"Globals" and the American Dream: A Survey of Student Aspirations in an American Studies Course

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15691497-12341260

PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 brill.com/pgdt

P E R S P E C T I V E SO N G L O B A L

D E V E L O P M E N TA N D

T E C H N O L O G Y

“Globals” and the American Dream: A Survey of Student Aspirations in an American Studies Course

Robert C. HauhartSaint Martin’s University

E-mail: [email protected]

Je!f BirkensteinSaint Martin’s University

E-mail: [email protected]

AbstractThe American Dream is a powerful ideology that generates overwhelming support from our fairly typical group of American college students. In order to examine this phenomenon more care-fully, we conducted a qualitative study of our team-taught, interdisciplinary undergraduate course, entitled “Chasing the American Dream.” Answers to an in-class student survey over two semesters confirmed and enlarged our understanding of the nature of The American Dream. We believe that the Dream seems to achieve its effect in part by its high level of abstraction and gen-erality. Thus, the American Dream is, effectively, an empty basket into which any American can place his/her hopes and aspirations. One can, for example, conceive of an entirely traditional domestic American Dream or one can re-conceive of a twenty-first century globalist Dream. As one breaks down the level of abstraction, generality, and mystery regarding the Dream concept, the support for various features of the Dream—as well as one’s likely success in achieving the Dream—becomes less strong.

KeywordsAmerican Dream, Globals, American studies, student aspirations, student surveys, interdisciplin-ary course, James Truslow Adams, Jonathan Winthrop, City on a Hill, global dystopia

IntroductionThe genesis of this joint project was when my colleague, Robert Hauhart, approached me a few years ago with the idea of team-teaching a course on the American Dream. I jumped at the opportunity. I did so because the American Dream has been, in one way or another, the subject of almost every course I have ever taught. Perhaps this was not always overtly and obviously apparent to the students, but as a professor who teaches American literature and

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composition, this concept—the American experiment—undergirds every-thing I teach. And, as most Americans intuitively understand, the American Dream (c)overtly guides, follows, and haunts all Americans every day. Indeed, the American Dream is such a compelling concept that it appears to influence people and states throughout the world, regardless of how influential or imme-diate the American Dream experiment may actually be (Fossum 2009). Cer-tainly the idea has driven the American immigrant experience from early on and, in turn, the lives of so many of our students’ family members. More recently, my colleague, Robert Hauhart (2011), has written about the influence the American Dream has had on the European mortgage and debt crisis now playing itself out in countries like Spain and Ireland. In short, while my com-ments may appear somewhat ethnocentric, it is difficult to over-state the impact of the various ideas that form the American Dream.

But I had one concern before we could teach together. As a great skeptic of this same American Dream—never more so than in the decade post-9/11—and its ability to often do little more than crush the spirit of so many who live under its thumb, I wanted Robert to assure me that this would not be a celebratory class, but a necessary critique worthy of the subject. I remember that he just laughed in response to my concerns. For starters, he indicated, there was the tentative class title: “Chasing the American Dream.” It was not “The American Dream,” but rather a title that suggests an attempt to grasp both its runaway, elusive nature and its mass appeal despite ever-mounting evidence against its continued efficacy. Yes, we were going to get along fine, as we both take a sim-ilar approach to the ubiquity of the Dream—skepticism, yes, but also a certain kind of jaded awe—even if we come at it from different professional back-grounds. The course we developed reflected these origins.

The Nature of Our CourseAt the most general level, one can best grasp the essence of our course from the design laid out in our course syllabus. First, we threw the net widely for our course goals and readings so that we might encompass as much of the Ameri-can cultural experience as we might reasonably reach in a single semester. Thus, our syllabus reads:

This is an interdisciplinary course in American cultural studies that examines the meaning, influence and various impacts of the American Dream. Class members may acquire elective credits in Criminal Justice, Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Interdis-ciplinary Studies or general education and/or elective credit for English 201. The only prerequisites for this course are Sophomore standing and a willingness to explore the

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 359American Dream, something about which we all already know something, whether we are American or not.

