Perhaps because they were making so much money out of it, Americans were slow to notice something peculiar about the American dream, and potentially divisive. The ideal of living \u201cunhampered,\u201d\u009d as Adams put it, by the barriers to social mobility erected in other countries is meaningful most of all to those familiar with other countries. The American dream is more evident to elites (including well-traveled historians like Adams) and to immigrants than it is to others. It is cosmopolitanism masquerading as American exceptionalism. When the billionaire Peter Peterson announced this year that he would join an initiative launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and use at least half his wealth for philanthropy, he referred to himself as \u201cthe son of poor Greek immigrants who has certainly lived the American dream.\u201d\u009d Paradoxically, it is Peterson\u2019s Greekness rather than his Americanness that gives him the bona fides to pronounce on the subject.<\/p>\n
Optimism in the face of hardship is, of course, one of the glories of America\u2019s immigrant history. A 75-minute bus commute to a job at Wal-Mart, which looks like wage-slavery to the son of a unionized industrial worker, might be a dream come true for an immigrant from a poor country, or even for that immigrant\u2019s son. So it should not surprise us that polling results released by Xavier University last winter showed new immigrants to be among the biggest believers in the American dream. But it ought to worry us more than it does that middle-aged Midwestern white women, according to Xavier, are among the most skeptical about it. Confronted with the economy we are now living through, such people are unlikely to be comforted by assurances that their circumstances beat those of mid-20th-century Greece.<\/p>\n
Most of the time we do not realize that what we are dreaming is the American dream, any more than we realize that what we are speaking is prose. World travelers, politicians and self-made men are not wrong to see the promise of American life as a stirring and romantic tale. To the median, native-born American with no other frame of reference but his life\u2019s span in this country, however, it is not a dream. It is simply the social contract. We are increasingly discovering that there are rational, nononeiric ways to measure when that contract is being broken.<\/p>\n