The Passing of the Dream

In this article, Dennis Altaian, examines some of the elements which go to make up the American Dream and looks at the future of the myths which bind Americans to their country.

The United States', Lyndon Johnson has said, 'was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart. North and South: "All men are created equar—"Government by consent of the governed"—"Give me liberty or give me death". These are not just clever words or empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries and today are risking their lives.'

In saying this Johnson was reaffirming a belief of tremendous importance for most Americans, a faith in the Constitution as an expression of the national purpose rather than merely a set of institutional arrangements. Nor has this belief been confined to the national boundaries. In the first of the Federalist Papers, written to urge the adoption of the Constitution, Hamilton wrote: 'It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection of choice ... A wrong election of the path we shall cut, may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.' Which was echoed by Jefferson, who wrote: 'It is impossible not to be sensible that we are acting for all mankind; that circumstances denied to others, but indulgent to us, have imposed on us the duty of proving what is the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.'

Americans have always had this sense of nationalistic utopianism. It has been accompanied by, indeed has risen out of, a faith in themselves, a belief that America is indeed, as S.M. Lipset wrote: 4the good society itself in operation'. Out of this faith, as much as any physical advantages, has come the tremendous dynamism and energy that have made America the most hated, loved, feared, despised, admired, envied, analysed, emulated and sought after nation in the world. To Americans and non-Americans alike, from Crevecoeur and Goethe to the Puerto Rican immigrants of West Side Story, the United States is as much a symbol of certain ideals as it is a country, one among numerous units on the international scene.

In recent years America has impinged on us to the extent that we are more familiar with the family life and foibles of its distinguished citizens than our own. For our conservatives it appears to provide the surrogate father figure necessary since Britain's abdication. For our radicals it provides an identifiable target on which to vent their frustration. Yet, oddly enough, it is the strongest adherents to America politically who often display an Anglophilic dislike of American society, while those politically anti-American find their inspiration in the writings, speeches and actions of Americans. One may feel as one likes about America, it appears, but about it one can never be neutral.

Perhaps it is because of this that we remain so unable to comprehend America, while at the same time being so aware of it. It is, at once, both the most familiar and the most foreign of countries. Familiar because we read its magazines, watch its films and television, and follow its politics. Foreign because we fail to understand the 'yearning for high-sounding moral purposes' that are seen as uniquely American, and thus have an image of America that misses that most elusive, and most significant, of dimensions. Yet without this dimension we cannot understand the great moral crisis through which America is now passing.

The surface manifestations of this crisis have been increasingly apparent with the emergence of violence as the norm, rather than the exception, in much of American life. Only the respite brought about by peace feelers made it possible for the President of the United States to move again about his own country as other than a fugitive, in secretive helicopter flights to carefully selected gatherings. But this respite coincided with the assassination of Martin Luther King—only, one might add cynically, another casualty in the death toll in the Civil Rights battle—and the outbreak of urban violence throughout the country before even the last snow had melted. Today American police forces are laying in sophisticated weapons in preparation for major battles during the Summer, while middle-aged housewives and embittered youths are forming themselves into private vigilante armies.

These are not isolated cases, but the symptoms of a deep-seated malaise that threatens to tear American Society apart. Nor is it sufficient to say that violence has always been a part of the American heritage, although this is undoubtedly true. This however is not the lawlessness of Al Capone or Bonnie and Clyde; today's lawlessness is collective rather than individual, rebellion rather than crime. When Johnson spoke of the need, to preserve national unity this was not mere political rhetoric. It was the expression of a real fear that America has been overtaken by a series of crises it is not within her power to control, and, most importantly, that it no longer believes it can control.

For the purpose to which Johnson referred is no longer clear, nor is it any more the shared purpose of all Americans. The disillusionment with the American Dream expressed by Albee and Mailer in works of that name has now spread to large sections of the country, in particular to the strange alliance of privileged, white, middle-class students and underprivileged, black, proletarian Negroes which Robert Kennedy had been courting. And while the internal conflict is the more significant, it is the souring of the dream abroad that provided the catalyst for the present crisis.

