Title: The American Dream | AMERICAN HERITAGE
Headings: The American Dream
NOW AND THEN
The American Dream
Anthony Brandt
April/May 1981
We hope you enjoyed this essay.

Content: As early as 1938 the sociologist Robert K. Merton referred to the American Dream in an important essay called “Social Structure and Anomie”; Merton identified the Dream not with Adams’ vague phrases about “a better, richer, happier life” but with success, specifically monetary success, and indicated that this was the principal goal of American culture. Quite a few other scholars subsequently adopted and elaborated on this interpretation, equating the American Dream with the achievement of the sort of success dramatized in the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches” stories and in the enormous body of how-to-succeed literature produced in America during the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth—a literature which, of course, still flourishes. But some scholars took another tack, not so much disagreeing with Merton’s interpretation as simply ignoring it. To them the Dream was essentially a dream of a better society; it was Utopian in nature and belonged to all those dreamers and reformers, from Sir Thomas More on down, for whom America was the last, best hope of mankind, a place not for the achievement of individual success but for the realization of a perfect society. This is the tack taken by Stewart Holbrook in his book Dreamers of the American Dream, published in 1957, which is largely about American reform movements; by Vernon L. Parrington, Jr., in American Dreams, which is about nineteenth-century Utopian communities; and by men like Archibald MacLeish, with their grand sense of the meaning and purpose of America. Unlike the people of other nations, said MacLeish, “We not only have a national purpose, we have a national purpose of such aspiration, such potentiality, such power of hope that we refer to it—or used to—as the American Dream.”