Second, to equal the self-described interdisciplinary nature of the course, and to take advantage of our different academic backgrounds, we read material addressing and critiquing the American Dream from a wide variety of perspec-tives. While acknowledging that in any given semester one can only scratch the surface of a topic, our “foundational” texts included excerpts from the United States Constitution, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840), a cou-ple of Horatio Alger stories, Jonathan Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon (1630), Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963), Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (first published 1855), Marx and Engels’ Das Kapital (1855), and, as something of a centerpiece both times the course has been offered, a close reading of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Gatsby, of course, sounds a dire warning for us all: “. . . [Gatsby] must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (p. 169). From this initial foundation—which constitutes about a third of the course material—we move on to such diverse texts as short stories and/or poems by John Cheever, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Jackson, Sandra TsingLoh, Amy Tan, John Updike, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright; TV epi-sodes, including Leave It to Beaver (1957-63) and The Lone Ranger (1949-57); Tennessee William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949); a variety of popular music and two films, Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) and a documentary about a 1980s Hormel factory strike entitled, appropriately enough, American Dream (1990). In our most recent class (Spring, 2012) we also required Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld’s Crime and the American Dream (2006, 4th ed.) and Philip E. Slater’s seminal The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970).1

In short, we incorporate a wide range of material. Though the actual list dif-fers very slightly each time we teach it, there is a stable core that constitutes 80 percent of the same materials. In this way we attempt to reproduce to a degree both the stability, and flux, of the themes and concerns that constitute the American Dream. As happens with many classes, we have become increas-ingly aware primarily of how much we do not yet know about the contours, dimension, and historical transformation of the American Dream. Still, the stu-dents do progress in their understanding of the Dream historically as well as, arguably, their appreciation and definition of their own Dream.

1 During Spring, 2010 we used Jennifer Hochschild’s Facing Up to the American Dream (1996) in place of Slater’s book.

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The Antecedents: The Conceptual Core of the American DreamWhere to begin? Well, first there is that iconic phrase, used and recognized not just in America but the world over. James Truslow Adams first penned it in his 1931 history, The Epic of America. The concept of opportunity for all, of endless possibilities for enrichment (if not endless enrichment), and not least of all, of hope, was key to Adams’ understanding of the United States and what he believed it offered not only its citizens, but also the world. In his epilogue, he describes his vision thusly:

. . . the American Dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtless counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the bar-riers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. And that dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves. (p. 318)

Published more than 80 years ago and, not incidentally, just two years after the Great Crash of 1929, Adams wrote down what so many people already felt, even in the midst of a growing global Depression. Adams’ contribution to the Amer-ican conversation with this iconic phrase is quite a legacy, even as few know his name, for he spawned the short-hand phrase that people all over the world often use today to refer to the central idea that represents the United States to so many countless millions.

Later writers identified other features of the American experience that seem to constitute part of the Dream as well. Philip Slater, writing originally in 1970, observed that “[o]ne of the oldest and deepest myths in the American psyche is the fantasy of being special—a treat that American society promises, and withholds, more than any society in history” (p. 144). This idea, too—often called “American exceptionalism”—has been widely acknowledged to be an important element of the American Dream. As a way of examining briefly what this concept is by examining something it is not, we need only turn to Fran-cesco Duina’s (2011) analysis of the so-called “Jante’s Law” in Denmark, about which “[v]irtually all Danes are familiar” (p. 4). This Law, set forth in the 1933 novel A Refugee Crosses His Tracks by Aksel Sandemose, includes such princi-ples as “Don’t think you are special” and “Don’t think you are good at anything” and “Don’t think that you are more important than us” among its ten guiding ideas. Essentially, Duina explains, these laws, which triumph the community and reduce the individual, “permeate public and private life, the education sys-tem from kindergarten on, politics, business, sports, family life, and more.”