Whatever the motivation for certain aspects of American foreign policy, its guiding principle over the past twenty years has been the containment of Communism. This could be defended both in terms of the national interest (the need to check rival great powers) and idealogically (the need to combat alien and evil doctrines). The latter was as important as the former, and, unlike Australia, America's Cold Warriors were often men committed domestically to liberal social reforms. It is ironical that a country which sanctifies pragmatic politics approaches foreign affairs with an ideological fervour, with Dulles like Torquemada, or Rusk, like Billy Graham, preaching the faith throughout the globe.

Vietnam, however, shattered the faith for many millions of Americans. No longer was it possible for them to believe that their country was defending that freedom and self-government that Jefferson thad proclaimed the essential purpose of America. The war in Vietnam has cracked the consensus that once existed on the need to contain Communism, wherever and however it might appear, and as yet no satisfactory alternative purpose in foreign policy has appeared. Not only is talk of victory in Vietnam no longer credible, the belief that made such talk relevant no longer exists. The extent to which America is disillusioned by the failure of her mission in Vietnam, as reflected in the sombre editorialising of Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, has little counterpart in Australia, for we did not need to rationalise the war to ourselves in terms of moral absolutes. (Many American opponents of the war, men like Fulbright, Aiken, Kennan and Lippmann, had opposed it, of course, precisely because of their distrust of the evangelical in foreign policy.)

Yet the beliefs of a generation die hard, and whatever the outcome in Vietnam it will continue to create internal turmoil within the United States. It is doubtful whether the country has the will to escalate any further, and probable that the Administration—any Administration—will eventually settle for some major role in a page 24 new Saigon Government for the National Liberation Front. By so doing they will, in effect, be accepting their inability to combat Communism in Vietnam, to win the 'honourable peace' to which Mr Nixon has referred. One shudders to contemplate the effect on a country that has committed 600,000 men to a war that, unlike Korea, cannot even end with the restoration of the 'status quo ante-bellum'. Just as the French defeat in Indo-China sixteen years ago had a long-range effect on her future political life, so an eventual settlement in Vietnam will bring cries of treachery and disloyalty that could prove even more divisive than have the protests of the anti-war movement.

Bound up with, indeed both cause and effect of, the collapse of the myths that made Vietnam possible is the situation in the cities that makes virtually every metropolitan centre in the United States the scene of potential warfare. The assassination of Dr Martin Luther King was almost too perfect a symbol—what dramatist would have dared concoct it? For King was the outstanding representative of the traditional Civil Rights Movement with its Pete Seeger songs, heroic defiance of cattle prods and clergy-led marchers, whose ends were integration and means a non-violent appeal to the conscience of White America. After his assassination what Negro can believe, as King, a true Jeffersonian liberal believed, that there is a non-violent road to a better and more humane America?

King too believed in the purpose of which Lyndon Johnson spoke: 'Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow,' he said, 'l still have a dream. It is a dream chiefly rooted in the American Dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that, all men are created equal.' For the embittered militants of Watts and Hough and Harlem and West Side Chicago, however, the Young Negroes of whom Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown are only the most articulate, these words no longer have any meaning. Negroes in the ghettoes no longer sing 'We Shall Overcome'; they build Molotov cocktails. Unlike other ethnic groups the Negro finds that automation and prejudice deny him the bottom rungs of the ladder that the American myth says lead to middle-class respectability. Unlike the workers who, encountering bitter resistance in their struggle to unionise, still clung to the ideology of Horatio Alger and 'log cabin to White House', increasing numbers of Negroes no longer feel any identification with the American creed of individual perfection.

The cry of Black Power is not, in itself, a repudiation of America; a convincing case can be made for an interpretation of Black Power that places it in the tradition of group solidarity as a part of the continual coalition building that is the essence of American politics. But however convincing Stokely Carmichael may be when addressing White liberals, the Civil Rights Movement has been transformed from a revolutionary affirmation of American values to a resolutionary denial of these values, and a demand for a new type of society, one that traditional politics seem unable to create.

