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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Role of Freedom and Equality in Fulfilling the American Dream

From the Puritan wish for religious freedom to the freeing of the slaves, American history has been one long struggle for freedom since the beginning. The question of equality has always persisted alongside these various fights for freedom, often uncomfortably. For the author of this book, both freedom and equality are necessary conditions for the American Dream to be meaningfully fulfilled.

Cullen writes that for the American colonists before the Revolution, “freedom was not a goal to be gained; it was a cherished possession the colonists wanted to prevent being lost” (44). After the influence of published works like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the colonists began to feel themselves as existing in a state of unfreedom in their relationship to Britain and fought to achieve freedom during the Revolution.

The obvious contradiction here is that the American Revolution was a revolution for freedom carried out by slaveholders. The Founding Fathers to some extent realized that “the attainment of their dream could encourage others to pursue theirs” (47)—namely, the Founding Fathers’ own slaves—and Thomas Jefferson himself labored with this contradiction in his drafting of the Declaration of Independence. The colonists’ American Dream of freedom rested on a horrific inequality that forced Black slaves to build the American economy. Freedom for one group of people has never guaranteed freedom or equality for others.

After the Revolution, the question of slavery grew more important. Still, during the Civil War and after the success of the North, few people were willing to say that Black and white Americans were equal even when they argued for the cause of Black freedom. Abraham Lincoln himself, despite his role in freeing slaves, wasn’t prepared to believe in or create a situation of equality between Blacks and whites. The period after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery from the late 19th century throughout the 20th century was a period of stark inequality for Black Americans. Inequality was enshrined in law through infamous court decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson, which paved the way for the application of Jim Crow laws in the American South with its pronouncement that racial segregation was lawful because it didn’t necessarily violate the equal status of Black Americans. It took the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—which Cullen writes could also appropriately be referred to as a “black equality movement” (110)—to demonstrate that freedom without equality was a meager form of freedom. Furthermore, the idea of equality of opportunity, which assumes that all individuals in a society have access to the same life prospects if they work hard enough, doesn’t consider the uneven starting points of white Americans born with all the privileges of citizenship and Black Americans who were first brought into America as slaves and then subject to segregation and racism. Cullen summarizes the situation well when he writes that “freedom is not enough. Nor is an equality of opportunity that is nothing more than an empty abstraction. For the Dream to live, it has to be more than that” (128). In this case, “more” refers to both full freedom and full equality—no compromises, no euphemisms about “separate but equal,” and no excuses.

History, Identity, and the Dream

More than just a simple concept, the American Dream goes to the heart of American identity and reveals interesting and uncomfortable aspects of the country’s history. Whether one is wholly committed to the promise of the Dream or outright rebukes its existence, completely removing the American Dream from any serious discussion of American life is impossible.

The American Dream is largely about looking forward and being willing to discard one’s past. Cullen writes that “at the core of many American Dreams, especially the Dream of the Coast, is an insistence that history doesn’t matter, that the future matters far more than the past” (184). In addition to the Dream of the Coast’s image of a promising young star leaving her hometown in rural America on the Greyhound to make it big in Hollywood, the power of the Dream of Upward Mobility embodies the idea that impoverished beginnings don’t define one’s entire life; the “self-made man” of the Dream of Upward Mobility is a fundamentally ahistorical concept. However, Cullen adds that “history is in the end the most tangible thing we have, the source and sale for all our dreams” (184), meaning that the American-ness of the Dream is comprehensible only in the context of a specific American history—one to which the Dream is constantly pointing.

The Puritan dream of religious freedom and starting over fresh in a new land is robbed of all its vigor without the history of religious persecution in England. Furthermore, the Puritan role in creating the Dream for future generations derives from the peculiar history of the Puritan lifestyle and belief system: Although harsh, strict, and intolerant, the Puritans were admirable for their work ethic, a trait that modern American political commentators still cite as the key to achieving the American Dream today. An upward mobility success story is meaningful because of a person’s meager beginnings, and for key figures of American history like Abraham Lincoln, the possibility of such success reveals a changing American cultural climate. In this climate, the nature of class prejudice is shifting such that impoverished roots can be celebrated, the “indispensable bedrock of distinction” rather than “a somewhat embarrassing obstacle to be overcome” (68).

As a relatively young country, the America of the European settler has no obvious bases of national identity in the same way that ancient civilizations like Egypt, China, or Greece have (although this statement makes less sense given America’s indigenous inhabitants, who had made a life on the land for thousands of years). In the absence of an identity based on “blood, religion, language, geography, a shared history, or some combination of these” (6), Americans turn to other bases of identity—namely, their founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as an allegiance to the “idea” of America, which is another way of saying the American Dream. The Dream works as a basis for identity not because it’s a provable hypothesis but precisely because it’s ambiguous, which “is the very source of its mythic power” (7) in the absence of deeply rooted ancient myths that a patriotic citizen of a country like Iran can easily grasp.

Limitations of the Dream

Part of the ambiguity and elusive nature of the American Dream is that while examples of Americans with impossible lives achieving their wildest dreams do exist, it isn’t reasonable to expect that most Americans will be able to achieve even a portion of their dreams. We know from observation and life experience that the promise of the Dream is often unfulfilled, perhaps even unfulfillable, despite the investment of abundant hard work by millions of Americans to improve the status of their lives.

The Dream’s limitations are, first, historical. Discussing the fulfillment of the Dream of Upward Mobility for disenfranchised American women in the 17th and 18th centuries makes little sense, and it makes even less sense for slaves. Any notion of the American Dream was the exclusive birthright of a subset of white men for more than 200 years of early American history. Slavery was abolished in the latter half of the 19th century in America, and women received the vote in 1920, but the idea of women and Black Americans being able to achieve the same level of success as white men by applying similar effort was absurd for most of American history—and in some instances remains so today.

Looking to a specific variation of the American Dream, like the Dream of Home Ownership with a clearly defined goal (home ownership), shows how the promise of the American Dream can remain unfulfilled. The author describes a situation in his young life in which it was relatively affordable for many American families to purchase a detached home in the suburbs and fulfill this dream—and in which many immigrants with a particularly ferocious home ownership dream were happily able to achieve this goal as well.

Today, however, low-income families in states like California have few prospects to own homes. Holding enough savings for a down payment while working at or near minimum wage in California wouldn’t qualify somebody to own a home. Such stories may exist, but in reality many people who desperately want to own a home and are prepared to work for it never achieve this dream. Cullen’s parents decided to purchase a home “because it made sense for them economically and because they felt it was the best means to their end of upward mobility for their children” (155). However, parents with similar aspirations today may find that economic forces beyond their direct control preclude their ever being able to make such a decision.