a deliberate act of conscious choice every time a person has landed on these shores. Explicit allegiance, not involuntary inheritance, is the theoretical basis of American identity.”

This passage folds neatly into discourse about American exceptionalism—the idea that the US is fundamentally different than other countries in a positive way. Clichéd ways of broaching the same subject would be to invoke the “great experiment” of America, or the “idea” of America. Such discussions have a mythical aspect, but it’s not wholly without merit, and the author later discusses (in Chapter 2) the unique origins of the US and its founding documents.

“Once a form of distraction or comfort while awaiting the implacable hand of fate, becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise had gone beyond an instrument of salvation into being a practical end in its own right. This emphasis—some might say mania—for self-improvement, cut loose from its original Calvinist moorings, remains a recognizable trait in the American character and is considered an indispensable means for the achievement of any American Dream.”

The legendary Puritan work ethic derives in part from the predestination aspect of Calvinist theology, which insists that God has preselected the people who will enjoy eternal life in heaven although nobody can know beforehand who those people are. This produced anxiety that led to theological innovations like preparationism, which offered practical steps toward conversion, and the idea that working hard and having one’s work bear good fruit can be evidence of God’s grace. The author is saying that in modern America, the Calvinist underpinning of this work ethic has been snipped away, leaving only the secular obsession with working hard and improving oneself.

“Yet it is also true that some of the most important reforms in American life, from the end of slavery to the creation of the nation’s great universities, derived from conceptions of community and morality central to the Puritan worldview. In the Puritans one could find refuge in the faith that one of the most important things that makes us human—the capacity for ideas—might actually be a basis for living one’s life, not as a matter of brute self-interest or of self-abnegation from worldly concerns but rather as a possibility that one can simultaneously be intellectually and emotionally engaged with contemporary life even as one always remembers that something lies beyond it. Hence the Puritan injunction to ‘live in the world, but not of it.’ This is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. But it is precisely the willingness to do something difficult, painful, unintentionally mischievous, or finally impossible that gives purpose to individual lives, both as they are lived and as they are remembered.”

The author is celebrating the Puritans’ famous communitarianism and the importance they placed on spiritual matters that transcend everyday life. The Puritan faith in ideas is seen as one of the cornerstones of the American Dream. Cullen presents this overall assessment of the Puritan achievement in the best possible light. It’s interesting to consider the ways in which the Puritan faith in transcendent ideas like predestination (a crucial component of the celebrated Puritan work ethic) may have also saddled generations of Americans and the Puritans themselves with fears and anxieties that ruined as many lives as they imbued with purpose.

“Somehow, the Declaration of Independence changed the course of history—by which I mean it reversed the flow of time. Before July of 1776, the American Revolution had been justified in terms of preserving 150 years of relative autonomy threatened by England’s need for revenue. After July of 1776, though, the Revolution was increasingly viewed in terms of the future changes it would justify”

Before the American Revolution, colonial Americans enjoyed a relatively comprehensive autonomy relative to their British colonial rulers and fought to maintain as much of it as possible. With the influence of political writers like Thomas Paine and the onset of the American Revolution, the struggle for autonomy became a fight for freedom against the supposed oppression of the British. This ideological shift in the meaning of British rule justified revolutionary action despite the hypocrisies inherent in this slaveholder revolution for freedom.

“In sum, the Declaration of Independence proved to be far bigger than the Founding Fathers. It was something they came to only fitfully, under real duress and with real reluctance, and it was a document whose ambiguities and implications they incompletely understood. Ultimately, it was the fact of the Declaration itself—the hardware, to use a twentieth-century metaphor—that proved far more important than the imperfect and perishable “software” of their particular republican dream. Its ongoing vitality and legitimacy would ultimately rest with others who inherited a machine whose circuitry would be repeatedly reconfigured and replaced for centuries to come.”

The idea of reconfiguring and replacing aspects of the founding documents might make the most sense for constitutional amendments, but it also makes some sense for reading different perspectives into the Declaration of Independence in the present day without changing the words. The quintessential example of this is the idea that “all men are created equal” and the subsequent disagreements over what constitutes a man and what “equal” means. In the context of the civil rights movement, Black activists pointed to the Declaration to paint a broader picture of equality than the Founders envisioned.

“If there is one constant in the Declaration of Independence, it lies in the way no version of the status quo is ever completely acceptable. It provides us with (often imperceptibly shifting) standards by which we measure success but simultaneously calls attention to the gap between what is and what we believe should be, a gap that defines our national experience. A piece of wishful thinking composed in haste, the Declaration was born and lives as the charter of the American Dream. It constitutes us.”

