The American dream

The phrase “American Dream” refers to a set of promises and ambitions closely identified with national identity, particularly economic opportunity and prosperity, wealth and land ownership, and equal access to the “good life.” This concept has also been closely associated with American ideals of masculinity, and the notion of America as a land of opportunity has nurtured an enduring cultural ideal in which success—not only as an American, but also as a man—has been measured in predominantly economic terms. Furthermore, it has reinforced a race- and class-based ideal of manhood, for white men, through their domination of the nation's power structures, have been most able to define, pursue, and fulfill the terms of the American Dream.

The interdependent relationship between masculinity, American identity, and material success can be traced back to what the German sociologist Max Weber identified as the Puritan origins of American capitalism. Although the doctrines of the first Puritan colonies—and the vision of America as a religious utopia—were short-lived, the practical tenets of the Puritan lifestyle left an indelible stamp on conceptions of the American Dream. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Weber argued that, removed from their religious context, Puritan values of diligence and thrift contributed to a rationalized lifestyle that made capitalist development possible. Although women could enact these values within the private sphere, men involved in the public arenas of politics and the market gained material success through their demonstration of these qualities.

The Colonial Period

The explicit formulation of the American Dream began in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (written between 1771 and 1789), which has established him as the colonial era's archetypal self-made man, led Weber to identify him as the personification of the capitalist work ethic. Through his own example, Franklin promoted an organized and virtuous lifestyle as the best means to secure wealth in an expanding commercial economy. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur offered an agrarian counterpart: Touting the promise of American agrarian life, he suggested in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) that the availability of land in America promised the individual who worked hard the opportunity to become a “new man.” Configured as a product of character and self-determination, the American Dream of wealth and success thus became a defining aspiration for white American men.

The Nineteenth Century

If Franklin and Crèvecoeur embodied formulas by which economic success could be achieved, the market revolution, urbanization, and industrialization, provided many Americans in the nineteenth century with the conditions necessary for its fulfillment and prompted the emergence of a middle class that associated manliness with character and the achievement of success. The United States' rapidly expanding cities offered business and industry as paths to the American Dream, and Horatio Alger's stories of impoverished urban male characters rising to positions of affluence encouraged a belief in economic mobility, the myth of the self-made man, and the notion that hard work would assure business success. Meanwhile, western expansion reinforced the association between manhood, agrarianism, and the American Dream by bolstering ...