It is in revulsion at the war and violence in the cities that the crumbling of the old American beliefs are most obvious. There are other symptoms too. It is a truism that art reflects social pressures; the last decade has seen a tremendous outpouring of artistic creation that has been increasingly typified by violence, disharmony and disillusionment. In art the constant search for a way of depicting modern society has produced a rapid succession of modernistic fads, just as the collapse of liberalism in Europe expressed itself in Dadaism and Surrealism. In music not only pop music speaks the language of rejection of traditional values; so-called 'serious' composers (though the Beatles are no less serious for being popular) are turning to new forms and techniques that display the inability of conventional approaches to convey their emotions. On the stage, influenced by a number of London imports, American playwriters are offering an increasing number of plays, happenings and events that reject the schmalz of Broadway musicals and family comedies. In literature the cult of Black Humour, which makes sense of American society only by making it macabre, has influenced many of the most interesting contemporary authors (Joseph Heller, John Barth, James Purdy, Thomas Pynchon etc.); it is accompanied by a new realism, individual rather than social in its focus, which is expressed in the attempts to shock and disgust found in books like Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, Blechman's Stations and Le Roi Jones' The System of Dante's Hell. Even films, so long the citadel of complacency, are beginning to echo a new awareness of the underside of American life, as in The Pawnbroker and Bonnie and Clyde.

America has always been a society with tremendous centrifugal forces, regional and ethnic. To hold the country together has posed problems unknown in a small and homogenous society. American unity has been very much the product of the shared belief in the American Dream, however varied the interpretations might be, and a faith in America that has made it possible, for example, for a country with enormous class divisions to deny these in its political behaviour. (One should not forget the enormous importance of pledges of allegiance and civics lessons in the public schools, where millions of immigrants were imbued with the American Dream. Writing of the task of the schools at a time when the Dream was also under challenge, Charles Beard said: 'Once more, as in the early days of the Republic, the terms, conditions, and methods appropriate to the maintenance of democratic society swing into the centre of educational interest.')

Today, as periodically in American history, the sufficiency and the relevance of the American Dream are being questioned. The questions take many forms. Polite doubt as to the universal validity of American ideals is expressed in Congressional committee rooms. Frustration with the application of these ideals has led to student unrest on most of the large American campuses, often among the academic elite of the country's five million students. In the urban ghettoes men talk, and act, revolution. The great bulk of Americans do not share the feeling of Berkeley or Harlem. They do however sense that the old ideals no longer provide an answer to contemporary problems, that new problems, at home and abroad, demand new ideals and new purposes.

Lyndon Johnson's Presidency will probably be seen in history as marking the end of the Roosevelt era (the New Dead) at home and the Truman era (of containment) abroad. Many of Johnson's domestic reforms, important as they were, were first mooted during the 'thirties. The Civil Rights legislation of his Presidency, though more important than the legislation of any, and all, of his predecessors since Lincoln, has failed to cope with the problems of housing and jobs and education which demand far more than integration into the existing social structure. His actions abroad were responses conditioned by the last twenty years of Cold Warfare, and no longer adequate. What Rovere said of foreign policy applies with equal force to domestic politics:

The policies we are applying were not meant to endure forever but merely to tide us over, to bring us safely into the present age. We have arrived, by no means safely but more or less intact, and it is incumbent upon us to look on this new age and seek new ways-if new ways are required and it seems to me perfectly clear that they are most desperately required—of dealing with it. Instead, our leaders and many of their most eloquent critics are locked in debate over who is and who is not being true to a bygone age.

It may be that in the end America will find the resources within her own traditions to meet the new challenges. The American Dream has become for many a symbol of complacency, a belief that American society is essentially good and requires only a little bit of tinkering to make it perfect. Yet the Dream was in its time a revolutionary one, expressing the belief that it was in the power of men to completely remake their society. This is the essence of the Dream, not a particular set of political and economic arrangements.

Even the most militant adherents of Black Power express ideas that would not have seemed alien to Jefferson, in their claims for local control and freedom from a welfare bureaucracy. In the days of the American Revolution, however, 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness', to quote Jefferson's version of Locke, could be attained by leaving men alone. In modern, urban, post-industrial America this is no longer sufficient. The great challenge America now faces is to find a way of re-allocating her grossly mis-distributed resources, which can only be done by government action, without merely enlarging the massive bureaucratic state which already administers her inadequate social services. Without this the American Dream can only become the American nightmare.