Cullen is arguing that the Declaration provides a grain of discontent and offers a glimpse of a better future that agitates US citizens to seek better lives for themselves and their children. All variations of the American Dream are ultimately dreamt up in the gap between what is and what could be—on which the Declaration sheds light. Implicit in the author’s statement is the idea that the US will never be without its tumultuousness and anxieties because the status quo will never be good enough.

“The original Puritan doctrine had strongly emphasized the degree to which men and women could not know what God intended for them and faith as the single most important instrument of their salvation. Yet by the early eighteenth century it was possible for a young man like Franklin to articulate a far more pragmatic—one might say self-serving—spiritual vision that emphasized the degree to which virtue and happiness were not only correlated but discernible and achievable […] If, then, acting on a belief in the efficacy of hard work yields affluence, then surely this is a sign of God’s favor. Here, in effect, is an embrace of the old Catholic doctrine that works were more important than faith—except that the doctrine was now enlisted in the service of personal and social reform (which Franklin considered mutually reinforcing). A new form of common sense was emerging.”

Imagining the Puritans’ strict Calvinism being sustainable for many people over time is difficult. The anxiety of predestination and especially the fear of hellfire prompted many Puritans to loosen their religious principles and allow for the idea that hard work and the fruits of their labor engendered God’s grace. Early Americans like Benjamin Franklin developed this movement toward a more progressive theology by emphasizing that the accrual of wealth based on hard work was inherently good and would allow wealthy individuals to positively influence the community. As the author notes, this is a bastardization of the “pure” aspect of Puritan doctrine that rejected the Catholic obsession with doing good works and instead focused on keeping a simple, uncorrupted faith.

“Lincoln was not opposed to slavery because he cared very much about slaves. He was opposed because he cared very, very deeply about whites (and unlike some of his fellow Republicans, he cared about all whites). Slavery was bad for them. And it was bad because it contaminated and, if left unchecked, would eventually destroy the American Dream in which he believed so deeply.”

The author is debunking the popular myth of Abraham Lincoln as the enthusiastic freer of slaves. It’s clear from the text that if a way had existed to keep America unified without broaching the issue of slavery, Lincoln would happily have explored that opportunity. Lincoln’s conception of the American Dream was incompatible with the institution of slavery because it prevented laboring whites from getting a fair opportunity in the economic sector. Lincoln’s commitment to his version of the American Dream of Upward Mobility is admirable, but it requires a tempered enthusiasm given that the wellbeing of slaves was never at the top of his agenda.

“Of course, one could also claim that the factory owner who paid his workers a pittance—and who, moreover, didn’t even have to pay for the upkeep on his workers—was as bad as any plantation owner, if not worse.”

This statement is surprising. To equate a slave-driving plantation owner with a modern capitalist factory owner is unusual in American discourse except in a Marxian analysis of history. The author is likely not trying to downplay slavery’s horrors but is instead trying to bring attention to the exploitative conditions of factory capitalism and show how a comparative analysis of these things isn’t necessarily inappropriate. Note, however, that defenders of the southern slave system at the time contrasted the attentive care that benevolent plantation owners showed their slaves with the indifferent and cruel businesspeople of the northern states—an argument that would be morally incomprehensible today.

“Plessy’s reputation is partly a matter of hindsight—subsequent events would show it legally legitimated a racist state in which African Americans were systematically deprived of political, civil, and social equality for decades to come—but observers at the time (the few that were paying attention, that is) recognized it would have a disastrous impact.”

The Supreme Court has played a central role in both creating the groundwork for legalized racism through decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson and offering the keys to dismantling it (after much effort from Black activists and allies) through decisions like Brown v. Board of Education. In this excerpt, the author recognizes the possibility that some people in the past who perhaps had a heightened moral sense often understood widespread, accepted injustices in their own lifetimes. For example, saying that Thomas Jefferson was a product of his time and therefore shouldn’t be judged for his slave owning (however uneasy his relationship with slavery may have been) isn’t enough because many people and groups of Jefferson’s contemporaries were enlightened enough to agitate against the practice in his day.

“Abraham Lincoln may have made the slaves free, but not even he, as he pointed out repeatedly in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, was prepared to make them equal. The Plessy decision was part of a broader political effort to make two concepts that had been widely considered virtually interchangeable into two that were wholly separate, even antithetical.”