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 361What is more, “[w]ithout a doubt most of us in the United States are raised to believe exactly the opposite of Jante’s Law.” Indeed, only a people so infatuated with their own destiny and uniqueness could create a concept like the Ameri-can Dream, name it after themselves, and then continue to consume and reproduce their own creation. Clearly, American exceptionalism deserves a place within the Dream.

So, too, is the Dream connected to other great American themes, like Mani-fest Destiny. The westward expansion of the United States during the nine-teenth century (finally declared ended by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893) was an act of self-creation akin to the original colonization of the North Amer-ican continent by the British, Dutch, Spanish, and French. Each of these migra-tions was driven, at least in part, by that simple, irreducible desire that still drives immigrants today—the search for a better life. Indeed, in the twentieth century, as James Truslow Adams was writing, the irrepressible American Dream for a better life over the horizon sometimes seemed to constitute all that the American people had to rely on. It is what caused the Joads, in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), whether they could express it fully and articulately or not, to give up their Dust Bowl existence and head west to the celebrated orange groves of California (pp. 82-83). That the California streets were not paved with gold is hardly the point of the Dream, even if so many before and since the Joads have found themselves foundering in the wake of established business and governmental powers that could, and did, actively limit access to the Dream.

The qualities that give rise to this peculiar American dreaming have long been present, as Adams points out, existing long before the United States even became an independent nation. Perhaps the most famous early example of a statement indicating the foundational principles underpinning this vision is Jonathan Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity.” Winthrop delivered his sermon aboard the deck of the Arbella (sometimes called Ara-bella) the small ship that had brought a group of Massachusetts Bay colonists to start a new life in a supposedly New World (although, of course, not new and already long inhabited). Winthrop’s themes remain popular, and he is often referenced, even if most people probably do not know where and when these ideas were first voiced, or by whom. Most commonly referred to, of course, is his Eurocentric concept of the New World being a kind of New Eden, a gift from God given to the righteous and the deserving. This idea is conveyed most succinctly in the following passage:

For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon Us, soe that if we shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be

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362 R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speakeevill of the wayes of god, and all professours for God’s sake. Wee shall shame the faces of many of god’s worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land wither wee are goeing. (p. 166)

This is quite a charge to live up to. Essentially, Winthrop argues that their little colony, on the edge of a vast “new” continent, is such an important experiment that the entire world will be watching. Moreover, if Winthrop and his followers should not live up to God’s purposes for this new land, then instead of being merely a failed expedition, they would become the very epitome of failure, to be used in the future by all those who argued against their version of the Chris-tian God. Clearly, there is no turning back, for to do so would be to spurn God’s beneficence.

Winthrop’s phrase—“A City on the Hill”—has long been used as a touch-stone representing the alleged singularity of the American experiment. Indeed, it is among the most commonly used metaphors—perhaps, the most common—for the idea of American exceptionalism and perhaps did more than anything else to append this idea to the themes of equal opportunity, unlimited potential, and perennial hope for a better future. The phrase was adopted and used most notably by presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. President-elect Kennedy referenced Winthrop extensively in his January 9, 1961 farewell speech to Massachusetts:

. . . During the last sixty days I have been in the task of constructing an administration. It has been a long and deliberate process. Some have counseled greater speed. Others have counseled more expedient tests.

But I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella 331 years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new govern-ment on a new and perilous frontier.

“We must always consider,” [Winthrop] said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”

Today, the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our government, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their grave trust and their great responsibilities.

For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awe-some than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it then was by terror without and disorder within.

History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these (pp. 56-57).

