REVIEW: The Interpretation of Dreams

Reconsidering a defining concept of national Identity

Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream by David Leonhardt. Random House, 2023. 492 pp., $32.00

The American Dream, like all living things, was dying from the moment it was born. The term has murky origins, but in our time it has come to denote a belief in the attainability of economic upward mobility. There is consensus that Pulitzer-Prize-winning author James Truslow Adams first popularized the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America. The publisher refused to let Adams use it in his title, arguing that no one would pay three dollars for a book on a dream. But Adams used the phrase dozens of times in the text. It soon became what we could call a meme, one that has been with us ever since. 

Significantly, The Epic of America was published in 1931—the very depths of the Great Depression. In his conclusion Adams wrote about the quest to sustain the American Dream: “Possibly the greatest of these struggles lies just ahead of us at this present time—not just a struggle of revolutionists against the established order, but of the ordinary man to hold fast to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ which were vouchsafed to us in the past in vision and on parchment.” As such a remark implies, Adams was concerned not only with economic deprivation but the ideological extremism it threatened to unleash. Indeed, in the years that followed it was a truism that fascism and communism threatened the American Dream. As an elite New Englander of his time and place—electorally speaking, the region was solidly Republican for much of his life—Adams espoused respectable opinions about self-reliance, thrift, and independence. Naturally, he was appalled by the New Deal.

Times change, even if underlying anxieties do not. In our day, informed opinion on the threat to the American Dream comes not from foreign dictators or economic collapse—though both hover—but from neoliberal policies that have hollowed out the welfare state and condoned, if not actively abetted, economic inequality. David Leonhardt’s new book is the latest in a line of such books. Its companions include Donald L. Barlett and James Steele’s America: What Went Wrong? (1992; updated in 2020), Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream? (2012), and Jacob Hackett and Paul Pierson’s American Amnesia (2016). The metanarrative these and others like them have established is clear and coherent: The American Dream was on life support when the New Deal came along. By empowering labor unions, creating a social safety net, and promoting a more civic-minded business community, a heterogeneous middle class grew in size and stability, turning upward mobility into a virtual birthright for generations of Americans. And for those traditionally left out of this dream—African Americans, for example—the obvious solution was to apply such measures to end their long national nightmares. 

This version of American Dream history is true as far as it goes. For the most part, Leonhardt hews close to the traditional (Democratic) line. There are two things that distinguish his account from previous ones, however. The first is that his narrative is enlivened by a series of skillfully etched—and at times counterintuitive—profiles of figures he regards as chiefly responsible for making and breaking the American Dream. The former include familiar figures like A. Philip Randolph and the latter Robert Bork (though his political origins on the political left is surprising), as well as more obscure heroes like Minneapolis Mayor Floyd Olson and computer programmer Grace Hopper (though she is rising through the ranks and may soon be canonized in our national gallery). 

The other notable aspect of this account is that Leonhardt acknowledges an alternate narrative in which the American Dream is not simply battered by rapacious capitalists but subject to rot from within. He notes that like all successful political orthodoxies, by the mid-1970s the welfare state suffered from elite capture of key constituencies and from growing inefficiencies. The problem was even more severe elsewhere in the West, as Eurosclerosis, a popular term of the time, indicates.

Leonhardt takes on other sacred cows as well. His circumspection (“I realize that some readers may be feeling a little uncomfortable”) about broaching the indelicate possibility that mass immigration may have damaged the health of the American Dream in terms of the wages and values of the working class would be comical were it not so aggravatingly indicative of elite obtuseness in facing issues that have—and likely will—result in electoral disasters. He tells the story of African American congresswoman Barbara Jordan, a sterling American Dream story in her own right, who headed a commission at the request of Bill Clinton to investigate the issue, only to see the president ignore its conclusion that the government needed to take the problem of illegal immigration more seriously. Leonhardt argues that the issue is not who comes (he’s inclusive) but how many, a distinction, he notes, that too often gets lost in such discussions.

These nuances notwithstanding, Leonhardt ends up on familiar ground. He calls for reinvigorated state action, a rebirth of labor unions, and a willingness to trust technical expertise in solving social problems. All reasonable.

And all largely irrelevant. The fact is that the fate of the American Dream largely rests outside the realm of government policy. On the one hand, there are domains in which the dream remains alive and well—why, after all, do so many people still want to come here, and why are so many newcomers from Africa and Asia starting small businesses in neighborhoods once occupied by Europeans from southern and western Europe? On the other hand, the American Dream, like all human constructs, is mortal. It is a downstream product of what some on the left call settler colonialism and imperial conquest. It is, most importantly, subject to the iron law of entropy. Which is not to say that the death of the American Dream is imminent, or that there’s nothing we should do to maintain its health. But acknowledging a measure of humility in our ability to technocratically engineer outcomes may sustain the patient.

This brings us to two ongoing problems with the American Dream as Leonhardt’s target audience understands it. The first lies in a toxic brew of entitlement and debt that has become a cancer on the body politic. The legitimacy of the American Dream has started to rest on its transformation into an American Reality: An aspiration has been conflated with a contract. But, as much as we might wish it would, life doesn’t work like that. To be sure, there needs to be some—even a lot—of agency in the conversion of hope into reality if the American Dream is going to sustain its mythic power. Ironically, one might note, the very intensity of complaints about the erosion of the American Dream show that the dream yet retains some of its mythic power. Still, the success and failure of the American Dream also rests in no small measure on factors like luck. This should offer an object lesson in modesty for those who succeed and reassurance for those who fail. One aspect of this luck, for better and worse, is that it has always mattered who your mommy or daddy are—both as a matter of the size of family savings accounts as well as factors that exist wholly outside economics, like love, discipline, and the mores of the communities families inhabit.

The other problem with the prevailing notion of the American Dream is that it’s too often defined primarily—or even solely—in economic terms. But that’s never been the only way the promise of American life has been understood. For the Puritans, for example, it was a matter of religious freedom—something many Americans have difficulty taking seriously because they have trouble taking the idea of religion itself seriously. For the Founding Fathers, it was political autonomy. 

But you don’t have to go that far back to encounter incantations of the American Dream that define the good life in alternative ways. This is something that James Truslow Adams was careful to do. “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain  to the fullest statute of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are,” he wrote, a sentiment that can be embraced by the progressive no less than the traditionalist stay-at-home mom.

There’s no question that Martin Luther King, Jr.—who invoked the American Dream countless times in speeches and writings, most famously in his 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial—cared about economics. He died while supporting a strike by sanitation workers seeking better wages, safety, and recognition of their union. One might note that the placard the picketers carried, “I am a Man,” suggested a vision of gender that would likely be denigrated by theorists if it wasn’t largely ignored as such. But King’s—Reverend King’s—vision of the American Dream was so much bigger and broader than that. If we’re going to keep hope alive, we need to stretch our imaginations.

Jim Cullen, who teaches History at the Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut, is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation. His most recent book is Bridge & Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century.