A central theme of this work is the distinction between the concepts of freedom and equality. Cullen claims that freedom and equality were considered nearly identical concepts in America as a matter of common sense before the institutionalization of racism through the judicial system and legislature. Certainly, freedom in the form of the abolition of slavery guaranteed equality of neither opportunity nor condition for newly free Black Americans. Many proponents of abolition were morally keen enough to realize that slavery was reprehensible but felt personally that white people were indeed racially superior to Black people and didn’t necessarily oppose the idea of separate public facilities based on race. US legal and political structures didn’t intervene to enforce racial equality for many years after abolition.

“At some visceral level, virtually all of us need to believe that equality is one of the core values of everyday American life, that its promises extend to everyone. If they don’t, then not everybody is eligible for the American Dream—and one of the principal attractions of the American Dream, and its major moral underpinning, is that everyone is eligible: this has been the benchmark, commonsense notion of what equality has meant for quite some time. That the circumstances of everyday life routinely belie this belief is hardly a problem as long as the principle of equality is affirmed.”

This statement connotes some skepticism about the requirement to believe in equality for the American Dream to make sense. On one hand, the author is saying that a belief in equality is the moral underpinning of the American Dream—the belief that the Dream is equally available to all Americans. On the other hand, he writes that this equality doesn’t really exist in America. What matters is agreeing that equality is of the utmost importance. One couldn’t be blamed for deriving cynical feelings from such a statement and concluding that the American Dream is a fantasy rooted in the wish for equality rather than its actual existence.

“In an important sense, however, names like ‘the civil rights Movement’ and ‘the black freedom movement’ obscure more than they reveal. In an important sense, this event of “the sixties” (another imprecise term) would perhaps most accurately be called the black equality movement. Such a designation would serve as a vivid reminder of what was really at stake in those years—and what has been so depressingly absent in the decades since.”

Cullen repeatedly indicates that equality for Black Americans was at the core of the civil rights movement. Freedom from slavery was no guarantee of equality for Black Americans because post-Civil War political and judicial decision-making splintered freedom and equality into two separate concepts. This paved the way for racist Jim Crow laws in the South that segregated the population and guaranteed inequality of both condition and opportunity for Black Americans. The American Dream, as the author sees it, is incomplete without upholding the principle of equality, so the viability of the American Dream itself was also at stake during the civil rights movement.

“Indeed, in principle, even now there’s no reason why separate but equal couldn’t work—except that history shows that in the realm of race relations, it never has. And that’s because, as a practical matter, separate but equal was simply a legal fiction whose entire reason for existence was a reality of separate but unequal. Proving this in court was very difficult; some exceptionally smart, dedicated people devoted their entire careers to upholding Jim Crow. But by the 1930s and into the 1940s, painstaking legal work was establishing an irrefutable gap between what we as a people said we believed and what we were actually doing.”

Practically speaking, “separate but equal” referred to the requirement that Black Americans use different public facilities than white Americans. Cullen writes that even if everybody agreed that this was morally egregious, it would be legally consistent if those separate facilities were truly of equal quality. However, Black Americans were constantly forced to use worse facilities, from understaffed schools to smaller water fountains to dehumanizing back entrances. Activists proved this in the courts and eventually overturned Jim Crow laws via decisions like Brown v. Board of Education.

“Slavery, which was now dead, was conquered by freedom. Segregation, which remained alive, could only be conquered by equality.”

This short snippet summarizes the complex situation in which Black Americans found themselves after the Civil War. Technically free, former Black slaves entered a largely unwelcoming America that became more “officially” unwelcoming (particularly in the South) with the passage of laws that legalized racial segregation under the “separate but equal” legal analysis introduced by Plessy v. Ferguson. Cullen is suggesting that conquering racial segregation by enforcing equality is technically just as straightforward as ending slavery by enforcing freedom, but both achievements were bitterly fought victories: The Civil War claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and the struggle for equality in some forms persists today despite the successful legal battles and activism of the 20th century.

“But even if we cannot, or should not, demand equality of condition, it is clear that the very imprecision, even vagueness, of equality of opportunity demands a vigilance that we tend to resist out of laziness or fear. Equality without freedom may be a totalitarian nightmare. But freedom without equality has been an oppressive reality for much of American history—and that’s the “better” half. To survive in a new century, the American Dream must be more than an excuse to ignore or forget.”

Cullen is staking the vitality of the American Dream on the ability of the US to guarantee true equality among its citizens. For Cullen, this doesn’t necessarily mean similarity in the incomes or living conditions of Americans (the “equality of condition” that some American politicians traditionally rejected as socialism or communism) but equality of opportunity rather than just belief in the principle of such equality. This analysis poses a question: If the government should intervene to demand equality in de-segregating public facilities like schools, what is its appropriate role in demanding wealth redistribution to support equality or in guaranteeing housing and food for all citizens?

