Waking from the American Dream

George P. Elliott

Although he is quite suspicious of the term, George Elliott, professor of English at Syracuse University, here sets out to discover the meaning of "the American Dream."

Until six years ago, "The American Dream" was an expression I had used seldom if at all, and the only time I had inspected it more than casually was when I had tried to figure out why Mailer had named one of his novels An American Dream; but this inspection did not come to anything because I soon decided that that title had as little connection with its story as Why Are We In Vietnam? had with its; two lousy Mailer novels with spectacularly bad titles; forget them. As for Albee's play, The American Dream, the irony of the title is heavy, and the irony of the outwardly pretty but inwardly corrupt young man who is supposed to embody the dream is not just heavy, it is a lump.

Why do we Americans have to be so pompous and self‑conscious? Whatever the people of Uganda and China are up to, they are doing it without benefit of "The Ugandan Dream" or "The Chinese Dream" ; and "The Swiss Dream" evokes nothing so much as a big cake with a sugar Alp on top. Phrases like "100 per cent American," "the American Dream," "the American Way of Life" have always made me itchy; I avoid them.

However, in the fall after Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was talking with a former student who was then teaching lower division English to nurses and other paramedicals, and she observed that when she had been selecting some contemporary, "relevant" fiction to teach, she had found no novelists who were against the American Dream. However critical they were of America, they were for the Dream. That rocked me back on my heels. I knew she was talking of writers such as Baldwin, Ellison, Roth, Malamud, Bellow, and it had never occurred to me that they had any more use for the American Dream than I thought I had. Rags to riches? Horatio Alger? Who was she kidding? But I knew she was serious and very intelligent; I asked her what she meant. "You know," she answered, "the American Dream." But I didn't know. "America," she said, "Democracy and freedom. What America is all about. You know, Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream'." So I said oh yes, and we went on to something safer.

Recently I have been asking my friends what they thought was meant by "the American Dream." There was little agreement; some spoke of it in the past tense, most in the present; equality was mentioned, success, progress, the frontier, individualism, capitalism, the founding fathers. But on three things they agreed: none claimed to be very sure what it meant , they all touched on freedom of one sort or another, and they agreed that the Dream was important and affected the way lots of Americans behaved. I asked a carpenter friend what it meant, and he was so bothered by the question which he could not answer that he went around in a bar that evening asking people. A blind man said it meant everybody helping everybody. An old codger said, "Turn the clock back to 1923. For Christ's sake leave me alone." One said "Watergate"; another, "Make a pile." This much at least became clear to me: the Dream is amorphous enough and has enough ingredients in it to feed a host of fantasies. Perfectly self‑contradictory fantasies, too. In 1972, a poll indicated that the Americans who said they were most strongly opposed to McGovern's income distribution plans were not the middle classes or the rich but the very poor. Something for everybody: the rich can dream of equality without having to give up their money, and the poor would rather keep on dreaming that their ship will come in some day than accept a little hard cash right now. (630 W.)

(from: The Nation, November 16, 1974, pp. 491‑492.)