Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion over Four Centuries (review)

Pursuing the American Dream stands in a tradition of works that have attempted to capture the essence of American political culture, conspicuously including Louis Hartz's classic The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955), Rogers M. Smith's Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, 1997), and Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998). Hartz put Lockean liberalism at the heart of his analysis. Smith posits a never-ending conflict among "multiple traditions," particularly the principles of atomizing Lockean individualism, communitarian civic republicanism, and an exclusionary emphasis on ascriptive characteristics. Foner reads the American political past as a halting and sometimes contradictory effort to define and apply the concept of freedom.

Jillson bids to take his place in this distinguished company with his claim that the principal animating force of American history has been the pursuit of the "American Dream," a term that he rescues from potential vapidity by defining it as the aspiration for "a fair chance to succeed in open competition with fellow citizens for the good things of life" (xi). As the argument proceeds, the key word turns out to be "competition." Jillson's American dreamers are an invidious, relentlessly striving lot, familiar to readers of Tocqueville and Veblen, not to mention Hartz.¹

Jillson focuses on several discrete moments in the American past, beginning with the colonial era and advancing through the Revolutionary and Constitutional periods, the age of Jackson and the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Progressive era and the New Deal, the long liberal ascendancy of the post–World War II decades, and the resurgence of conservatism in the last quarter-century. In each of those epochs, he examines, in order, the social landscape as it appeared to contemporaries; the particular version of the Dream that they articulated; its embodiment in institutions, laws, and policy; and the fate of those denied full access to the Dream—especially blacks, women, and Native Americans.

This organizational scheme makes for an admirable synthesis of the copious literatures on social, intellectual, political, and minority history that have emerged in the last several decades. Unfortunately, it also yields a series of potted studies of the successive eras discussed, giving the general account something of the flavor of a textbook. Of the valuable information and cogent argument in this book, little of it will be unfamiliar to specialists.

Jillson cites Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, and Horatio Alger as authentic voices of the American Dream, as well as both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. His own ideological posture is somewhere between the last two, probably closer to Clinton, whom he likens to Lincoln and both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt as believers in Herbert Croly's famous advice in The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909) to employ the Hamiltonian means of an active state to secure the Jeffersonian ends of individual liberty and happiness. His chapter on the years from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson carries the subtitle "Opportunity to Entitlement," a development that he clearly disdains. The subtitle of the succeeding chapter, on Reagan and Clinton, is "Entitlement to Responsibility," a progression that he cheers, but with reservations about the extent to which widening gaps in wealth and income, lack of universal health care, and educational inequalities might today be jeopardizing the Dream that defines his America.