“The American Dream is very much a national, even global, phenomenon, but some dreams have a strong geographic orientation.”

The book acknowledges that the ambition to succeed and create a better life for one’s children is nearly universal, but Cullen holds out a special consideration for the American context of the Dream. Although the book does a great job of exploring the historical context and meanings of the various American Dreams, how citizens of other countries formulate their own dreams and how much that owes to the influence of the American Dream remains an open question. Cullen doesn’t deny that the world’s many historical and cultural contexts foster different dreams, but he insists that the American Dream has some global effect.

“From the plantation owner happy to survey his fields from the comfort of his porch to the Wall Street executive contentedly savoring the fruits of paper profits at a Caribbean resort, the purest expression of the Dream of the Coast rests on a quest for placidity, not the thrill of risk.”

This snippet follows a prolonged discussion of the development of the Las Vegas gambling economy and the California Gold Rush, two frenetic stories exemplifying the relatable desire to get rich quick and live the good life. The Dream of the Coast is about relishing in the luxuries of life without the burden of hard work. The author contrasts this dream unfavorably with the Puritans’ aspirations and lifestyle. Without downright criticizing the Dream of the Coast, including its Hollywood celebrity manifestation, Cullen withholds the deep respect he reveals in earlier chapters when discussing the Dream of Upward Mobility.

“[T]he American Dreams of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Carnegie rested on a sense of character; those of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford rested on personality.”

This roundabout comparison between the Dream of Upward Mobility and the Dream of the Good Life suggests that men like Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln felt that achieving their dreams required hard work and a strong moral compass. The dreams of the new breed of Hollywood celebrity that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford represented, on the other hand, were based on surface characteristics and reputation. The Pickfair estate, a lavish gathering place of famous people, represents the Dream of the Good Life in its luxuriousness and in the way other Americans desired to live like the Fairbanks and Pickfords but without any real drive to work hard for it.

“[T]he real problem is that any American Dream is finally too incomplete a vessel to contain longings that elude human expression or comprehension. We never reach the Coast we think we see. Still we go on dreaming.”

Here, Cullen is at his most poetic. This passage tries to capture the enormity of one human life’s hopes and dreams and the always-imperfect attempt to transcribe inner hopes and dreams into reality. The American Dream is an ideal through which many generations of people have strived for the lives they always wanted. The author explains that although it’s never a perfect accomplishment, something in the human spirit keeps us moving forward regardless.

“What makes the American Dream American is not that our dreams are any better, worse, or more interesting than anyone else’s, but that we live in a country constituted of dreams, whose very justification continues to rest on it being a place where one can, for better and worse, pursue distant goals.”

Despite the humbleness of the first sentence, this is another example of American exceptionalism. While all individuals on Earth might have valid dreams for their own lives and those of their families, something about the US validates such dreams more compellingly than in any other country. This book attempts to help define what that “something” is in relation to the country’s founding and history.

“Indeed, even without a huge surge in immigration, the closing decades of the twentieth century were a time of increased awareness of demographic differences in American society, in large measure because of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. One legacy of that movement has been a heightened awareness of the ways minority experiences have not corresponded to the presumptions or practices of ‘normal,’ ‘mainstream,’ or ‘traditional’ Americans and of the ways in which a dominant American culture has overshadowed, even repressed, such alternative experiences.”

By “normal,” “mainstream,” and “traditional” Americans, the author must be talking about white Americans. The insight that white Americans often live in a totally different world than Black Americans, even within the same country, isn’t new (20th century scholars like W.E.B. Dubois articulated it many decades ago), but Cullen is arguing that differences in worldview based on race, sex, or other identities are now at the forefront of culture. This might be truer now than it was in 2003, when this book was published.

“In writing this book, I hoped to show that the American Dream has functioned as shared ground for a very long time, binding together people who may have otherwise little in common and may even be hostile to one another. Which is not to say that the Dream should be uncritically upheld as a kind of miracle glue. Indeed, I have also hoped to show that all too often it serves as a form of lazy shorthand, particularly on the part of those who use it to ignore, or even consciously obscure, real divisions in American society.”

Uncritical belief in the American Dream can be used as an excuse to believe that if one person has gained success in America, nothing is holding back somebody else from doing the same. This accusation of laziness levied toward people who haven’t managed to realize their dreams or be successful in traditional ways also requires the uncritical belief that true equality of opportunity exists. The idea that two people who work equally hard can end up in opposite financial and social positions in life concedes that life, even in America, is fundamentally unfair.