Of all the events in the United States this month–the wrangling over the budget on Capitol Hill, the Republican victory over a veteran Democrat in an important Senate runoff in Louisiana, the firestorm over the CIA report, the early maneuvering for advantage in the presidential race–the most startling and most important may have been one poll finding and one headline on the front of the Business pages of The New York Times the other day.
The poll showed that just short of two-thirds of Americans believed that it was possible to start out poor in the United States, work hard, and become rich. The headline said: Many Feel American Dream Is Out of Reach.
The survey results showing that only 64 per cent believed that a poor birth could lead to a rich life was the lowest result in about two decades. Even though it came after months of public hand-wringing over the disparity between rich and poor in the United States, this was an astonishing finding, in part because the figure in this poll–in a period in which 321,000 jobs were added last month, far higher than even the rosiest projections–was 8 percentage points lower than it was in 2009, during the darkest days of the Great Recession.
But what also was intriguing was the headline, attaching the up-by-your-bootstraps ethos to the evocative phrase American Dream. The poll question itself made no mention of the American Dream, but the headline writer made the association.
Americans have been debating the nature, definition and authenticity of the American Dream since James Truslow Adams (1878 – 1949), a Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian, dreamed up the phrase in a 1931 book. In ``The Epic of America" Adams, who is not part of the fabled 18th and 19th century American political dynasty, said the American Dream was "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." No phrase, with the possible exception of ``The American Century," the 1941 brainchild of TIME magazine publisher Henry Luce, has sparked so much debate, emotion, and anguish. (Former Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier thought the 19th century was the century of the United States and in 1904 said: ``I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the 20th century.'')
In recent years the phrase has become as ironic as it once was iconic. The comedian George Carlin said it was called the American Dream because ``you have to be asleep to believe it." The Black Muslim leader Malcolm X complained: ``We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare."
Mr. Adams's conception of the American Dream was a far more nuanced concept than the one we now employ. He acknowledged that "too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of" the notion of the American Dream, but he went on to say that it was not a reverie of materialism:
``It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to 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."
Americans have debated for decades the connection between economic success and personal fulfillment, and sometimes those with the greatest economic success profess to have little personal fulfillment–a lamentation that often seems beyond credulity to those on the other side of the economic divide.
Even so, it is indisputable that the notion of social mobility is packed into the American outlook.
It is a sturdy, revered part of the American folklore, which is why the notion of rags-to-riches seemed commonplace in the United States until recently and why the name Horatio Alger is familiar to millions of Americans who could not tell you who he was. Indeed, to almost all Americans, Horatio Alger (1832-1899) is an adjective, not a noun. Here's an explanation:
A ``Horatio Alger story" is one in which pluck and luck combine to elevate someone from the gutters to the commanding heights of the American economy. But Horatio Alger himself, the man who established the genre with an 1868 book called ''Ragged Dick," was the scion of an established American family and an honours graduate of Harvard.
Today the debate over the American Dream is so fertile and so revealing a topic that the Library of Congress has established a curriculum of readings and assignments to examine the question.
And yet there is no mistaking the anxiety–and disappointment–Americans feel at year's end. For the first time in a quarter century, according to the USAToday/Pew Research Center Poll, a minority of Americans feel things will be better in the year ahead than they were in the in the year just completed. (That gets to the question of American optimism.) The New York Times poll shows that only half of Americans (52 per cent) believe the nation's economic system is fair. (That gets to the question of social mobility.) At the same time, it is revealing that fully a third (32 per cent) say they have no confidence in Wall Street bankers and brokers.
But, as Mr. Adams explained, economics is only part of the American Dream. In his memoir, former President George W. Bush, reflecting on Midland, Texas, where he was reared, took a different view:
``Those were comfortable, carefree years. The word I'd use now is idyllic. On Friday nights, we cheered on the Bulldogs of Midland High. On Sunday mornings, we went to church. Nobody locked their doors. Years later, when I would speak about the American Dream, it was Midland I had in mind."