The American Dream: A Cultural History by Lawrence R. Samuel (review)

This wide-ranging, interesting, well-written book addresses a topic of perennial importance to Americans and to those in other countries who follow what goes on in the United States (i.e., a good chunk of the world). The book is full of intriguing observations and wonderful quotations from an array of cultural sources, but it offers no profound new ideas, no hypothesis-testing or forms of causal analysis, and no scholarly framework—which perhaps is not surprising for an author who is the founder of a firm “offering cultural insight to Fortune 500 organizations” (from the jacket). I certainly enjoyed reading The American Dream but I cannot claim to have learned a great deal from it. I will, however, mine it for quotations when I teach or write about U.S. political ideology.

The author, Lawrence Samuel, begins with the accurate observation that James Truslow Adams was the first to use the phrase “American Dream” in 1931 but that it has deep roots in U.S. ideals of equal opportunity, the self-made man [sic], upward mobility, and individual liberty. From that starting point, Samuel’s mission is to “fill that Grand Canyon-size chasm in our literary landscape” by “trac[ing] the narrative of the American Dream as expressed through popular culture” (p. 2). He does so by dividing the eight decades starting in 1931 into six periods—roughly, the anxious Depression and war years, the return-to-normal postwar era, the countercultural 1960s, the counterrevolutionary 1980s, the ambivalent 1990s, and finally the zigzagging 2000s (my characterizations, not his). For each period, he examines cultural expressions about home ownership, upward mobility, individualism, and religiosity, among other things. He discusses optimism and pessimism, racialized and gendered failures of the Dream, advertisements, and movies. The book sweeps across each period rapidly and lucidly and covers a lot of ground.

Although Samuel portrays the book as historical in the sense that the meaning and use of the American Dream has changed in important ways over his six periods, I see much more recurrence or circularity than genuine change. In each era, people aspire to upward mobility, and some but not all attain it. People work to buy homes (whether suburban ranch houses or urban condominiums), and some but not all succeed. Disadvantaged groups, particularly blacks and women, make some advances but remain disadvantaged. Optimism is almost drowned by anxiety but bobs to the surface again. In each era, advertisements reflect hopes and goals, and movies give us a distorted but not false image of ourselves.

The final paragraphs of each chapter (or pair of chapters) unintentionally echo one another: “the nation looked to the future with both confidence and trepidation, ushering in a new era in the history of the American Dream” (p. 41); “The American Dream . . . would become increasingly scrutinized in the years ahead, its very meaning questioned and considered suspect” (p. 71)—but (a decade later) “the American Dream Machine would again be churning out opportunity and optimism as new raw materials became available” (p. 103); “The myth was as powerful as ever, but the reality much different. . . . The nation was about to turn another corner, however, . . . a prime opportunity to yet again rethink and re-create the American Dream” (p. 135); in “a new century, however, the American Dream would take another major curve in its twisting, turning, roller-coaster ride” (p. 165); and, finally, as of 2010, “the Dream appeared to be as fragile a thing as it was in 1931 . . . , sensitive to the constantly shifting winds of economic, political, and social change. The future of the Dream is, as always, uncertain” (p. 195). I quote these chapter closings not only to highlight the somewhat formulaic quality of Samuel’s depiction of the six eras but also to suggest a deeper point that accords with his view. The American Dream is a genuinely protean image, although it is also foundational to American culture and self...