White picket fences. Green, manicured lawns. Children on bicycles.<\/p>\n
The \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d conjures images of a suburban ideal and elicits hope and optimism, especially for immigrants and for those fighting for democracy in their own countries. At the same time, entire segments of society have been denied equality, freedom and life. Even today, the promise of the American Dream for millions remains completely out of reach.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“There have always been contradictions in these expressions of what America is, so the American Dream is also going to be similarly conflicted,\u201d said Louis Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of U.S. Western History at UC Davis.<\/p>\n
The American Dream as both idea and ideal, for all its complications, has had an undeniably powerful role in shaping values and aspirations in the U.S. and far beyond its borders. We spoke with faculty and students in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis who represent a wealth of knowledge and perspectives that help us think about American society\u2019s past, present and continuing potential.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The birth of the American Dream<\/p>\n
In her 2018 book\u00a0Behold America<\/a>, University of London historian Sarah Churchwell traces the term \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d to at least as early as 1895. By the early 1900s, it was often shorthand for Americans\u2019 appreciation for new consumer goods, like furniture and clothing.<\/p>\n (Andrew Ling \/ Unsplash)<\/p>\n The U.S. has always been known as a highly commercial society, Warren said. Even as the 19th\u00a0century\u00a0Hudson River School<\/a> movement yielded landscape paintings reflecting the natural beauty of the land, businessmen bought land to cut down forests to sell as timber and to make way for commercial farms.<\/p>\n Popular culture has been grappling with this contradiction throughout the nation\u2019s young history. In F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, for example, the book\u2019s title character pursues his gilded version of the American Dream only to die without truly achieving what had always been a mirage.<\/p>\n \u201cFitzgerald was making a brilliant critique of that kind of thinking coming out of the 1920s just before Adams articulated his version of the American Dream,\u201d said Warren. \u201cFitzgerald says you will not transcend your history and it’s dangerous to try.\u201d<\/p>\n Troubled by the notion of a U.S. identity tied to consumerism, American novelist and historian James Truslow Adams redefined the American Dream in his 1931 book\u00a0The Epic of America.<\/a> In his vision, it was \u201ca dream of a 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n To me, the American Dream serves as an idealistic pursuit of building wealth through hard work. I truly want to believe that regardless of background, we can all succeed, and to an extent that\u2019s true. In modern times, I think the ideal is just that, an ideal that can bring hope or enforce structural barriers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Xavier Gonzalez, major in computer science and cinema & digital media<\/p>\n The American Dream has also been about resilience and survival.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Nicol\u00e1s Dosman, an associate professor of music in the College of Letters and Science, said that the one really authentic form of American music is based in African American traditions.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Jenkins Band\/Orphan Band (Harlem)” (1934), painting by Malvin Gray Johnson. (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library)<\/p>\n \u201cHaving your ancestors brought over to this country and brutalized and enslaved and turning it into something really beautiful with the musical forms that we now have,\u201d said Dosman. \u201cThat’s an American story that came from the African American experience.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n LGBTQ+ communities have also had to carve out their own spaces as they reenvisioned relationships and communities that don\u2019t necessarily contribute to the accumulation of wealth.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is something that people of various stripes aspire to and have like some investment in, whether or not they achieve it or not,\u201d said Beenash Jafri, associate professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at UC Davis. \u201cCertain strands of LGBTQ+ organizing have really put a lot of their efforts into same-sex marriage and inclusion in the military \u2014 essentially access to the American Dream. Why aspire to this kind of assimilation?\u201d<\/p>\n After World War II, said Traci Parker, an associate professor of history, the American Dream became tied to the nuclear family, owning a car and having a house in the suburbs.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn all honesty, it\u2019s a fa\u00e7ade,\u201d said Parker. \u201cIt\u2019s like you could buy your way into the American Dream.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Shopping for equal access to the American Dream\u00a0<\/p>\n Parker connects the idea of the American Dream with the rise of consumer capitalism beginning in the late 1800s. During that period, the young nation shifted from an economy based in agriculture and industrial labor to one dominated by corporations and consumer culture. Department stores came to define consumer culture starting in the late 19th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sears, Roebuck & Co. department store, Milwaukee, c. 1930s (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n Parker’s book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement (UNC Press, 2019<\/a>), highlights department stores as the epicenter of a modern Black middle class, where both work and consumerism were battlegrounds for civil rights.