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 363Ronald Reagan also referenced Winthrop at multiple mileposts of his career, mentioning it first on January 25, 1974 in a speech entitled “We Will Be a City Upon a Hill.” He later returned to these themes during his January 11, 1989 tele-vised farewell speech from the Oval Office:

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life. . . . And how stands the city on this winter night? . . . After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a bea-con, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

Our American Dream Course and the Year of Global DystopiaHaving recently finished our second iteration of our “Chasing the American Dream” class, we have found that from the beginning of the class each term, students innately know—but perhaps only partially understand—most of the ideas laid out above. While they have not heard of James Truslow Adams, only a few of them remember reading Winthrop’s sermon, and they are rarely aware of the Kennedy and Reagan speeches, American college students have a gen-eral, although hazy, sense of what they think constitutes the American Dream. Perhaps more to the point for the present discussion at the beginning of the class they believe in the Dream, desire it, and think they know how to attain it.

However, while our students think they know these things about America, their conviction in their own understanding quickly evaporates when we ask them to define the American Dream by writing down their version of it. It is here that the trouble begins. On the first day of our first class2 we ask the stu-dents to “freewrite” (Elbow 1998:13-19) about both their general understanding of the American Dream and their Dream specifically.3 Through discussion and a review of their freewriting, we have found that students have difficulty with the prompt on every level. Thus, they demonstrate some trouble in actually putting the American Dream into words, and with separating their own Dream from the Dream of the masses. Further, much of what they produce on that first day is related primarily to “getting ahead” in America—that is, their Dream as initially expressed is related chiefly to monetary concerns, to getting that

2 We asked the same two apparently simple questions in the first minute of the first day of our class in Spring, 2010 and Spring, 2012: 1) What do we mean by the American Dream? 2) What is your American Dream? We provide no further elaboration.

3 Students are always told ahead of time which freewrites will be collected and which will remain their own. Thus, since the class members know their definitions and personal statements will be collected and (they believe) subject to grading (not true) and review (true), students appear to take the task seriously.

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oft-referred to, rarely attained so-called “good job.” Their efforts suggest, at this early point in the class, that the twenty-first century American Dream is, per-haps, openly and merely, to quote Messner and Rosenfeld (1997), “. . . a sales slogan for the material comforts and individual opportunities of a middle-class lifestyle: a car, a house, education for the children, a secure retirement” (p. 6).

Naturally, there are challenges to this traditional view of what the Dream encompasses. As Robert is a Baby Boomer and Jeff a Gen-Xer, we well know how such buzzwords can, in part, falsely define a generation with their pithy and generalized conclusions. It is no surprise, then, that this current genera-tion of students lives under the dubious specter of various monikers, each vying for supremacy in their own way. One term that may be taking hold, and certainly speaks to a growing interest in international experiences among some young college students, is ‘Globals,’ or, as first coined by John Zogby (2008), “First Globals.” Zogby is a pollster and his statistics are dizzying, but much of his argument comes down to fundamental changes in our society. That is, as marriage age is delayed, as more and more Americans are going to college and the resulting degree being worth less and less, as the job prospects continue to look dim, a contingent of American college students today appear to be seeking something new, and often that experience lies—or is thought to lie—outside of the United States. Couple this with an increasingly small, inter-nationalized world on all fronts, from popular media to American wars to off-shoring jobs, and students are searching. “For their part,” Zogby writes (2008), “the First Globals are already leading us into a new age of inclusion and authen-ticity. These are our internationalists, our multilateralists” (p. 196).

Sam Sanders (2012), reporting for National Public Radio, also discusses this phenomenon: “[Today’s students] are more likely than previous generations to live, study and work abroad. As they travel around the world, they’re now abandoning some of the traditional tenets of the American dream that their parents hold dear.” Although not focused exclusively on a globalist perspec-tive, Adam Shepard (2008), who graduated college and set out with twenty-five dollars in search of the mythic American Dream, argues analogously that the Dream is today more diverse. Shepard notes that “Coupled with the ideal that you have the freedom to work hard and accomplish what you want in your life, it’s about finding happiness and solace in your present lifestyle” (pp. 213-214). In but one more example, Brook Larmer’s (2012) New York Times Magazine story incorporates both the elements of global influence and novelty. She writes about Daniel Gillen, an architect employed by a New York firm, who was laid off in 2008 at the height of the mortgage and financial crisis. For six months, he hunkered down and mailed out resumes to American firms. Then he saw an ad to work as an architect in China—at half his former salary. Gillen, young

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 365and adventuresome at 32, jumped at the chance and went international. Such stories abound.

