An analysis of the changing faces of the American Dream
LIFE LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF ( fill-in-the-blank)
Thoughts on POPTONE paper from the French Paper Company.
An analysis of the changing faces of the American Dream
LIFE LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF ( fill-in-the-blank)
Copyright Š 2011 by Emily Shields All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States of America First Edition, 2011 ISBN 0-9000000-0-0
Shields Publishing House 2060 Leavenworth Street San Francisco, CA 94133
Dedicated to my parents, who inspire me to pursue my dreams.
THE AMERICAN DREAM
THE CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE From the first days of its founding, the United States has fascinated the rest of the world with its distinct character , an identity firmly rooted in an American Dream of rising from nothing to greatness, largely by virtue of talent and hard work. And the Dream has been leveraged as a powerful marketing tool, to sell everything from cigarettes to prefab houses to political candidates. It resonates in marketing and advertising in ways that are so ingrained as to be barely detectable. But time and tide have had their effect on the Dream, and the character of the people who believe in it. Over the past half-century, the changing faces of the American Dream have paralleled the evolution of the American character, a parallel that has been greatly reflected in pop culture throughout the decades.
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Mobilization for World War II lifted the American economy permanently out of the Great Depression.
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Hard work pays off in material well-being and respect. I will be better off with each passing year. My children will be better off than I have been. All hardworking Americans can own a home. Sacrifice, self-denial, and deferred gratification are virtues. Social acceptance is more important than our selfexpression. Faith in God and country is unquestioned. Cars, possessions, and vacations are all badges of respectability. Men and women have traditional gender roles as breadwinner and homemaker.
07 THE 1950’S AMERICAN DREAM
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Many Americans feared that the end of WW II and the subsequent drop in military spending might bring back hard times of the Great Depression. Instead, pent-up consumer demand fueled exceptionally strong economic growth in the post war period. The automobile industry successfully converted back to producing cars, and new industries such as aviation and electronics grew by leaps and bounds. In 1947, commercial television with 13 stations became available to the public. Computers were developed during the early forties. The digital computer, ENIAC, weighing 30 tons and standing two stories high, was completed in 1945. A housing boom, stimulated in part by easily affordable mortgages for returning members of the military, added to the expansion. The nation’s gross national product rose from about $200,000 million in 1940 to $300,000 million in 1950 and to more than $500,000 million in 1960. At the same time, the jump in postwar births, known as the “baby boom,” increased the number of consumers. More and more Americans joined the middle class. College became available to the capable rather than the priviledged few. The United States recognized during the postwar period the definite need to restructure international monetary arrangements,
Pent-up consumer demand fueled exceptionally strong economic growth in the post-war period. The nation’s gross national product rose from about $200,000 million in 1940 to $300,000 million in 1950.
initializing the creation of the international Monetary Fund. Business entered into a period of consolidation and firms merged to create huge conglomerates. The American work force also changed significantly. The num-
ber of workers providing services grew until it surpassed the number who produced goods. By 1956, a majority of U.S. workers held white-collar jobs. Growing demand for single-family homes and the widespread ownership of cars led many Americans to migrate from central cities to suburbs. Coupled with technological innovations such as the invention of air conditioning, the migration spurred the development of “Sun Belt” cities such as Houston, Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix. As new, federally sponsored highways created better access to the suburbs, business patterns began to change as well. Shopping centers multiplied, rising from eight at the end of World War II to 3,840 in 1960. Many industries soon followed, leaving cities for less crowded sites. LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF
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The Four Freedoms paintings offer tremendous insight into how US citizens viewed their idealized selves. This idealization became the backbone of the post-war American dream.
POSTWAR PROSPERITY
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HOME OWNERSHIP BOOM Levittown is today a byword for creepy suburban conformity, but Bill Levitt, with his Henry Ford–like acumen for mass production, played a crucial role in making home ownership a new tenet of the American Dream. From 1900 to 1940, the percentage of families who lived in homes that they themselves owned held steady at around 45 percent. But by 1950 this figure had shot up to 55 percent, and by 1960 it was at 62 percent. Likewise, the homebuilding business, severely depressed during the war, revived abruptly at war’s end, going from 114,000 new single-family houses started in 1944 to 937,000 in 1946—and to 1.7 million in 1950. Buttressed by postwar optimism and prosperity, the American Dream was undergoing another recalibration. Home ownership was the fundamental goal, but, depending on who was doing the dreaming, the package might also include car ownership, television ownership (which multiplied from 6 million to 60 million sets in the U.S. between 1950 and 1960), and the intent to send one’s kids to college.