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you walked into a department store you felt fancy,\u201d said Parker. \u201cYou felt like you were somebody, and then you had sales workers who treated you like you were somebody. For white Americans it was sort of a reaffirmation of being middle class. If you were moving up from the white working class, that was part of your process of becoming middle class.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The American Dream, for us, is humble, the result of the courage of leaving everything behind for the chance at something better. It is not about taking \u2014 it\u2019s about giving, about providing themselves and their children with the opportunity for a life of choice.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2014 Melanie Diaz, major in medicinal chemistry and drug design<\/p>\n Not all Americans could have that experience. Department store managers worried that any perception of racial equality, even the noticeable presence of African Americans in the store, would upset the experience of white shoppers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many stores\u00a0strictly controlled how African Americans took part,<\/a> both as shoppers and as workers. They were not allowed to try on clothes or return purchases. They were denied jobs in white-collar staff positions in sales, administration and management. Some stores wouldn\u2019t even serve Black shoppers at a time when\u00a0Black codes and Jim Crow laws<\/a> enforced segregation.<\/p>\n It is no surprise, said Parker, that some of the most successful tactics during the Civil Rights Movement were boycotts that threatened the foundations of consumer capitalism. The\u00a0Montgomery Bus Boycott,<\/a> which began in 1955 after the arrest of Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, lasted 13 months and resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling segregation on public buses unconstitutional.\u00a0<\/p>\n African American man working in a Sears department store, 1979. (T.J. O’Halloran \/ Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection)<\/p>\n \u201cThe bus boycott became this very large expansive movement that captivated an entire community,\u201d said Parker. \u201cAfrican Americans were demanding that they be treated as first-class citizens in a marketplace that was reliant on their dollars, a marketplace in which, frankly, a lot of businesses would not succeed if it wasn’t for African American shoppers and African American workers.\u201d<\/p>\n These successes made it possible for Black workers to access good jobs in sales and management in department stores.\u00a0<\/p>\n This was short-lived. Industry wide, the shopping experience shifted from customer service. Big-box and discount stores like K-Mart and Walmart could pay lower wages to unskilled workers while putting more responsibility onto customers.<\/p>\n \u201cI think for a lot of African Americans, the American Dream has been about the battle to achieve the American Dream, to be considered a full citizen, a first-class citizen, in a way that has long been denied to them and that still seems to be an ongoing struggle,\u201d said Parker.\u00a0<\/p>\n This land is my land \u2014 not your land\u00a0<\/p>\n The U.S. was established on land that had been home to those now known as Native Americans for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of the first Europeans. North American settlers and early U.S. leaders claimed the land and turned it into a commodity \u2014 something to be owned, farmed, drilled, bought, sold and rented.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOften the thing at the heart of the American Dream is really owning property,\u201d said Jafri.<\/p>\n She explained that with the Dawes Act of 1887, tribal lands were turned into individual allotments as Indigenous people were encouraged to assimilate and embrace agriculture, disrupting Indigenous relationships to land.\u00a0<\/p>\n Only those who accepted the division of lands were able to become U.S. citizens.\u00a0According to the National Park Service<\/a>, this resulted in the government taking more than 90 million acres of tribal land from Native Americans and selling it to non-native U.S. citizens.\u00a0<\/p>\n The American Dream should celebrate and welcome people who sacrifice everything in search for a better tomorrow for either themselves or their kin. It should push away from the idea that they have to provide something in order to be deemed \u2018good.\u2019 It should celebrate the culture that many benefit from and stop asking what they bring to the table when they are the ones who built it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2014 Emily Ayala, major in political science and Chicana\/o studies<\/p>\n Demonstrators at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. (By Warren K. Leffler. Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd of Unseen Histories<\/a> via Unsplash)<\/p>\n Property ownership continued to be out of reach for entire generations of Americans. Mortgage lenders, with compliance by government policies, would prevent ancestors of formerly enslaved Americans from buying certain property, denying them access to home ownership and, ultimately, the American Dream through\u00a0redlining<\/a>. Women, too, had limited access to mortgages, a form of discrimination that continued until the\u00a0Equal Credit Opportunity Act<\/a> made it illegal in 1974.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re necessarily immune to being caught up in that American Dream, even though it also has historically been exclusionary,\u201d said Jafri. \u201cEven the idea of the suburban neighborhood is exclusive. It\u2019s about keeping certain undesirables out.