The American Dream Is not about Getting Rich

Somewhere along the way, the idea of “the American Dream” became constricted.

It started referring purely to economic success: that is, the idea that if you just worked hard, you could become at least comfortably well-off, or even rich. Here is a sampling of examples. Mrinal Mishra, Jonathan Fu, and Steven Ongen recently published a paper called “Do Narratives about the American Dream Rally Local Entrepreneurship?” looking at the connections between mentions of the “American dream” in newspapers and local rates start-ups and entrepreneurship. They refer to the “American dream” as “the quintessential story of entrepreneurship and advancement.” A few years ago, Jimmy Narang, Robert Manduca, Nathan Hendren, Maximilian Hell, David Grusky, and Raj Chetty published a paper called “The fading American Dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940,” in which the American dream is equated to income mobility. In a similar spirit, the American Enterprise Institute has started an “American Dream Initiative” to look at upward economic mobility. In 2014, Mark Robert Rank, Thomas Hirschl, and Kirk Foster, wrote a book called Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes, which they defined as a combination platter of mostly economic outcomes, like economic security for oneself, the idea that one’s children will have more opportunities, and the freedom to pursue one’s passions,

Compare these definitions of the American dream to how Martin Luther King referred to the American Dream in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech:

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a 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 one day out in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. 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 their character.

Clearly, King’s description of the central message of the “American dream” has a different tone from middle-class economic security, increasing business start-up rates, and intergenerational income mobility.

In my own mind, I tend to label the dream of economic progress within and across generations as the “Horatio Alger myth.” For those unfamiliar with the name, Alger became in the years after his death in 1899 the best-selling American novelist of all time, with between 100 and 500 million copies in print by the end of the 1920s (publishing statistics at this time were not a precise science), although his total has been surpassed over the years by a few others including Danielle Steele and Dr. Suess.

As for literature, Horatio Alger stories aren’t much. He turned two basic plots into almost 100 books. His alliterative heroes like Ben Bruce, Ned Newton and Dean Dunham rise from humble beginnings. They are tempted by bad companions, threatened by bullies, and unfairly accused, before winning the attention of a benefactor by saving a drowning child, returning a lost gem, or stopping a runaway horse. The message, pounded home with sledgehammer subtlety, is that through frugality, honesty, abstaining from smoking and drinking, standing up to bullies, and answering the door when fortune knocks, anyone can reach middle-class respectability.

Horatio Alger himself was not a sympathetic character, but his books caught something in the zeitgeist of his time. His books were best-sellers into the 1920s, and one shouldn’t underestimate how they continue to capture a powerful element of popular imagination. Modern-day popular culture still celebrates when a high school graduate, an immigrant, or garage entrepreneur rises to fame and fortune. 

The British scholar Sarah Churchwell has gone looking for the origins of the terminology of the “American Dream.” She writes:

The American dream was rarely, if ever, used to describe the familiar idea of Horatio Alger individual upward social mobility until after the Second World War. Quite the opposite, in fact.  … Although many now assume that the phrase American dream was first used to describe 19^th century immigrants’ archetypal dreams of finding a land where the streets were paved with gold, not until 1918 have I found any instance of the “American dream” being used to describe the immigrant experience …

Instead, Churchwell points out that the terminology of the “American dream” was popularized by the Pulitzer prize-winning historian named James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America. Adams acknowledges that economic security is part of the American dream, but insists on a much broader meaning as well–the version of the American dream to which Martin Luther King was referring. Adams wrote:

But there has also been the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. 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. I once had an intelligent young Frenchman as a guest in New York, and after a few days I asked him what struck him most among his new impressions. Without hesitation he replied, “The way that everyone of every sort looks you right in the eye, without a thought of inequality. Some time ago a foreigner who used to do some work for me, and who had picked up a very fair education, occasionally sat and chatted with me in my study after I had finished my work. One day he said that such a relationship was the great difference between America and his homeland. There, he said, “I would do my work and might get a pleasant word, but I could never sit and talk like this. There is a difference there between social grades which cannot be gotten over. I would not talk to you there as man to man, but as my employer.”

No, the American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtless counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected by older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than just for the simple human being of any and every class. And that dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves.

As Churchwell points out, Adams ends his book by suggesting that the Main Reading Room in the Library of Congress was a useful metaphor for the American Dream. Churchwell writes:

James Truslow Adams ended The Epic of America with what he said was the perfect symbol of the American dream in action. It was not the example of an immigrant who made good, a self-made man who bootstrapped his way from poverty to power, or the iconic house with a white picket fence. For Adams, the American dream was embodied in the Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress.

It was a room that the nation had gifted to itself, so that every American — “old and young, rich and poor, Black and white, the executive and the laborer, the general and the private, the noted scholar and the schoolboy” — could sit together, “reading at their own library provided by their own democracy. It has always seemed to me,” Adams continued,

to be a perfect working out in a concrete example of the American dream — the means provided by the accumulated resources of the people themselves, a public intelligent enough to use them, and men of high distinction, themselves a part of the great democracy, devoting themselves to the good of the whole, uncloistered.

It is an image of peaceful, collective, enlightened self-improvement. That is the American dream, according to the man who bequeathed us the phrase. It is an image that takes for granted the value of education, of shared knowledge and curiosity, of historical inquiry and a commitment to the good of the whole.

Once I have started thinking about the “American dream” in these terms, I find that I am unpleasantly startled when I see the term reduced to a narrowly economic vision.