University of Central Florida STARS HIM 1990-2015 2013 A case study of national identity: an analysis of the american dream in politics and literature Sarah Marie Horning University of Central Florida Part of the Political Science Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.edu/honorstheses1990-2015 University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.edu This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIM 1990-2015 by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact STARS@ucf. Recommended Citation Horning, Sarah Marie, "A case study of national identity: an analysis of the american dream in politics and literature" (2013).edu/honorstheses1990-2015/1407 A CASE STUDY OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: AN ANALYSIS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM IN POLITICS AND LITERATURE by SARAH-MARIE D.
HORNING A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Honors in the Major Program in Political Science in the College of Sciences and in the Burnett Honors College at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Spring Term 2013 Thesis Chair: Dr. David Houghton i ABSTRACT The American Dream has been the inspiration of many political speeches, political writings, and works of literature throughout American history. Most recently, it has inspired political groups like the Center for the New American Dream and academic groups like the Xavier University Center for the Study of the American Dream. As of late, the notion of the American Dream has begun to crop up more often than not in main stream political discourse, especially surrounding the topic of immigration with the aptly named Dream Act.
Why has the American Dream drawn this new attention and inquiry? Why and how is it important to American Political thought? What does it mean? Why does it endure? As a complex issue of American culture, this thesis will use disparate methods of analysis to form answers to these questions. The American Dream is often referred to as our national myth. It is comprised of the many ideals and narratives which undergird American politics and culture. Through examination of literary works of fiction and of political texts, this research will examine the meaning and the history of the American Dream.
Then, using secondary survey data, this research will examine the implications and state of the American Dream. Finally, to answer the question of why the American Dream endures, this research will employ elements of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to argue that the Dream works as a cycle of American political thought. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. 4 DEFINING THE AMERICAN DREAM.
7 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE AS A SOURCE FOR DREAM VALUES. 12 AMERICAN DREAM POLITICS AND MARXIST ECONOMICS. 20 UNDERSTANDING THE DREAM THROUGH THE BOOM/BUST CYCLE. 25 MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE DREAM.
30 THE DREAM IN LITERATURE: A MARXIST PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITIQUE. 39 FUTURE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN DREAM. 41 iii LIST OF TABLES Table 1 “Goals in Life”. 11 Table 2 “American Dream is Dependent Mostly Upon Hard Work”.
13 Table 3 “America is Still the Standard of Success”. 15 Table 4 “American Dream Impossible for Most?”. 21 Table 5 “Do you think the United States Benefits from having a Class of Rich People, or Not?”. 24 Table 6 “All in all, if you had your choice, would you want to be rich or not?”.28 Table 7 “Success Determined by Forces Outside of Our Control.
43 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 "Temperance". 17 v “The Americas as a dream: a continent that Columbus stumbled across with a mythical map in his hands on his way to Cathay, the Spice Islands and the Orient. This unexpected landfall was initially transformed into the European script of El Dorado, a city on the hill, a virgin land, a new world: an imaginary construct that responded to the desires and fears (gold and cannibals) of Europe. So, modernity is the product of an imaginary map.” –Ian Chambers INTRODUCTION Called “the idea that shaped a nation,” the American Dream has become an increasingly important concept in American politics as it is begins to break out of the “musty domain of print culture” (Cullen 5).
Roughly, it is the idea that regardless of one’s origins, Americans have the freedom and the opportunity to achieve their goals, be they material, social, political, or spiritual. Brought to the attention of the mass media in part by social movements like the Occupy and Tea Party movements which, representing partisan extremes, espouse that each has discovered the true American Dream, the concept has slowly worked its way into the media’s sphere of interest “where it is enshrined as our national motto” (Cullen 5).The American Dream has been evoked by activists, artists, authors, scholars, leaders, politicians, and playwrights. Currently, the American Dream is being fought over by 1 political parties like a single piece of candy in a crowded schoolroom. This battle for meaning is essential, though, because the ambiguity gives the Dream its longevity.
After all, it “would have no drama or mystique if it were a self- evident falsehood or a scientifically demonstrable principle” (Cullen 7). The Dream embodies our national myth, motto, ideals, and our spirit. The Dream is traceable through American history long before the term was ever used. In many instances, the American Dream is viewed as America’s unifying theme, as it was borne out of one of our darkest hours during the Great Depression.