How Broad and Deep is the Reach of Globalism?Yet despite this reported evolution in the dreams and aspirations of some of our country’s young people, we still suspected that many of the traditional dreams remained, or were dying hard. We seemed to sense that the end result is, initially, most of our students have difficulty moving beyond the equation where happiness equals wealth, revenue generation and related factors. They may, on occasion, be searching for such things in new and interesting places, but the search is often for many of the same goals, if re-packaged in other forms.

These suspicions led us to undertake our multi-semester classroom study simply so that we might understand our students better and consider further the meaning of the American Dream. Our students’ stilted initial attempts to define the American Dream and articulate their own version of it also led us to wonder whether there is little left to Truslow’s concept other than this façade of material prosperity and well-being. After all, other reports on American life suggest that the foundations of our collective American existence are being assaulted and destroyed at every turn by various forms of self-interest directly antithetical to the health of the larger American corpus. Charles Derber (2011) calls this internal attack on American culture “wilding,” which he defines as “a degenerate form of individualism” (p. 10).While the term originated with con-duct that was alleged to constitute criminal behavior, Derber understands cor-rectly that the term more properly means a form of outrageous disrespect for American public culture and connectedness by any number of self-interested acts, many of them entirely legal, if dubiously so. Barbara Ehrenreich (2005), discussing the disintegration of American life, describes white collar insecu-rity, long thought to be impervious to, or at least less susceptible to the vicis-situdes that have long threatened poor and blue collar workers, this way:

[It is] no longer a function of the business cycle—rising as the stock market falls and declining again when the numbers improve. Nor is it confined to a few volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions of the country like the rust belt or Silicon Valley. The economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the talented and the successful as well as the mediocre. Since the mid-nineties, this perpet-ual winnowing process has been institutionalized under various euphemisms such as “downsizing,” “right-sizing,” “smart-sizing,” “restructuring,” and “de-layering”—to which

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366 R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376we can now add the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas. (p. 4)

Yet despite this mounting evidence, and much more besides, suggesting that attaining the “good job” is ever more elusive, that the rules are stacked against the vast if declining American middle class, students continue to seek out pre-cisely these dreams. We witness this not only by their presence on a college campus, for which they often take on huge loans, but also by their responses to our prompts throughout the semester.

Taken together, our students’ expressions of the Dream and the critics’ views of it, led us to wonder: was there really ever anything else to the Dream besides material prosperity and an amorphous desire to get ahead? Has not the history of the United States, from its first footfall at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, merely been a story of grasping predation, usurpation, spoilage, and oppres-sion? Perhaps a bit dismayed by the narrowness of our students’ definitions and the complacent acceptance of some of their own Dreams, if not surprised by their lack of clarity, we set out to explore further their conception of the American Dream.

Our “Chasing the American Dream” Student Surveys

Survey I: Design and ResponsesOur interest piqued and inspired by the concerns raised as a result of our initial freewriting exercise, we decided to inquire further into our students’ concep-tions of the American Dream through a survey administered to those enrolled in our classes. Initially, we did this in a very simple but more formalized man-ner. Then, later in the semester during our Spring, 2010 course, we distributed a single typed sheet of paper to class members in attendance and asked them to complete the survey in class and hand it back to us. The survey was elemen-tary in design and asked only three things: 1) basic demographic information; 2) the nature of their American Dream; and 3) whether or not the respondent believed they could achieve their American Dream.

