American Dream (ethos)
The American Dream is an ethos in the United States characterized by the belief that everyone, regardless of their background, can achieve prosperity and success through hard work and determination. Originating from the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, it emphasizes the pursuit of happiness and upward social mobility. While historically linked to homeownership and the notion of "sweat equity," the American Dream has evolved over generations, reflecting cultural and economic shifts.
Notable influences on this concept include literary figures such as Horatio Alger Jr., whose rags-to-riches tales encapsulated the dream of individual success. Despite its optimistic roots, the American Dream has faced scrutiny, especially during economic downturns like the Great Depression and the 2007 financial crisis, which challenged its viability. Recent surveys indicate a decline in belief that homeownership is integral to the American Dream, with many now viewing renting as a viable path to financial stability.
As of the 2020s, discussions surrounding the American Dream highlight barriers to achieving it, such as rising home prices and income mobility challenges. While many still see homeownership as a key marker of success, the evolving definition of the American Dream continues to provoke debate regarding its accessibility and relevance in contemporary society.
American Dream (ethos)
The American Dream is a set of ideals stating that in the United States, freedom includes opportunities to obtain prosperity, success, and upward social mobility through hard work no matter an individual’s racial, religious, or economic background. Scholars suggest that the American Dream is delineated by every generation within the context of cultural changes and economic boom and bust cycles. However, many observers have questioned the ongoing viability of the American Dream or whether the concept was ever realistic in the first place.
Background
Even before the founding of the United States, some European settlers viewed America as a land of great opportunity, particularly in terms of religious and economic freedom. However, the core tenets of the American Dream truly began to take shape with the American Revolution; the Declaration of Independence contains the core concepts of it in the statement that “all men are created equal . . . with certain inalienable Rights [including] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Subsequent generations have redefined this ethos within evolving cultural and economic constructs.
French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), in his Democracy in America (1835), observed how even with the negative impact of slavery, the American standard of living seemed to improve with the Industrial Revolution, Western expansion, and Jacksonian democracy. He remarked on the habit of Americans to be independent stand-alone citizens who believed they held their individual destiny in their own hands. Sweat equity is an important historic element of the American Dream—meaning an individual’s contribution to an endeavor (be it education, business, community, or homeownership) often came from labor rather than from financial capital.
Owning a home, and possibly land as well, became a foundational aspect of the American Dream from early in the country's history. This in turn affected government policy as well as the aspirations of individuals. In 1850, the Donation Land Act promoted homestead settlements in the Oregon Territory by making tracts of 320 acres available to unmarried White claimants who were at least eighteen years old or 640 acres available to married couples with the assumption that they would develop the land. This was one of the first instances when the government offered married women opportunities to own property in their own names. After the 1854 cutoff date, the remaining designated tracts were no longer free, but were sold for a nominal fee. In 1862, the Homestead Act allowed anyone who had not fought against the United States and who was over twenty-one years of age or a head of family (including women and former enslaved people) to apply for a federal land grant. The strong association between owning a home and generally achieving success and respect would remain powerful in American culture. In a 1986 survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal, 78 percent of Americans said they considered homeownership emblematic of the American Dream.
The emerging concept of the American Dream was also influenced by (and reflected in) popular culture, including literature that dramatized the potential for Americans to rise to success regardless of their background. For example, Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–99) wrote rags-to-riches stories beginning with Ragged Dick, or, The Street Life in New York (1867). Alger’s formulaic stories generally featured poor boys who garnered sensational success with hard work, thrift, and resisting temptation. Other noted authors, such as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, offered more complex takes on the subject in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their works often document contemporary views on elements of the American Dream like individualism and prosperity, but in many cases can also be interpreted as critiques of the ethos itself.
Journalist Walter Lippman used the term "American Dream" itself in his book Drift and Mastery (1914), in which he urged Americans to find a new vision for the twentieth century to combat perceived malaise in American politics. However, it was James Truslow Adams who popularized the term in his book The Epic of America (1931), to describe the vision of building a good life based on one’s own merits without being limited by unjust caste or custom. Within the context of the Great Depression, the American Dream became a beacon of enduring optimism that despite great adversity, Americans individually and collectively could not only overcome, but prosper.
Twenty-First Century Perspectives
The financial crisis in the United States that started in 2007 revealed a parallel housing crisis resulting from the large number of homeowners who bought subprime mortgages to finance home purchases. These adjustable loans carried higher interest rates than regular long-term mortgages, and when rates ballooned, homeowners found that they were unable to afford the monthly mortgage payments and became subject to foreclosure. The American Dream related to homeownership became the subject of governmental hearings for maintaining homeland security. Following the recession, the percentage of people who considered homeownership an integral part of the American Dream declined, according to a poll by the University of Virginia; many of those who had been foreclosed on were not eager to reenter the housing market and preferred to rent. According to a 2014 survey by the MacArthur Foundation, nearly half of Americans no longer believed that buying a home was a sound investment, and a majority of respondents said that they believed that renters were just as likely to be financially successful as homeowners. This shift demonstrated that the public conception of what constitutes the American Dream may change over time.
Still, questions around the American Dream and its ability to be achieved continued into the 2020s when soaring home prices amid record low inventory, coupled with rising inflation, made homeownership much harder to achieve. A 2022 survey revealed that nearly 75 percent of those polled believed homeownership was the highest gauge of prosperity, and thus the greatest indicator of achieving the American Dream. Moreover, research showed that the American Dream was becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. One measure by which this is determined is by upward income mobility, or the percentage of people who outearn their parents. Some studies have found that only 50 percent of adults born in 1980 earned more money than their parents in the early twenty-first century.
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