The American Dream: Is That All There Is? Is That All There Was?

I always get a bit queasy over the catchphrase “the American Dream.”  I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard (or read) variations on: “All he wants is his piece of the American Dream,” or: “Owning a home is key to the American Dream,” or: “They came here in search of the American Dream,” or, worst of all: “So-and-so is the very embodiment of the American Dream.”  The familiar phrase implies a widespread desire for economic success, but it does so obliquely, even evasively.  Why not instead say: “All he wants is to get rich, who can blame him?” or: “Owning a home is the basis of middle-class security,” or: “They came here for better economic opportunities,” or: “So-and-so started with nothing and built a business empire”?  These alternatives would be simpler and more honest in their intention.  Am I alone in judging the word-song of “the American Dream” to be a sugar-coated, falsely patriotic euphemism?  What compels so many Americans to cloak their striving for material gain in a mantle of exceptionalist rhetoric?  When people parrot “the American Dream,” they are not only celebrating a general urge to make money, but they are also affirming that the United States is the best place on earth to achieve upward mobility.  It has long been an American truism that if someone cannot “make it” here, they cannot make it anywhere.  So, the loftiness of the phrase “the American Dream” elevates the attainment of wealth to the pantheon of national values, along with freedom, equality, democracy, and progress.  This sanctification of affluence makes me uncomfortable.

It is little consolation that I am not the first to voice such discomfort.  In fact, when the phrase “the American Dream” was coined by the historian James Truslow Adams in his The Epic of America (1931), he was voicing a similar complaint that making money was acquiring the “aspects of moral virtues.”  Adams believed the authentic American Dream was broader, and involved “a genuine individual search and striving for the abiding values of life,” which had not, historically, been possible in other lands.[1]  Indeed, thinking back to my childhood in the 1960s, we were taught in public school that immigrants came to this country for both political freedom and economic opportunity (the imported slaves were sidestepped).  But, invariably, political freedoms were heavily emphasized and enumerated by our teachers, while economic imperatives were more or less mentioned in passing.  The national icons we were taught to revere underscored that imbalance: the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty (not the trading bell and the statue of wealth).  So too our patriotic slogans: the home of the brave (not the property of the shareholders); the pursuit of happiness (not the accumulation of assets); give me liberty or give me death (not give me profits or I don’t want to live anymore).  Ridiculous as these counter examples may sound, they illustrate the reality that we explicitly embellish, exaggerate, and celebrate—and sing about and hold parades in honor of—our constitutional freedoms, our democratic-egalitarian ideals, and our revolutionary heritage, while we usually relegate money matters to more mundane, less noble or idealistic expressions.  Except when we invoke the American Dream.

The potency of “the American Dream” as a motto of our national culture, with its genius for economic improvement, makes me wonder whether the glorification of democratic freedoms has been mostly window dressing, and the growth of our material affluence has been our true national purpose all along.  By coincidence, while rereading a classic book in preparation for a previous blog post, I came across two marked passages from my earlier reading.  In the first, the author noted: “Those who came to this country to act (to make money) were more quickly and thoroughly Americanized than those who came to realize some lofty ideal.”  The second, in which the author was describing the ideals of various nations, concluded: “The gross ideal of an ever-rising standard of living has kept this nation fairly virile.”[2]  Could it be, that is all there ever was?  Without the fables of abundance, validated by actual prosperity, would the United States have been able to indulge its revolutionary political ideas?  What if the ever-rising standard of living created breathing room for political and ideological conflicts to be resolved?  By way of analogy: sports teams that keep winning tend to experience minimal interpersonal tensions, recriminations, disloyalties, and so forth; the same holds for political campaigns that are thriving or business firms that are growing; when entities start losing, failing, or shrinking, internal dissension and destructive behavior ensues.  For two centuries, the economy of the United States developed impressively and created the world’s first massive middleclass.  Living conditions improved markedly over time, as did the perception of heightened opportunity for each successive generation.

