At a party a few years back I got into a disagreement with a rich man about the meaning of the American Dream.
The man, who had earned his fortune honestly, said he’d achieved the American Dream by becoming wealthy.
I told him that he needn’t have gotten rich, as the dream isn’t so much about riches as it was about having enough to enjoy your life and family and friends.
The discussion was pointless but it went on as these things did before Siri was around to squelch them. The other day I looked up “American Dream” in my Webster’s Unabridged and found that my rich friend and I were perhaps both right.
The dictionary’s second definition of the dream read, “a life of personal happiness and material comfort as traditionally sought by individuals in the U.S.,” dating the origin of the term to 1930-35. Interestingly, its first definition was, “the ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity traditionally held to be available to every American.”
As college-educated white guys, my friend and I had assumed our way right through the first definition and were onto debating how much moolah matched definition #2. A poor, Central American refugee eavesdropping on our conversation might have justifiably dumped the cheese dip over both our heads.
But on reconsidering the two dictionary definitions, our disagreement seemed perhaps inevitable. The term itself is ambiguous, if not contradictory. How can the same expression that describes noble, egalitarian ideals also apply to the more base concerns of material comfort and happiness?
A person dedicated to their own material comforts, after all, might blithely deny another person their freedom, equality or opportunity. I’m thinking southern plantation owners before the Civil War, or today, heads of corporations that pay workers less than living wages.
Can one person’s American Dream cancel out another’s? Is the idea of the American Dream at war with itself?
The confusion may be wrapped up in the history of the phrase. Historian James Truslow Adams is crediting with coining “American Dream” in his best-selling 1931 book “Epic of America.” He defined it as “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.”
But by 1938, sociologist Robert K. Merton redefined the term with emphasis on monetary success, claiming it was the central goal of American life. Another popular but preposterous interpretation of the dream’s fulfillment, apparently building on Adams, is that every generation would achieve more material success than the previous one.
My father was born in 1930, around the same time Adams was blending ideas of our nation and its namesake aspiration. Dad grew up poor in the Great Depression, shining shoes to help his family meet expenses. Dinner was sometimes wilted lettuce soup.
Like others of his generation, Dad would later say, “We were poor, but we didn’t know it because we didn’t have television. Everyone around us was in the same boat we were in.”
Dad didn’t talk much philosophy and I can’t remember him ever bringing up the American Dream. My mom liked to say, “In my lifetime I’ve had no money and I had money. Having money is better.”
After a career as a research librarian, Dad – who pinched and saved – died with a half-million dollars in the bank. Toward the end of his life, he wrote up an autobiographical statement as a favor to his granddaughter, who chose him as the subject of a school assignment to interview a successful person.
Dad wrote, “I guess I consider myself a success because I have achieved my goals and had some fun doing it.”
That’s more a philosophy than a dream, and it’s not bound to our nation or to any other, but it might be a better goal to work toward than the conflicting definitions of the American Dream.