Attitudes Toward The American Dream

The phrase, the American Dream is a national ethos of the United States and the idea that clutched many immigrants who came to the US at a deep emotional level. Having left their own countries means they left not only their friends and family, but everything that identifies who they are. However, whether or not they left their countries because of war, poverty or civil or religious persecution, they believed that in America, they could achieve a better quality of life if they work hard enough. It was their reason and motivation to move. I, as an another immigrant who explored many countries and settled in the US, can understand how they feel about the Dream. However, in the last decades, many statistics show that American attitudes toward this
It was after three hundred years of a gap since John Winthrop’s well known City Upon a Hill section of the sermon A Model of Christian Charity in 1630. During his sermon, Winthrop never mentioned the word “dream” to his fellow Puritans, however, his vision of the society, in which everyone would have a chance to prosper and gossip, settled into the minds of 19th and 20th century writers. Back to 1931, a historian, James Truslow Adams first used the word “the American Dream” in his book The Epic of America. Here, he stated that the American Dream is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement (214).” He continues, “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (215).” This suggests that the American Dream at this time was more than just achieving material prosperity, but instead, the goal of the Dream was to have happiness. As it can be seen in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson asserts his famous statement of people’s inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
According to The New York Times and CBS News Poll which was held at the time of the 2009 Great Recession, 75 percent said they have achieved or expect to achieve it in feature and 20 percent responded they had given up over reaching the Dream. They asked the same question in 2014 and they found that only 64 percent of the respondents believe in the American Dream and nearly 31 percent said they had given up over reaching the Dream. The polls show that over the 7 years, 10 percent of Americans lost faith in believing the American Dream indicating that it might be not just changing but fading away. The change of the definition is clearly shown in 2013 President Barack Obama’s speech about promoting the American Dream. During the speech, he specifically refers to the Dream as the success in homeownership and speech covers his vision for a housing system. Under this definition, the number of young people who are no longer believed that they can afford to have better lives than their parents are increasing which means the American Dream can be only possessed by fewer American people. 2015 Life Story Research supports this idea even further. According to this document, 39 percent of respondents with an income level of under $50,000 annual salary are not pursuing their dreams and 42 percent said they haven’t achieved it. However, the