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Definition: American Dream |
American DreamNoun1. The widespread aspiration of Americans to live better than their parents did. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Crosswords: American Dream |
| Specialty definitions using "American Dream": reveille. (references) |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
What the American dream has become is a question under constant discussion.
The origin of the American dream stems from the departure in government and economics from the models of the Old World. This allowed unprecedented freedom, especially the possibility of dramatic upward social mobility. Additionally, from the Revolutionary War well into the later half of the nineteenth century, many of America's physical resources were unclaimed and often undiscovered, allowing the possibility of coming across a fortune through relatively little, but lucky investment in land or industry. The development of the Industrial Revolution defined the mineral and land wealth which was there in abundance, contrary to the environmental riches such as huge herds of bison and diversity of forests, for the original American Indians.
Many early Americans prospectors headed west of the Rocky Mountains to buy acres of cheap land in hopes of finding deposits of gold. The American dream was a driving factor not only in the Gold Rush of the mid to late 1800s, but also in the waves of immigration throughout that century and the following.
Impoverished western Europeans escaping the Irish potato famines in Ireland, the Highland clearances in Scotland and the aftermath of Napoleon in the rest of Europe came to America to escape a poor quality of life at home. They wanted to embrace the promise of financial security and constitutional freedom they had heard existed so widely in the United States.
Nearing the twentieth century, major industrialist personalities became the new model of the American dream, many beginning life in the humblest of conditions but later controlling enormous corporations and fortunes. Perhaps most notable here were the great American capitalists Andrew Carnegie and Nelson Rockefeller.
This acquisition of great wealth demonstrated that if you had talent, intelligence, and a willingness to work extremely hard you were guaranteed at least moderate success as a result.
The key difference here from the Old World societal structure is that the antiquated monarchies of Western Europe and their post-feudal economies actively oppressed the peasant class. They also required high levels of taxation which crippled development. America, however, was built by people who were consciously free of these constraints.
There was a hope for egalitarianism. Martin Luther King invoked the American Dream in what is perhaps his most famous speech:
In the 20th century, the American dream had its challenges. The Depression caused widespread hardship during the Twenties and Thirties, and was almost a reverse of the dream for those directly affected. Racial instability did not disappear, and in some parts of the country racial violence was almost commonplace. There was concern about the undemocratic campaign carried on against suspected Communists.
Since the end of World War II, young American families have sought to live in relative bourgeois comfort in the suburbs that they built up. The possibility of great wealth has remained more of a distant dream in the recent century, while the widely held goal of home ownership, financial security, and civil and international stability have come to take the place of the common American dream in modern times. This was aided as a vision by the apparent winning of the Cold War.
The basic capitalistic virtues of hard work, intelligence and independence had been seen as the means to achieving this 'final' incarnation of the American dream.
The 9/11 attacks in America have put all of these achievements in a new light, and international and domestic stability is undergoing an upheaval at the present time. The sleeper is restless, but the American dream has not yet become a nightmare.
A cynical view would say that the American dream was built on aggressive colonialism. The Civil War to promote Liberty could be seen to be undermined by the earlier displacement, dispossession and slaughter of the original inhabitants of the land: this amounts to genocide on a par with that which many immigrants came to these shores to escape. Some see parallels here with aspects of the Middle East situation today.
There is widespread criticism of America's aggressive military, economic and foreign policies, failure to ratify ecological and human rights treaties, and apparent breaches of human rights, internally, see McCarthyism and externally, in response to attacks on her territories. (See Camp X-Ray).
Some would link these alleged shortcomings to original problematic features of the expansion that produced and formed the country in the first place: possibly this could be extended to the problematic situations which the original pioneers were escaping in their home countries. Could we be seeing today the echoes of ancient conflicts and struggles which the American dream has failed to resolve?
History of the American dream
A time of plenty
The American dream today
Criticism of the American dream
Related Links:
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American dream."
| Domain | Usage | |
Screenplays | Nobody wants to see what's crawling under the rock of the American Dream. (Our Guys: Outrage at Glen Ridge; writing credit: Bernie Lefkowitz; Paul Brown) That's the American dream! (Halloween: Resurrection; writing credit: Debra Hill; John Carpenter) I got me a ranch house out in Sausalito, 25 acres, a couple of pigs, sex swing in the basement, this weird Vietnamese guy who just kind of hangs out - you know, the American Dream. (Saturday Night Live; writing credit: Doug Abeles; Leo Allen) | |
Lyrics | Voila! An American Dream. (American Dream; performing artist: The Dirt Band) In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream ("Born to Run"; performing artist: Bruce Springsteen) From the American dream (Nowhere To Go; performing artist: Melissa Etheridge) | |
Movie/TV Titles | Norman Rockwell's World... An American Dream (1972) The Great American Dream Machine (1971) An American Dream (1966) American Dream (1961) The American Dream (1998) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
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Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Thumbnail | Description & Credit | Thumbnail | Description & Credit |
 | The American dream.Credit: Library of Congress. |  | The American dream / Donato, Toronto Sun.Credit: Library of Congress. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Author | Date | Quotation |
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | 1963 | It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. (Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1914) |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
| Speaker | Term | Phrase(s) |
Richard Nixon | 1969-1974 | The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep. |
Ronald Reagan | 1981-1989 | As we work to make the American Dream real for all, we must also look to the condition of America's families. |
Bill Clinton | 1993-2001 | Martin Luther King's dream was the American Dream. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "a-a-a-c-d-e-e-i-m-m-n-r-r" | |
-2 letters: camaraderie. | |
-4 letters: cameraman, cameramen, remainder. | |
-5 letters: academia, acaridan, adamance, arcadian, creamier, demerara, dracaena, dreamier, endermic, maenadic, marinade, marinara, medicare, radiance, rearmice, recamier, remained, reminder, reremind. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)41 6D 65 72 69 63 61 6E 44 72 65 61 6D |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
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Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01000001 01101101 01100101 01110010 01101001 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01000100 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101101 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)A m e r i c a n   D r e a m |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0041 006D 0065 0072 0069 0063 0061 006E 0044 0072 0065 0061 006D |
Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)357971847569678023884716779 |
| 1. Definition 2. Crosswords 3. Usage: Modern 4. Usage: Commercial | 5. Images: Slideshow 6. Images: Photo Album 7. Quotations: Historic 8. Quotations: Speeches | 9. Expressions: Internet 10. Anagrams 11. Orthography 12. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
