Imagine that you have just arrived in the United States. You step onto the street in the city where you are about to make your new life, and an agent greets you. Not only does he have a job to offer you, but he also has a place for you to live – and you can own it after you pay for it for a few years. All you need is to put down a payment that is almost as much as the savings you brought with you, but then you will have a home of your very own in America, and you will have a job that will make it easy for you to make the payments each month. Of course, the mortgage paperwork (which you cannot read, since it is in complex English and you are an immigrant who does not know much English at all) details the fact that your first year of payments is just the interest; principal payments kick in after that point, and you will not be able to afford the payments then. That will not matter, though, because you are as likely as not to have gotten injured on the job and been replaced – and you are as likely as not to be out on the streets, with a fresh immigrant family installed in your house and on the same road that you just traveled. Does this sound like the Great Recession of 2007? Actually, this is the experience of many immigrants who traveled to Chicago around the dawn of the twentieth century. With the nation just over a century old, the first round of industrialists were using such industries as the meatpacking business to use immigrants ruthlessly. The American Dream was just as much an illusion then as it is now. In a time when income inequality is at its greatest point in history, the idea that anyone can get ahead in these United States is just as antiquated as the cotton gin.
One thing that is certain about the myth of the American Dream is its power. As Brandon King points out, “[d]espite the harshness of the Great Recession, a 2009 New York Times survey found that 72 percent of Americans still believed it was possible to start poor work hard and become rich in America” (p. 2). This idea of the optimistic person starting out in poverty and working hard to become wealthy still persists in American society, despite the fact that there are so many counterexamples to that truth – and always have been. There were a bunch of colonists who headed out from England to start a new life and the settlement they would call Roanoke in Virginia – and the entire colony disappeared without a trace to indicate what had happened to them by the time the next supply expedition showed up from England. The poignancy of the first Thanksgiving, celebrated by the Pilgrims with some of their Native American friends, came from the fact that so many Pilgrims had passed away during that long first winter. It is possible for people to rise from modest means to vast wealth, as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak showed when they started Apple in a garage, only to have it mushroom into one of the largest electronics companies in the world today, with people carrying iPods to listen to music, iPads to surf the Internet when they don’t have time or space to get out a laptop, and iPhones to talk to their friends (and do some more of that surfing).
The fact that the terms of the American Dream have changed over time from transformative to modest shows that the dream itself is largely illusory. When most people think about a successful life, they are now talking about such things as “a steady job, financial security for the future, being able to retire without struggling, and having a secure place of residence” (King, p. 3). These respondents are not talking about having their own home (instead of renting), being able to buy a vacation home (or even a boat) or even expanding their own material wealth significantly. It sounds like they want to continue to be able to go to the grocery store regularly and be able to stay out of the homeless shelter. What kind of a glamorous existence is that? That is not a dream; that is basic maintenance. If you are telling me that the American Dream means that you can feed yourself and you do not have to sleep on the streets, then that is a long way from the idea of someone coming to this country and being able to end up wealthy and comfortable at the end of his days. What used to be a powerful statement about the material possibilities in this nation has now become a mere wish for survival.
Some might say that the fact that the government has instituted systems to protect the poor is not a sign that the American Dream is dead; some might say that the fact that there are more poor people than rich people is not a sign that the American Dream has been shown to be illusory. However, one could ask how many people within a population should be able to accomplish this goal for it to be considered “American.” Also, with the greater gulf between the haves and the have-nots, how many people are still able to rise from poverty to wealth? That’s not the same thing as inheriting a position of wealth and using it to build still greater wealth – that is something that people were able to do fairly easily back in England, and elsewhere in the world. This idea that anyone – regardless of family pedigree, inheritance or background – could rise from small means to take on wealth is what made the American Dream unique. The establishment of a social safety net does not make the dream real; all it means is that American society has developed enough of a sense of personal responsibility so that people take care of their neediest – or they have developed a sense of self-preservation, aware that if enough people fall into poverty that there would be an uprising in the social order that could actually topple those on top of the social ladder from their positions.
This possibility is what has, in part, fueled the rise of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. His central issues have been the unfairness of the economy in a situation where there is such growing inequality and the untoward influence that Wall Street has come to bear on the political establishment. His point is that the economy has been manipulated to the point where the poor no longer have a chance to rise to wealth because of the way that the tax code has been reformed, particularly with breaks to the corporations. It is difficult to argue with those who would say that the American Dream has passed, because mobility seems to be shrinking at such a rapid pace.
Works Cited
King, Brandon. “The American Dream: Dead, Alive or on Hold?” Assigned course
reading.
