Confused? Good; listen up. I’m hearing “the American dream” about twice a week now. Nobody troubles to define it but everyone is in favor of it, whatever it is. And I foresee we’re going to hear it ad nauseum as we approach November, ’24. Tiffany Smiley (is that not a politician’s ideal name?) after being soundly defeated in her Senatorial run against Patty Murray last November, announced the formation of the Endeavor PAC, to help Republican candidates across the country: “every dollar goes to helping candidates” who, she told Fox News, “are ready to rescue the American dream for our kids today.” Turns out the kids she had in mind are her own; the PAC’s only expenditures have been to pay off her own campaign debts.
In 2012, Hedrick Smith wrote Who Killed the
American Dream? a book that pinned the blame for the destroyed
hopes and ambitions of the middle class on unscrupulous banks that created and
sold over-rated mortgage-backed securities; predatory variable rate lenders
that lured families into unaffordable homes; Bush-era tax breaks for the upper
class that exacerbate income and wealth inequality while increasing the
national debt; inflated costs of post-secondary education; replacement of
pensions with 401ks; off-shoring of jobs; decline of unions; globalization of
trade – all the usual suspects we’ve been hearing about ever since the financial
crises of 2001 and 2008.
Smith’s title, too, suggests that The American Dream is a universal; the book implies that generally it has to do with prosperity and economic security – home ownership, dependable work, savings, retirement funds, higher education for the kids, and so on.
In 2016, candidate Donald Trump proclaimed, “The American Dream is dead.” Moreover, if you elect me, I will resuscitate it. “Only I can fix it.” By 2020, despite four years as President Trump, he again announced that the American Dream is dead. And repeatedly since then. So much for fixing it. It appears his and his kid’s real “American dream” was to monetize his campaign to line family pockets.
Despite a supposedly deceased dream, despite recession and pandemic, in 2020 over 700,000 people legally emigrated to the US. An uncountable band of illegal immigrants snuck in as well. And last year, 2022, 1.2 million persons legally sought and achieved entry into our country! That’s more than in the peak Ellis-island years of 1910, ’11, ’12, and ’13. Somebody’s dream of becoming an American hadn’t died.
What is The American Dream?
This drumbeat of “The” American Dream piqued my interest. I began inquiring of young, native-born Americans and of recent emigres to this country about its so-called dead dream.
- Shawn T, Iranian-born civil engineer and real estate entrepreneur:
“I came for education; I stayed to practice my
faith free from religious persecution.”
“No, I don’t think in terms of an American
Dream.”
- Kalina M, Polish-born artist:
“I’m not sure what the American Dream is but here
I am free to be myself outside the bounds of culture and tradition.”
These conversations and others give me my first finding:
“the American Dream” is a phrase not used much by immigrants. Instead, it
appears to be a phrase we native-born use to explain to ourselves why these
newcomers want to live here.
- Besom A, Armenian-born owner of a lawn and landscape service company:
“My Dad brought us here for safety. Here I’m doing better than he did and my kids will do better than me.”
- Corriell S, American-born municipal maintenance crew chief:
“It’s about choice – freedom to choose.”
- Teena P, Thai-born, co-owner of a salon:
“My Mom brought the
family here. She was being pestered by pimps offering her cash to buy her
oldest daughter, my sister. She had to get us out of there and a cousin said
come here, they’ll be safe and you’ll be free to start over.”
Immigrants always come with a purpose, an intention, an aspiration. Each wave of immigration has had its own motives, its own goals, their own dreams in response to their challenges and conditions. My mother’s English Separatist forebears emigrated from Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, to Leyden in Holland and, later, from there to Plymouth in order to worship in an autonomous church free from the strictures of the Church of England. (And, wrote some, because their kids were speaking better Dutch than English and beginning to think in Dutch.)
My father’s forebears arrived in Massachusetts and Connecticut thirty years later, Puritans in search of freedom to worship “pure” Christianity unadulterated with C of E carry-overs from Roman rites. Also, to manage their local governance, which Oliver Cromwell’s military Protectorate would not allow back in England.
No matter how long you've been here, your forbears came with desire and courage -- even if "indiginous", your forbears migrated here from somewhere else. Ann’s forbears came from Sweden at the turn of the century, presumably to escape conscription, rigid social stratification, and the rigidity of Lutheran Church of Sweden.
The Irish, in the 19thC came to escape famine and Ascendant English landlords, and to work, digging our canals and laying rails. German socialists came after failure of the 1848 revolts with the dream of pursuing equity and opportunity free of repressive monarchs. The Swedes came to homestead cheap RR land and stake out their own farms. After our Civil War, the Chinese came to the West Coast to work the transcontinental railroads and mines and earn money, silver, to send back home. The Eastern European Jews came to New York for freedom from pogroms. Southern Blacks migrated North to escape Jim Crow and to trade sharecropping for factory work. Mexicans came for employment; Cubans to flee Communism. El Salvadorans come to escape crime gangs and keep their children safe; Indians to find entrepreneurial opportunities.
