The American Dream

Is it "a dream deferred" (in Langston Hughes' phrase) ora vision of reality? Do Americans know what they meanwhen they speak of it?

The American Dream: it is not a slogan but a catchword, used so constantly but with such little precision that it seems now, a pot of gold under the rainbow, and now, a receding mirage.

The American Dream: to some, it is only a bad joke. "Don't you mean the American Nighmare?" They feel we have traveled a long and sorry way from Emma Lazarus' words for "Liberty Enlightening the World"—"Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"—to the derisive song of the Puerto Rican gang in "West Side Story"—"Everything free in America,/For a small fee, in America."

The American Dream: to others, it remains an inspiration. They maintain, as Martin Luther King, in his Christmas Sermon on Peace, maintained, that "I still have a dream today."

It is inevitable that an election year will see yet one more parading of the ideals of the American Dream, with celebration of the politicians' efforts to make them come true, and promises to make them come even more true in the future. But what lies behind the banners and the bright costumes—the incorruptible soul of an imperishable republic or a heap of dingy laundry? Has the Dream at last been urbanized, brutalized, populated, and polluted to death? Or if not, is it still worth dreaming? Was it ever worth dreaming? Are we where we are now because of, or in spite of, the American Dream? Should we go back to sleep or wake up?

Our answers and our evidence must come from many sources: our national scriptures—the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, the Pledge of Allegiance; our concepts, images and slogans—the myth of the frontier, the idea of Manifest Destiny, the Four Freedoms, Equal Opportunity, One-Man-One-Vote, £ Pluribus Unum, "In God We Trust," "With Freedom and Justice for All"; and the testimony of artists, historians, and critics who have measured what we have come to against where we say we want to go. Their conclusions have always varied intensely, from those who cry "Howl!" to those who cry "Hail!" But as a country of optimists, we have thus far tended to assume that the closer we look at not only the bright hopes but also the harsh realities of the American Dream, the better we will be able to advance towards its fulfillment.

And so we prepare to ask what remains of the Great American Experiment, the Great American Dream Machine, which can be affirmed to the rest of the world without irony. Within the traditional framework of Alumni College discourse—unthreatened exchange of opinion, consideration of new ideas and criticism of the old, the gathering of knowledge, and the seeking of wisdom—four members of the Dartmouth College faculty will begin an anatomy of the American Dream. It will then be the pleasant-and-painful task of the participants to continue.

The identity of those lecturers, the content of their lectures, and the structure of the twelve-day program are described in the following pages. I hope after reading them you will decide to join us this year in our own ope" convention," as we try to re-create ourselves and put back together American Dream.