\u201d<\/p>\n While outright discrimination is illegal today, the high costs of property keep a new generation of Americans from owning homes. The average\u00a0price of a home<\/a> spiked from under $300,000 in 2012 to over $500,000 in in 2022. This is especially true in California, where the\u00a0median home price recently topped more than $900,000 compared to a national average of about $400,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n The American Dream of a better future\u00a0<\/p>\n Baked into the American Dream is the idea of \u201cpulling yourself up by your bootstraps” \u2014 that if you work hard enough and do what you’re supposed to do, success is in reach. In the U.S., this might translate to earning more money, owning property, getting a coveted position at work and, possibly, partnering up and starting a family.<\/p>\n Immigration officers examine documents and immigrants at Ellis Island Immigration Station in the final discharge area, 1902. (Library of Congress)<\/p>\n No matter how someone defines success, however, Dosman said one thing everyone with a stake in the American Dream can agree on is: \u201cWhether you\u2019re right, center, left \u2014 everybody wants their children to have a better life than they did.\u201d<\/p>\n But is that possible? By some measures, it isn’t.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s no sign of any kind of magic to American society in terms of providing social mobility,\u201d said Gregory Clark, a distinguished professor emeritus of economics.<\/p>\n Clark’s book The Son Also Rises (Princeton, 2014<\/a>) contains his first analysis of mobility in the U.S. It includes multiple generations of white Americans dating back to the nation\u2019s founding. Since then, Clark has expanded this work to\u00a0Britain<\/a> and Denmark with measures of social status that include occupation, years of education and family income. In every case, he has found no evidence of lasting social mobility.<\/p>\n Sometimes, of course, the unexpected happens.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are families that move from rags to riches across a few generations, and those that move from riches to rags,\u201d said Clark. \u201cBut interestingly there is nothing that systematically predicts such movements. God, seemingly, just likes to add a bit of randomness to social life.\u201d<\/p>\n A financial disaster can drive a family into extreme need that lasts generations. A sudden lotto win or something like starting in tech at the right time can lead to almost instant wealth.<\/p>\n For immigrants who arrive in the U.S. from low-income countries, social mobility can be instant. Wages across the board in the U.S. and other high-income countries are much higher even than in upper middle-income countries. According to the\u00a0OECD<\/a>, in 2023 average wages in the U.S. were roughly $80,000 compared to just over $20,000 in Mexico.\u00a0<\/p>\n The American dream is a promise for greater opportunities in the face of effort and sacrifice. The promise drives masses of people to the United States year in and year out because of this expectation of opportunity and the desire to advance one’s economic status. This dream however is currently under threat as the cost of living outpaces wages and the assaults on undocumented peoples throughout the nation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2014 Brandon Gonzalez Arenas, major in political science and Chicana\/o studies<\/p>\n Clark\u2019s analysis stretching back to the nation\u2019s founding may not capture the impact of government safety net programs that, since the 1930s, have sought to support a minimum standard of living.<\/p>\n First printing of food stamps, Washington, D.C., April 20, 1939. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing)<\/p>\n The first safety net program<\/a> in the U.S. was part of President Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal legislation that provided support during the Great Depression. During the 1960s, safety nets expanded greatly starting with\u00a0War on Poverty<\/a> legislation passed by President Lyndon Johnson, with new or expanded programs including Medicare, Medicaid, the Food Stamps Program, Head Start and others.<\/p>\n Generations of economists have meticulously documented the impacts of these programs since they were established. For programs that benefit children, these impacts include future education, income and even their weight at birth, which on its own can predict how a child will do in later life.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of these programs from the war on poverty were meant to help level the playing field,\u201d said Marianne Bitler, professor and chair of economics at UC Davis and a research affiliate of the\u00a0UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research<\/a>. \u201cThey improve earnings and other outcomes that we think are important.\u201d<\/p>\n Bitler, an expert on safety net programs in the U.S., has found that the\u00a0Women, Infants and Children (WIC)<\/a> program significantly improves infant birthweights<\/a>, particularly among African-American families.<\/p>\n WIC provides support to low-income women who are pregnant, new mothers and children up to age 5. It supplies healthy foods, personalized nutrition education, breastfeeding support and service referrals. While administered by state agencies,\u00a0WIC is completely funded by the federal government<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI am quite confident based on my own work and that of others that WIC during pregnancy is good for kids,\u201d said Bitler.<\/p>\n According to the USDA, in 2020\u00a0eligibility for WIC<\/a> included 4.8 million white non-Hispanic people, 4 million Hispanic\/Latino people, 2.6 million Black-only non-Hispanic people, and 1 million non-Hispanic people of other or multiple races.<\/p>\n Some of her recent preliminary findings show that WIC participation also reduces the likelihood someone will use Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits in the future, which could mean they do better financially as adults and won\u2019t need more help.\u00a0<\/p>\n Resilience in pursuit of the American Dream\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n For many immigrants, the American Dream isn\u2019t just about economics.