And so it has gone – people of courage and initiative come with their own dream but the common denominator is the freedom to try and make yourself and your family better off than you might be back there. Not all make it; about a third of Eastern European immigrants in the first decade of the 20thC returned home. But not all.
- Anna Q, Vietnamese-born salon owner:
It’s the same for native-born Americans.
- Taylor R, American-born marine services operator:
“it’s
about mobility. My grandparents moved from Oklahoma to California to Alaska,
looking for opportunity. Mom became a therapist and moved us to Washington
State.”
You move from Oklahoma to California, from California to Alaska. You hold a job as a diesel mechanic and send your daughter to law school. You’re free to pursue a better, however you choose to define it.
It appears that there is no “The” American dream but many “Their” American Dreams.
So, this slippery phrase: where did it come from?
James Truslow Adams is usually
credited with coining “The American Dream” in his 1931 book, The Epic of
America. But in fact, the phrase was used long before: in 1900, the New
York Post wrote “. . . the American Dream was of democracy – of equality of
opportunity, of justice for all.” Walter Lippman, in 1914, expressed his
skeptical view that “the American Dream of endless progress . . . is a delusion.” (These references I have drawn from Prof. Sarah Churchwell’s
essay ‘The State of the American Dream’ published in The Catalyst, a journal
of the Bush Institute. Check it out; it’s a very good read.)
Before WWII, the American Dream was not so much about material prosperity as it was about social mobility and democracy. James Truslow Adams wrote “ . . . not a dream of motorcars and high wages, merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” If I add to that Martin Luther King’s 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…. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ ” then I get a version of the American Dream that replaces prosperity with the ideals to which I should aspire.
Attaining Their American Dream is getting tougher
What Rick Smith wrote about is not the holding of a dream but its achievement, the realization, of it. And it’s gotten harder, not easier.
- Ella B, American-born tattoo artist and jewelry designer:
“The American
Dream is dead: credit card debt and interest rates, student loan debt,
apartment rents. How can you save and build capital?”
Economists and sociologists term it social mobility – climbing the socio-economic ladder – and inter-generational mobility – children becoming better educated, more secure economically, enjoying a higher status and earning more than their parents. So, how are we doing?
The World Economic Forum rates and publishes a widely used Social Mobility Index, ten measures in five categories:
- Health and health services
- Education: (Access, Quality and Equity)
- Technology Access
- Fair Work Opportunities
- Social Protection & Efficient Institutions
The top ten nations are
Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria,
Belgium and Luxembourg -- all small, all northern European. Where are the large
countries? In the second ten: Germany, France, Japan, UK, Canada and so
on. But the US?
We are 27th! And
falling! 27th out of 82 countries the WEF rates. The lowest social
mobility index of the G-7.
You all know the obstacles to
achieving social mobility and intergenerational mobility:
· costs of education rising steadily faster
than inflation;
- · wage stagnation,
- · highly unequal distribution of incomes and
wealth,
- · job relocations overseas,
- · high costs of housing,
- · regressive taxation
- · weakened unions
- -- you’ve heard all this before.
And intergenerational mobility?
The Brookings Institute study, using World Bank and Pew Research data,
concluded that “While Americans have an optimistic faith in the
ability of individuals to get ahead within a lifetime or from one generation to
the next, there is growing evidence of less intergenerational economic mobility
in the United States than in many other rich, industrialized countries . . ..” In
fact, we're lower than all but the UK.
Yet still they come, despite these barriers, in pursuit of their dream of becoming an American.
- Yvgenia P, Russian-born architect (who became a citizen of the USA last year along with 900,000 other strivers):
“If I lived in France, I would never be French.
Here I can be an American. In France or Russia, it’s about blood and language;
here, it’s about an idea.”
Removing those barriers
Don’t we who are securely here have
a duty to reduce obstacles, to remove barriers to achievement of whatever
American Dream youngsters and immigrants hold? We need these new citizens:
their energy, their imagination, their courage, their determination to raise
children and make America work for them. We’re not an Orban who believes that
strength comes from illiberal homogeneity. We relish freshness, differences, new
ideas and perspectives – don’t we?
What should you and I do? We
should seek to remove barriers, those impediments and obstacles that block
realization of the dream. We should at least support those who aspire to public
service, who want to tackle inequity, to lessen inequality and increase
opportunity, to increase the odds that newcomers earn realization of their
American dream.
Every public policy proposal and
every political and civic leader should be judged on whether and how well they facilitate
realization of dreams. Not for nothing are these young undocumented called
Dreamers. We must stand for removing barriers.
Make this your litmus test: do
your senators and representatives, your church or club or town council or alma
mater make it easier or harder to realize an American Dream of life getting
better, of being heard, of climbing that socio-economic ladder?
Ask of yourself: how can I help
remove barriers to realizing one’s American Dream?
(A note to Democrats, whether moderate or progressive or of
whatever stripe: Removing Barriers is an over-arching, unifying and winning
frame.)