Unfortunately, since the 1970s the long-term economic miracle that was the United States has flagged, and the great expectations of the populace have dampened.  Statistically, the economy still grows, but it no longer improves in any meaningful sense for the majority of citizens.  The middle class is shrinking and has become less secure; income disparity and wealth inequality have ballooned.  American industry no longer seems competitive in an increasingly globalized market, and, for the first time in modern history, technological innovations are not creating more good jobs than they are destroying.  Moreover, the United States, which openly prided itself as a venue for individual advancement, has fallen behind quite a few other countries in delivering upward mobility.[3] Our nation has become a sports franchise that no longer wins, a corporation that is downsizing.  Predictably, internal distrust, dissension, blaming, scapegoating, invalidating, villainizing, and infighting are increasing.  Hence, there is little chance of resolving our political, ideological, or cultural conflicts.  I would hate to admit that Silent Cal was right about the business of America being business, or that Charles Wilson was justified in claiming that what was good for General Motors was good for the rest of us.  But they may have been partly right in ways they could not have known.  Perhaps without sustained, broadly based, and growing prosperity, our political values alone are not strong enough to hold society together.  This is a disheartening prospect, and I hope it is not the case.  Yet it seems plausible at this frightening juncture.

This essay was sparked by a PBS documentary I watched about Ted Ngoy, a Cambodian immigrant who came the United States in the 1970s and became the “Donut King” of California: building a chain of about fifty donut shops, and acquiring a personal fortune of $20 million. Ngoy became active in Republican Party politics, and President George H.W. Bush gave him an award for entrepreneurship.  But as the film’s promotional tease puts it: “After living his version of the American Dream, everything came crashing down for Ngoy.”  Ngoy became a compulsive gambler who lost his money, his business empire, his mansion, and his family; he returned to his native Cambodia, eventually finding work as a real estate agent.  There is a lot to explore in the Donut King saga, but one thing that stands out to me is its packaging.  For the American television and video audience, Ngoy’s story is sold as an instalment of the American Dream, as in: “[This is] a story of…who gets to access the American Dream…[and] also about how the American Dream gets handed down and evolves from one generation to another.” [4] Obviously, the golden words “American Dream” have become a dependable marketing hook.  Rags-to-riches stories are not unique to the United States.  Yet there is something special about the way the act of economic striving seems to establish a person’s bona fides as an American, while also, in some ill-defined, symbolic sense, it contributes to the collective identity of American society.

The conventional wisdom these days is that the world is splitting into two camps.  One alliance, led by the United States, represents democratic capitalism and enlightened values; the other alliance, led by China, represents authoritarian capitalism at the expense of individual rights.  Things were simpler when the authoritarian camp was Communist, and rejected the idea of personal profit and private wealth.  Now that so many formerly Communist countries are shamelessly seeking capitalist riches, the visions that separate the two camps are not so stark.  In fact, since chasing money for personal gain is fast becoming the transnational norm, and places like China are growing richer faster than the United States, it may be time for Americans to curtail their vernacular reliance on “the American Dream.”  Better still, we can begin applying the phrase to national values that really do—or should—set us apart from other places.  This would be in line with what J.T. Adams had in mind when he coined the phrase, or what Herbert Croly meant (in 1909) when he spoke of “the promise of American life.”

[1] James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), pp. 406, 412.  Adams saves his direct argument for the book’s Epilog, pp. 401-417 (Epic is a general history of the United States); by my quick count, Adams uses the term “American dream” 17 times (10 in the epilog, where he italicizes it on first use; he never capitalizes “dream”).

[2] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951; New York: Perennial Library, 1966), pp. 111, 148.

[3] Cal Jillson, The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012); pp. 226-227, 275-279 for a sampling of U.S. economic woes.

[4] The Donut King, a film by Alice Gu, PBS premier on Independent Lens, May 24, 2023.  Blurbs are from: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/the-donut-king/ (accessed 6/8/23);  additional information from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Ngoy (accessed 6/8/23).