Today, many define the American Dream as the ability and opportunity to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps. These same people idealize anyone who achieves such accomplishments, putting the lucky individual on a pedestal as proof that everyone else who fails at this is simply lazy.
While this inaccuracy has always plagued American fantasies, it was actually an achievable and accurate depiction of the opportunity the new world offered at one point. Yet, somewhere along the way, we forgot how this once achievable idea of opportunism and hard work became nothing more than myth.
Reading J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s “Letters from an American Farmer” in my early American literature class, we examined the mood of early America: what other countries thought of the world’s newest nation, whether the expectations for the new nation were being lived up to, and how a burgeoning society set apart from the rest of the modern world developed.
Of course there were contradictions in opinion: Crevecoeur predicted a dissolvement of religion while Alexis de Tocqueville, author of “Democracy in America,” argued religion would save democracy. Yet overall, everyone viewed American democracy as a success.
Equality was the biggest contributing factor noted by outside observers. Tocqueville wrote in volume two of “Democracy in America,” “Because they sympathize with the sufferings of their fellows, Americans are quick to give assistance. Equality also makes Americans see that they are all weak and subject to similar dangers, so they tend to lend mutual help when needed.”
Crevecoeur spent a large portion of “Letters” giving an example of established Americans helping immigrants succeed. These examples created the idea of coming to America and gaining the ability to make something of yourself due to an abundance of resources.
Yet the main resource most people omit when espousing bootstrap arguments today is empathy. Crevecoeur describes Americans providing housing and lending land to immigrants who lacked financial backings. In one section, Crevecoeur illustrates nearby Americans joining together to clear land for a new immigrant family’s farm.
Crevecoeur listed two key elements of the young country as reasons to its societal success and profusion of empathy: the lack of class divisions and an abundance of land. Granted, these characteristics are impossible to preserve as a nation expands in size and population.
This change is another element many Americans disregard when mourning the change in American society along with empathy (and slavery and sexism which Crevecoeur and Tocqueville both acknowledged as America’s weaknesses). We cannot directly apply one period’s ideas to another era hundreds of years in the future. With advanced technology and a shifting landscape, it is impossible for a new society to ever revert back to the old.
Ironically the American Enlightenment occurred during the writings of Crevecoeur and Tocqueville and the birth of the nation, including the central tenet that ideas should not be given credence simply because they were traditional.
It is not wrong to try and recreate what our nation once had at its robust birth, and we should effuse some elements of early America into today’s America. But many conservatives who would like to keep America as it was founded forget the country’s evolution and inventiveness is what made it so successful.
It is one thing to learn from history and identify things that once worked to make America such a revered nation, but reverting back to such a time is futile and counterintuitive to dominant beliefs during the creation of America itself.
Ryan Thaxton is a 20-year-old mass communication sophomore from Monroe, Louisiana.