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Nothing reinforced the seductive pill of the new, suburbanized American dream more than the burgeoning medium of television.
The introduction of television after World War II coincided with a steep rise in mortgage rates, birth rates, and the growth of mass-produced suburbs. In this social climate, it is no wonder that television was conceived as, first and foremost as a family medium. Over the course of the 1950s, as debates raged in Congress over issues such as juvenile delinquency and the mass media’s contribution to it, the three major television networks developed prime-time fare that would appeal to a general family audience. Many of these policy debates and network strategies are echoed in the more recent public controversies concerning television and family values, especially the famous Murphy Brown incident in which Vice President Dan Quayle used the name of this fictional unwed mother as an example of what is wrong with America. As the case of Quayle demonstrates, the public often assumes that television fictional representations of the family have a strong impact on actual families in America. For this reason
The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet was one of the most enduring family based situation comedies within the history of the American television. Ozzie & Harriet were a direct reflection of what Americans wanted to be.
people have often also assumed that these fictional households ought to mirror not simply family life in general, but their own personal values regarding it. Throughout television history, then, the representation of
the family has been a concern in Congress, among special interest groups and lobbyists, the general audience and, of course, the industry which has attempted to satisfy all of these parties in different ways. In the early 1950s, domestic life was represented with some degree of diversity. There were families who lived in suburbs, cities, and rural areas. There were nuclear families (such as that in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) and childless couples (such as the Stevens of I Married Joan or Sapphire and Kingfish of Amos ‘n’ Andy). There was a variety of ethnic families in domestic comedies end family dramas (including the Norwegian family of Mama and the Jewish family of The Goldbergs). At a time when many Americans were moving from cities to mass-produced suburbs these programs featured nostalgic versions of family and neighborhood bonding that played on sentimentality for the more “authentic” social relationships of the urban past.
THE FIRST TV FAMILY LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF
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RISE OF THE UNCONVENTIONAL FAMILY Within the domestic comedy form itself, the nuclear family was increasingly displaced by a counter-programming trend that represented broken families and unconventional families. Coinciding with rising divorce rates of the 1960s numerous shows featured families led by a single father (My Three Sons and Family Affair and the Western Bonanza), while others featured single mothers (Julia and Here’s Lucy and the western The Big Valley). By 1967 the classic domestic comedies featuring nuclear families were all canceled. At the level of the news these fictional programs were met by the tragic break up of America’s first family as the coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s funeral haunted America’s television screens. We might even speculate that the proliferation and popularity of broken families on television entertainment genres was in some sense a way our society responded to and aesthetically resolved the loss of our nation’s father and the dream or nuclear family life that he and Jackie represented at the time.
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THE REAGAN ERA
While the song, “Born in the USA” demonstrated
The shift in lyrical themes in pop music from
that American pop culture could generate powerful
the ‘60s to the ‘80s mirrored a distinct shift in
critiques of Ronald Reagan’s vision for America,
values and priorities for many young Americans.
in truth, it was very typical of its time. Popular
It is always dangerous, of course, to make broad
American songs and movies of the 1980s were more
generalizations about entire generations of people;
likely to celebrate Reagan’s values than to challenge
there were plenty of corporatist strivers around
them. For most of his presidency, Reagan was quite
in the hippie ‘60s and plenty of countercultural
popular, and pop culture, by and large, reflected the
dropouts on the scene through the “materialist”
American public’s admiration for the president and
‘80s. That said, young Americans who reached
his worldview.
maturity during the Reagan Era were much more
Ronald Reagan was without a doubt popular for the majority of his presidency, and pop culture, by and large, reflected the American public’s admiration for the president and his worldview.
likely than their ‘60s predecessors to hold Reagan-like values. College campuses that had erupted in protest and anarchy during the ‘60s welcomed burgeoning Young Republican clubs in the ‘80s. Young grads sought law degrees and MBAs in record numbers.
The most dominant trend even in hip-hop, was not
Today, Americans who came of age during Ronald
toward social activism as it was toward material-
Reagan’s presidency remain, the most conserva-
ism; legendary ‘80s rhymes celebrated hot women,
tive generational cohort within American society.
big bling, hot cars, and even cool sneakers. Ronald
The “Reagan Generation” Americans born between
Reagan and his conservative supporters may not
about 1960-70—is currently the only age cohort
have appreciated the cultural aesthetics of hip-hop,
of the American population in which Republicans
but most rappers embraced an individualistic, com-
outnumber Democrats.44. Perhaps the iconic pop-
petitive, and materialistic ethos that shared much in
culture representation of that cohort was Alex P.
common with President Reagan’s own worldview.
