American Dream

The American Dream is the national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals including representative democracy, rights, liberty, and equality, in which freedom is interpreted as the opportunity for individual prosperity and success, as well as the chance for upward social mobility for each according to ability and achievement through hard work in a capitalist society with many challenges but few formal barriers.

The term "American Dream" was popularized by James Truslow Adams in 1931, saying that "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.

Proponents of the American Dream often claim that its tenets originate from the United States Declaration of Independence, which states that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States is used similarly, and states that the Constitution's purpose is to, in part, "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".

Throughout American history, there have been critics of its national ethos. Some critics have said that American focus on individualism and capital results in materialism, consumerism, and a lack of worker solidarity. In 2015, only 10.5 percent of American workers were members of a labor union. The American Dream has also been criticized as a product of American exceptionalism and Native American genocide, as well as other examples of discriminatory violence.

Belief in the American Dream is often inversely associated with rates of national disillusionment. Evidence indicates that upward economic mobility has declined and income inequality has risen in the United States in recent decades. In 2020, a poll found 54 percent of American adults thought the American Dream was attainable for them, 28 percent believed it was unattainable for them personally, while 9 percent rejected the idea of the American Dream entirely. Younger generations were also less likely to believe in the American Dream than their older counterparts. Women are more skeptical of achieving the American Dream than men are.

History

The meaning of the American Dream has changed over the course of history, and includes both personal components such as home ownership and upward mobility as well as a global vision for cultural hegemony and diplomacy.

18th century

Historically, the Dream originated in colonial mystique regarding frontier life. As John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the colonial Governor of Virginia, noted in 1774, the Americans "for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled". He added that, "if they attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west". The idea of the American Dream is ever evolving and changing. When the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, the founding fathers believed that this would ratify the role of government and society in the United States. Jim Cullen notability claims:

Ever since, the Declaration of Independence has functioned as the banner of the American Dream, one repeatedly waved by figures that included women’s rights activists, populists, homosexuals, and anyone who has ever believed that happiness can not only be pursued, but attained. The U.S. Constitution, which marked the other bookend of the nation’s creation, lacks the mythic resonances of the Declaration, though it takes little reflection to see that it is the backdrop, if not the foundation, for all American Dreams. Whatever their disagreements about its scope or character, most Americans would agree that their national government is legitimate insofar as it permits a level playing field of dreams. Many of us have doubts that the government ''does'' serve this function; few have doubts that it ''should''.

19th century

Many well-educated Germans who fled the failed 1848 revolution found the United States more politically free than their homeland, which they believed to be a hierarchical and aristocratic society that determined the ceiling for their aspirations. One of them said:

The German emigrant comes into a country free from the despotism, privileged orders and monopolies, intolerable taxes, and constraints in matters of belief and conscience. Everyone can travel and settle wherever he pleases. No passport is demanded, no police mingles in his affairs or hinders his movements ... Fidelity and merit are the only sources of honor here. The rich stand on the same footing as the poor; the scholar is not a mug above the most humble mechanics; no German ought to be ashamed to pursue any occupation ... n Americawealth and possession of real estate confer not the least political right on its owner above what the poorest citizen has. Nor are there nobility, privileged orders, or standing armies to weaken the physical and moral power of the people, nor are there swarms of public functionaries to devour in idleness credit for. Above all, there are no princes and corrupt courts representing the so-called divine 'right of birth'. In such a country the ''talents, energy and perseverance'' of a person ... have far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies.

The discovery of gold in California in 1849 brought in a hundred thousand men looking for their fortune overnight—and a few did find it. Thus was born the California Dream of instant success. Historian H. W. Brands noted that in the years after the Gold Rush, the California Dream spread across the nation:

The old American Dream ... was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard"... of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. hisgolden dream ... became a prominent part of the American psyche only after Sutter's Mill.

During the 18th century provided Americans with new sources of wealth and looking for new ways of travel. When looking at immigration in history, it is important to consider the different experiences of gender as much as race. There are often times tensions between economic and political agendas. By studying the global tensions and events outside of the United States, helps to form a broader viewpoint and perspective of the past. After 1776, the United States became a part of the global connections improving marketing opportunities. This paragraph highlights the complex relationships between global integration within American history:

These complicated transnational networks themselves are not the only story. Along with global integration went attempts to assert national distinctiveness amid growing global competition. Americans conceived of and responded to these pressures by striving to create national economic independence because they wanted to maintain political and social independence. Thus there was tension between the economic imperatives of global integration, and national political debates and economic agendas - such as the enhancement of national security through a strong industrial and financial base.

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 advanced the frontier thesis, under which American democracy and the American Dream were formed by the American frontier. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. He also stressed results; especially that American democracy was the primary result, along with egalitarianism, a lack of interest in high culture, and violence. "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier," said Turner.

In Turner's thesis, the American frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mindsets and eroding old, dysfunctional customs. The frontier had no need for standing armies, established churches, aristocrats or nobles, nor for landed gentry who controlled most of the land and charged heavy rents. Frontier land was free for the taking. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. He won wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals. Turner elaborated on the theme in his advanced history lectures and in a series of essays published over the next 25 years, published along with his initial paper as ''The Frontier in American History.'' Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.

20th century

Freelance writer James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase "American Dream" in his 1931 book ''Epic of America'':

Adams contended that extreme wealth inequality was among the worst enemies of the American Dream, and said that:

He also said that the American institution that best exemplified the American dream was the Library of Congress; he contrasted it with European libraries of the time, which restricted access to many of their works, and argued that the Library, as an institution funded by and meant to uphold democracy, was an example of democratic government's ability to uplift and equalize the people that it ruled over and was ruled by in order to "save itself" from a takeover by the elite. The Library also offered an opportunity for the whole nation to come together in thoughtful pursuit of a common good, which Adams claimed needed to be "carried out in all departments of our national life" in order to make the American Dream a reality.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963), rooted the civil rights movement in the African-American quest for the American Dream:

We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands ... when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Literature

The concept of the American Dream has been used in popular discourse, and scholars have traced its use in American literature ranging from the ''Autobiography'' of Benjamin Franklin, to Mark Twain's ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (1884), Willa Cather's ''My Ántonia'', F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Theodore Dreiser's ''An American Tragedy'' (1925) and Toni Morrison's '' Song of Solomon'' (1977). Other writers who used the American Dream theme include Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Albee, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, and Giannina Braschi.

In 2006, Dr. Guiyou Huang from St. Thomas University in Florida wrote a
paper regarding the American Dream as a recurring theme in the fiction of Asian Americans.

American ideals

Many American authors added American ideals to their work as a theme or other reoccurring idea, to get their point across. There are many ideals that appear in American literature such as that all people are equal, the United States is the land of opportunity, independence is valued, the American Dream is attainable, and everyone can succeed with hard work and determination. John Winthrop also wrote about this term called American exceptionalism