<\/p>\n “Most people have come to the United States of America to have a better life,\u201d Dosman said. \u201cFor some, that’s economic prosperity. For some, that’s having your white picket fence, your house that you own, your dog and your 2.5 children that you see on TV. For others, it\u2019s just being able to survive and knowing that your children are going to be safe and away from violence.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the\u00a0United Nations<\/a>, more than 1 million people were uprooted from their homes in Central America by the end of 2022 due to violence, insecurity and persecution. Gang violence, political turmoil, threats, extortion, persecution and sexual violence have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes in search of safety and a better life.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s a safety element to the American Dream that’s really important for people escaping authoritarian regimes,\u201d said Ariana Valle, an assistant professor of sociology. \u201cThinking about all the interviews I’ve done in different places, what resonates for me right now is people who talked about the dream of being able to move about in their communities \u2014 having physical mobility \u2014 and not having to live in fear.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For me, the American Dream is my parents working night after night in a country they didn’t grow up in so I could one day live without fear of survival. By earning a degree, I’m not just fulfilling a dream, I’m rewriting the future for my siblings and the generations after. That’s the kind of freedom my family came here for.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2014 Kyhara Crespin, major is design, minor in computer science<\/p>\n Valle, a faculty affiliate of the\u00a0UC Davis Global Migration Center<\/a>, has conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 200\u00a0Latinos<\/a>, including immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants as well as Puerto Ricans who are native-born U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)<\/p>\n Latinos have been particularly affected by recent\u00a0immigration raids<\/a>,\u00a0mass deportations and detentions<\/a> even for people with no history of crime and court-affirmed legal residency status.<\/p>\n Even U.S. citizens have been detained. In June, federal agents in Montebello, California detained a native-born U.S. citizen who told agents his\u00a0passport was in his pocket<\/a>. In April, a native-born U.S. citizen in Arizona, reported to be illiterate and with a learning disability, was held by immigration officials and\u00a0mistakenly signed<\/a> an affidavit admitting he had entered the U.S. illegally. In May, a U.S. citizen born in Florida was detained by immigration officials in spite of having his\u00a0Real ID<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cLooking Latino means you must be undocumented,\u201d said Valle. \u201cSo not only are you perceived as a foreigner, but you’re assumed to be undocumented, and so folks understand that\u2019s how they\u2019re perceived. They\u2019re anticipating racial profiling and are walking around with their passports because they understand that they’re part of the \u2018suspected undocumented\u2019 category.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, Valle said that\u00a0communities in Los Angeles<\/a> are showing incredible resilience by using whatever agency is available to them to respond. A lot of that response is in the form of peaceful protest and free expression. People are also coming together to support families affected by federal enforcement actions.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there’s a lot of inspiration and hope in the ways in which people are coming together,\u201d said Valle, “and I would say it\u2019s not only Latino members of those communities coming together; this moment is generating a lot of cross-racial solidarity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Do we need a new American Dream?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n For all its contradictions, the American Dream has always been a way to think about what this nation and its people can be. As an idea, it has been debated and criticized, especially among the younger generation of activists who would lead the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and among broader student movements.<\/p>\n Demonstrators holding a sign reading “We who believe in freedom cannot rest,” a quote by Ella Baker, in June 2020. (Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash)<\/p>\n \u201cThey were rejecting this idea of the American Dream as something that was government-driven, that was business- and corporate-driven,\u201d said Parker. \u201cThey thought that these were ideas no one could really live up to, and that the people who were trying to live up to them were actually not truly happy.\u201d<\/p>\n The 1960s saw a new version of the American Dream take root in California. Warren traces the \u201cCalifornia Dream<\/a>\u201d to the 1965 song \u201cCalifornia Dreamin\u2019\u201d by The Mamas & The Papas. The California Dream reimagined the American Dream in part by incorporating Cold War-era social values that included the importance of leisure, environmental protection and healthy living.<\/p>\n \u201cSome would say it’s the American Dream only better,\u201d said Warren. \u201cIf America says \u2018dream,\u2019 California says \u2018dream bigger.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Due to the inability for so many Americans to realize the dream or even have access to some semblance of it, Jafri said we may need a new ideal.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that the American Dream or some different version of it is a thing that I would want to pin my hopes on,\u201d said Jafri. \u201cThinking about alternatives and noticing how people are helping each other and supporting one another in different types of ways, that\u2019s the thing that makes me feel a little hopeful.”<\/p>\n