In the midst of fear, instability, and regret, Americans of the Great Depression were desperately in need of a hard look at what they would define as the nation’s values; these were destined to be abstractions since it was the chase for material wealth and the boom of the Jazz Age which had led to the unfathomable bust and fraud of the Depression in the first place. Despite the challenging circumstances which gave birth to the Dream, it is important to note that the concept of an American Dream has survived various challenges to its validity—economic crises, racial tensions, income inequalities, and most recently, ideological polarization, as each party begins to struggle for rights to co-opt the narrative as its own. Specifically, Jennifer Hoschild argues “that the American dream is being threatened by Americans’ racial antagonism” (xviii) while Mark Davis argues that the capitalist notions at work behind the Dream hold the American working class “prisoner.” The concept has fueled many a political debate, but it gains primary significance as the cornerstone of American national identity. At the Xavier University Center 2 for the Study of the American Dream, scholars ardently defend the significance of the Dream to American politics: To ask why it is important to study the American Dream is to ask why America, itself, is important.
The American Dream defines our aspirations; .The Center’s mission is to study the history of the American Dream, to examine and report on the present state of the American Dream, and to identify trends and analyze shifts in the future evolution of the American Dream.) Xavier’s argument for the centrality of the Dream is far from unfounded. The Dream provides a stream of political and cultural discourse many fathoms deep. In his analysis of trends found in Presidential addresses, for example, Elvin Lim observes that the American Dream is an increasingly important concept to American politics as the occurrence of the term has increased drastically since 1964 (335). The American Dream is also politically significant as it provides a convenient guide for debates over the state of American national identity.
In his 2004 book Who Are We?, Samuel Huntington argues that America is suffering an identity crisis: “Debates over national identity are a pervasive characteristic of our time. Almost everywhere people have questioned, reconsidered, and redefined what they have in common and what distinguishes them from other people: Who are we? Where do we belong?” (12). While the American struggle for national identity is a significant political discourse, it is not unique to “our 3 time” (whatever that may be), nor is it a fatalistic indicator that America is in crisis as Huntington later argues. Many generations have had to grapple with establishing a sense of identity, as we have transitioned from British subjects to colonists to state citizens to finally see ourselves, in varying degrees of intensity, as Americans.
The Dream is a particularly important home for political discourse since it acts in many ways as America’s “unifying theme.” Imbued with a sense of community, the Dream represents a view of America’s national solidarity rather than as a fragmented body of confederated states, races, ethnicities, cultures, communities, and political partisans. While there has been a great deal of research which employs the American Dream, as Stanley Tracktenburg observes, “One of the characteristic difficulties in identifying the American Dream is that it hasn’t stood still long enough” (227). Many authors who seek to define or analyze the Dream either deconstruct it, using compartmentalized components to dismantle and understand the Dream, while others situate the Dream within an already established political discourse (such as class warfare in Davis’s text or racism in Hochschild’s) and use it as a guide rope out of the abyss. Similarly, I seek to work my way through the labyrinthine Dream in an effort less to trace or define the American Dream than to anatomize it.
Hypothesis My goal is to show that while the American Dream is often associated with material objectives (i., the goal of homeownership), there is a 4 psychological element to the dream which cyclically validates the pursuit in spite of the materialistic disillusionment we experience in times of economic crisis. In his book Prisoners of the American Dream, self described Marxist Mike Davis argues that the lure of capitalism repeatedly draws generations of Americans toward a fallacious promise of economic opportunity in order to subjugate the American working class. His analysis of “why the American working class is different” seeks to understand why America lacks the socialistic class consciousness of other nations. He finds that the answer lies at “the very structure of American culture—the lack of feudal class struggles, the hegemony of a Lockean world-view, the safety-valve of the frontier, and so on” (6).
This thesis seeks in part to build on, and to refute, this Marxist argument. Where Davis argues in favor of class warfare, which he believes is being stymied by the American Dream, I argue that the belief in, and existence of, upward mobility does not imprison the American working class, but liberates it. The definition of the American dream founded on opportunity and upward mobility endures because it represents the Dream as a cycle of American consciousness to which there is no ultimate end. I would like, however, to build on an argument which Davis makes about the economic based cultural environment in America.
Davis writes that “[e]ach major cycle of class struggle, economic crisis, and social restructuring in American history has finally been resolved through epochal tests of strength between capital and labor” (7). I argue that the American Dream can be traced along this same “major cycle of class struggle,” which Davis discusses as being 5 fueled by the Marxist progression. Davis writes that the “democratic revolution had been left ‘unfinished’” as these cycles which, by the Marxist model, should result in a revolt of the underclass, are continually thwarted by “same malign ‘American Dream’” (7, 314). This fusion of economic motives and psychological impact makes the American Dream an important model for understanding political behavior.
As the XavierCenter observes, the American Dream allows us “to understand the aspirations and values likely to directly current and future economic, political, and cultural decisions” (sic). While this thesis seeks to discover what characteristics comprise and motivate belief or disbelief in the American Dream, it will ultimately draw conclusions concerning the influence the American Dream has on social and political behavior. To do this, I will use works of literature, as the Dream is often constructed as a theme of literary works such as F.