As I was doing the research for this sermon, I looked for recently taken polls about what Americans think the American Dream is.
One of the most recent ones I found showed that the top response was “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which is vague and hardly original, but still got 33-percent of the votes.
The other answers were mostly economic: economic security, owning a house, each generation better off financially than their parents.
It was taken by Gallup and financed by the Center for Advancing the American Dream. Oh, they must have some good information. Another click of the mouse revealed that it is the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream.
And I thought, Milken?
As in Michael Milken? The Junk Bond King? The Michael Milken who was charged with 98 counts of racketeering, mail fraud, and securities fraud? Whose junk bond fortune came to him at leaving smoking ruins of various businesses taken over with the highly leveraged debt he arranged, and then stripped of assets, so that hundreds of people lost their jobs? Who took a plea deal that cut his sentence down to 10 years in prison? Who then had his sentence reduced to two years and was pardoned by Donald Trump? That Michael Milken?
That’s the one. He’s a philanthropist now.
He and other donors have taken over a group of buildings across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Treasury Building, kitty-corner from the White House and made them into a lavish and flashy combination temple and instructive amusement gallery. It’s a feel-good celebration of capitalism without really addressing the challenges so many people face or specific, tangible solutions for overcoming them.
Is the American Dream About Great Wealth?
There are plenty of people, and Mr. Milken is one of them, who believe that possession of great wealth, be it property or money, is the most important objective in life. They believe that is the American Dream.
When the writers of the Declaration of Independence gave birth to a country, they didn’t mention capitalism, but the desire for wealth and property has always been a force in our society. It was even lingering, unspoken, in the Declaration itself.
What they said was, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
We’re so used to the idea that all humans are created equal that it seems totally unremarkable. But it wasn’t then. Monarchies were based on the idea that kings were chosen by God, which is why a coronation is still a religious ceremony. And that the social order was also divinely ordained. There had been several changes of regime disputing that assumption, and more revolutions were brewing.
Life, Liberty, and. . .Property?
What did it mean if we were all equal? To philosopher John Locke and others, it meant that all men had a God-given right to govern their own lives, liberty, and property, and that it was a government’s duty to protect those rights. The phrase with property appears in other founding documents, notably the Constitution. It was in much more common use at the time. Part of the resistance to abolishing slavery was the widespread belief that slaves were property. As the book passage Joyce read earlier suggests, humans have a deep-seated possessiveness over anything they consider to be their property, and that has influenced American history in many ways—not always for the better. It has influenced what we consider to be the American Dream.
Who Coined the Phrase?
The term was first popularized by James Truslow Adams, a Pulitzer prize winning historian and writer, educated as an engineer and a successful investment banker. He wrote that the dream is about:
“. . .a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of 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.”
Do you have the impression I have? Looks to me like he was aware that many people did consider the American Dream to be about money, that it was in fact a dream of motor cars and high wages, and, oh, yeah, probably a house, and I think people would certainly be desperately hoping for those things when he was writing. His thoughts were published in 1931, after the stock market had crashed, and before the United States government had figured out anything useful to deal with the resulting depression. Many people didn’t have a home, didn’t have enough to eat, because they were out of work and out of luck.
When the writers of the Declaration referred to all men being equal, they meant white men with property. But what they were starting was a bigger revolution than they realized.
The Revolution was Bigger Than We Knew
For a long time historians didn’t realize how big it was either. For nearly two hundred years the story of the revolution was told through the deeds of great men. I’ve heard people say that history doesn’t change, but I think it does. History changes the way science changes: the underlying phenomena are the same, but what we know about them changes.
In the 1960s, historians started to realize that the revolution had also affected women, slaves, the working classes—everyone. Gordon Wood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, told me in an interview that it was only in the 1960s that historians began to realize what a profound revolution it was: that it changed the relationships between servants and masters, fathers and children, men and women. He noted a line of questioning from the Revolution through the abolitionist movement and to the Seneca Falls convention, the gathering that launched the women’s suffrage movement.
We Kept Asking Ourselves Questions
So property diminished as a benchmark for who could vote and who couldn’t. But those changes were hardly inevitable. Abigail Adams begged her husband to “Remember the ladies,” but that didn’t happen in her lifetime. If every man was equal could every man vote? Don’t be ridiculous. “All men” means only white male landowners. Then as the frontiers pushed westward, and the people who lived on them became more important to national wealth and security, it maybe meant poor white men, too
Well, did it mean black people who were held as slaves should be free? That they could vote? Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. Eventually it did—at least in theory. It took a civil war to even get the laws on the books. Of course, some white Americans have resisted the idea, keeping many of the restrictions imposed by slavery in place in slightly changed forms, including our labor laws. Then eventually the concept included women, and after that the indigenous people who were here before all these Europeans barged in with their strange ideas.
And their greed for land. I only learned when I watched Ken Burns’s American Revolution on PBS that many of the people fighting for independence from Britain did so because they wanted to claim or buy land west of the Appalachians, and the British government would not let them do that. The British had lucrative trading going on with Native tribes, and white settlers upset that trade. The British wanted the Americans to stay on the East Coast. Maybe they thought the colonists would be more easily governed if they all stayed there.
Fat chance of that happening. Virginia’s colonial governor Lord Dunmore said he thought Virginians would rather live on the banks of the Ohio than in Heaven.