Keaton, the character played by Michael J. Fox on
American culture generated a wealth of works seemingly simpatico with the prevailing ideologies of Reaganism. For example, one of the early hits that lifted Madonna to a career of pop super stardom was “Material Girl” (1985), Madonna’s material values marked a sharp break from those that had predominated in the 1960s and ‘70s heyday of countercultural rock n’ roll, when tunes like Loggins & Messina’s “Danny’s Song” (1971) preached
the hit ‘80s sitcom Family Ties. Alex P. Keaton was the perfect embodiment of the Reagan generation; the teenage son of aging hippie parents, he idolized Milton Friedman, kept a portrait of Richard Nixon at his bedside, subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, and never went anywhere without his briefcase. The huge generation gap between the ultra-capitalistic Alex and his parents provided Family Ties with seven primetime seasons on NBC.
a different message.
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A NEW REALITY As the ‘70s gave way to the ‘80s, the center of gravity in thinking about the American Dream was forced to accommodate a new reality—that of economic uncertainty. Standards of living no longer moved up automatically each year. Second jobs became a necessity to maintain the desired standards of living. For the first time, Americans had to ask if the Dream really could apply to every American, or just some Americans. If the American Dream of this period had many faces, it is important to acknowledge that some of those faces were ugly. The sexual revolution, widespread divorce, single parenthood, and improvised schooling criteria had side effects, not all of which were attractive. The American character soon had to accommodate the reality of unintended consequences from change—from declines in education results and rises in sexually transmitted diseases to psychologically troubled kids and rampant drug abuse.
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HEREIN LIES THE AMERICAN PARADOX. WE NOW HAVE, AS AVERAGE AMERICANS, DOUBLE REAL INCOMES AND DOUBLE WHAT MONEY CAN BUY. WE NOW ALSO HAVE LESS HAPPINESS, MORE DEPRESSION, MORE FRAGILE RELATIONSHIPS, LESS COMMUNAL COMMITMENT, LESS VOCATIONAL SECURITY, MORE CRIME AND MORE
THE AMERICAN PARADOX LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF
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HIGH UN EMPLOY MENT RATES
OVER SPENDING THE CONSEQUENCES
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In hewing to the misbegotten notion that our standard of living must trend inexorably upward, we entered in the late 90s and early 00s into what might be called the Juiceball Era of the American Dream—a time of steroidally outsize purchasing and artificially inflated numbers. It was no longer enough for people to keep up with the Joneses; no, now they had to “call and raise the Joneses.” This personal debt, coupled with mounting institutional debt, is what has got us in the hole we’re in now. While it remains a laudable proposition for a young couple to secure a low-interest loan for the purchase of their first home, the more recent practice of running up huge credit-card bills to pay for, well, whatever, has come back to haunt us. The amount of outstanding consumer debt in the U.S. has gone up every year since 1958, and up an astonishing 22 percent since 2000 alone. The over-leveraging of America has become especially acute in the last 10 years, with the U.S.’s debt burden, as a proportion of the gross domestic product, in the region of 355 percent. Which means debt is three and a half times the output of the economy, which is most definitely an historical maximum.
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The American dream can no longer be just about money. While a nice house and a pay raise will always be attractive, the new American dream has to be about living within our means and simple continuity for the sake of our future.
THE AMERICAN DREAM WILL PREVAIL LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF
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GOING FORWARD A dream is an aspiration. A sense of greater possibility and a motivation to push through difficulty to a better day just beyond reach but within sight. It’s not a dream if you’re hanging on by a thread, trying to keep what you’ve already got. The aspiration of ‘greater, better’ is gone when all you’ve got is ‘protect, preserve.’ It is a fragment society, there can no longer be a single vision anymore of what each individual aspires to. It is time for a change. The market crash, the ensuing recession, the worsening societal inequality—these are not normal cyclical downturns or growing pains. We are in a crucial transitional stage. The nature of our economy is changing; the nature of what people want from our economy is changing. A whole new system for creating wealth is taking shape, a new kind of capitalism that is powerful and full of promise, but far from fully formed. Yet neither party is proposing measures that might help it along because neither appears to grasp what’s going on.
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And what about the outmoded proposition that each successive generation in the United States must live better than the one that preceded it? It’s no longer applicable to an American middle class that lives more comfortably than any version that came before it. The time has come for simple continuity, where the standard of living remains happily constant from one generation to the next.
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