Always Competing Desires
So even leading up to the Revolution, there were these competing desires among Americans for why they wanted their independence. For some it was self-determination, for others it was wealth, for the land that underpins capitalism. Some were determined that they have no taxation without representation, and some were determined not to pay any taxes at all.
I think we have a disproportionate number of their descendants in Washington state. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
One Value: Literacy
But there has also been another, important value that American society has always had, although it’s been showing signs of weakness lately: literacy. The ability to read and write. I think that’s important in the pursuit of happiness, and apparently that is a value that was also an important part of us from the beginning. At the time of the American Revolution, American society apparently had the highest literacy rate in the world. I say apparently because statistics weren’t routinely kept in those days, but one interesting measure is the sale of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, which strongly urged independence from Britain. Twenty percent of Americans bought a copy; that means one person in five, which made it a staggering best-seller. And its language requires a high level of comprehension. It was common for Americans to be able to read and write, even female Americans.
This is at least partly because most colonists were Protestants, and most Protestant denominations emphasized the importance of people reading the Bible for themselves. That’s why they were translators of the Bible into various European languages—even when it was illegal to do that, and translators were imprisoned or even executed.
The systemic and systematic support of education showed again, even before the Constitution was written, in the Northwest Ordinance, which required of every township that a central piece of land be set aside for education and other government functions, and that the people of that township be taxed to support the schools. It set the course for widespread free public education. The Northwest Ordinance also showed the willingness of Americans to work together, to sacrifice some of their own money and property, for the good of the community, which I think is also vital in the pursuit of happiness.
Of course, like many other benefits, free education was not available to enslaved people, and limited for native people. It was also limited by the prevalence of child labor, which was common in the United States until 1938.
A High Respect for Science
From the beginning, Americans also had a high respect for science, investigation, and invention. There was no such job as scientist then, and I’ve formed that opinion partly because Franklin and Jefferson were inventors and, yes, scientists. Joseph Priestley fled to the United States after being run out of England for his support of dissenting views. We weren’t yet the leaders in many areas of science that we became, but the mindset was there, and, moreover, as Alexis de Toqueville noted in his early 19th-century study of the United States, “I discover that in most of the operations of the mind, each American appeals to the individual exercise of his own understanding alone.” It was characteristic that we thought for ourselves—which I think is helpful if we’re pursuing happiness.
James Truslow Adams—remember him? He’s the one who first wrote about the American Dream. He believed in its higher ideals— egalitarianism, freedom, opportunity and justice for all — and he saw them dissolving in the hands of the wealthy. He warned, “If you let the superrich infiltrate your democracy they will demand special privileges, reject equality and distort the democratic government to their own ends.”
The Superrich
Some superrich do believe themselves to be a superior species to the rest of us. At the time of the Revolution, many people believed that wealth was a sign of God’s favor—and the converse, that poverty was the poor person’s fault. Many people still believe that. Some of the superrich describe themselves as “job creators,” implying that the people who do the work are somehow parasites on their brilliance, that anybody can do what their workers do. Personally, I think anybody can be a job creator. Babies, for example, are really good at creating jobs for other people to do.
We Just Need Enough
I think when many Americans express the American Dream in economic terms—such as a house and a car—what they’re saying is that they want enough. They want to be adequately housed, have a way to get around, to educate their children. They’re not saying they have a desperate desire to be super rich.
We produce enough; we produce enough food to feed everyone. We could make sure everyone has a safe place to sleep—are you listening, Seattle? Our numbers of homeless people keep going up, even when other cities have found ways to bring them down. We can afford a wide range of education available to a wide range of people, but we need the public will to do it.
Am I talking about taxes? That’s part of it. The 1950s, which Americans started feeling nostalgic for in the 1970s, was a time of high taxes on the rich and high union membership. Prosperity for many was assisted by the GI Bill and the fact that most industrialized economies of the world lay in ruins after World War II.
It wasn’t great for everyone, but I think this is a time to try that income tax structure again, and to pick up the people who didn’t benefit last time around, such as African Americans and Native Americans.
The Work is Never Finished
We’ve come a long way since the Revolution, a time when Black people were held in slavery, women were chattel with few property rights, indigenous people were being massacred just for living where they had always lived. The work is never finished, and there’s always pushback from people who have much and are afraid of losing any of it.
It’s work to change those things, and he work must continue to push the pendulum the other way. I’m discouraged by who we have heading up all three branches of government, but that can change, and some of it might even change soon. I’m encouraged now by the resurgence of the union movement, by the increasing activism of young people, who say things like why not have Medicare for everyone? I’m also encouraged by members of this congregation, who step to work for many forms of social justice, and I’m grateful and proud to be one of you.
I’d like to close with a note about the hymns we’re singing today. The words to “Once to Every Soul and Nation” were written to protest the Mexican war, and, while I think the moment to decide comes more often than once, we are often faced with the choice between good and evil, and it takes courage to make the right choice. As a closing hymn today, we’re singing two verses of “America the Beautiful,” including the fourth verse, which seems to confuse people: “O beautiful for patriot dream, that sees beyond the years. Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.” People point out that we don’t have any gleaming alabaster cities, which is true. That is the dream, the dream of fairness and equality under the law for all of us. And that dream abides.
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