The basic demographic information was elicited through close-ended ques-tions (Denzin 1970:129-30; Phillips 1971:19-20) asking the respondent’s gender; racial heritage or ethnicity, as self-defined; age; year in school; parents’ level of education (mother and father’s educational attainment specifically requested in separate queries); and parents’ occupation (mother and father’s occupations again sought in separate queries). While we might have asked about religious affiliation and practice as well as various other forms of basic group identifica-

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 367tion in American life, we did not do so in this initial formal survey effort. (We later did so in the Spring, 2012 class in our modestly expanded “Survey II” design, discussed below.)

In contrast to the questions designed to elicit basic demographic informa-tion, we used open-ended questions to ask about our students’ conception of their own American Dream and their likelihood, in their own estimation, of achieving it. In this regard, these questions were similar to the form of ques-tions we used to inspire the original freewriting exercise. Indeed, in the case of “What is your American Dream[?]” the question was virtually identical. We merely added a second inquiry asking each student to evaluate the probability that they would be able to attain their American Dream.

It should be clear from the onset—and it was certainly clear to us—that we were not engaged in conducting a full-fledged, social scientific study that met all of the contemporary professional standards for questionnaire and survey design. There are a number of reasons for this. First, our population—a single college class of approximately 35 respondents4—was simply too small to offer a reliable window into any group other than itself. Second, while one of us (Hauhart) was trained as a traditional social scientist, we were generally not engaged in, nor organized to conduct, a serious extended inquiry into these questions outside of our classroom and the students who formed our class. Thus, our goal was not to obtain “definitive” information—whether about our 35 students or Saint Martin’s University students as a whole or American col-lege students more generally. Rather, our goal was to turn up suggestive insights that we might use to explore our topic and better understand our students’ views of the American Dream.

When we administered our simple questionnaire to our Spring, 2010 class we received 33 responses (17 from males; 16 from females) from the 33 class members in attendance that day. We proceeded to analyze the responses we received by simple content analysis (Lindsey and Beach 2002:48-49). We reviewed for certain key components the open-ended answers to our two ques-tions regarding each students’ conception of their own American Dream and their own estimation of their likelihood of attaining it. With respect to our stu-dents’ vision of their own American Dream, for example, we looked for (and counted) references to spouse/marriage and/or family (of one’s own); mention of having a “good job” or the equivalent; and any comment, reference, or dis-cussion of money (or being well-off financially). Interestingly, we found that men in our Spring, 2010 class were far more likely (12 specific mentions vs. 7

4 During Spring, 2010 there were 36 students enrolled in our class; in Spring, 2012 there were 32 students.

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specific mentions for females) to include mentions of the “spouse/marriage/family” theme in their statement of their own American Dream. Equally intriguing was the fact that more men were just about equally likely to explic-itly identify one feature of their Dream as “having a good job” as compared to females (12 specific mentions for males vs. 8 for females). As it turned out, men-tions of money and financial success were about evenly split, although slightly favoring females (5 specific mentions by males; 7 specific mentions by females). With respect to the likelihood of achieving the American Dream, students were overwhelmingly confident that they could achieve it (29 vs. 4). We duly reported these observations to the class as one more part of our discussion.

In our most recent class, we replicated our initial use of “Survey I” by distrib-uting it to the students during class in the middle of the term. Twenty-nine (29) students completed the simple questionnaire that day (12 males; 17 females). Interestingly, positive references to the “spouse/marriage/family” theme were low for both male (5 out of 7 specific mentions) and female (8 out of 15 specific mentions) students. The same general pattern emerged for “having a good job” and mentions of “money/financial success”: low positive mention by both gen-ders. Moreover, in this group of responses we began to see a wider range of idiosyncratic responses: references to being active in one’s church; making a difference in someone’s life; having good friends; and so forth.5

Survey II: Design and ResponsesThese early efforts led us to decide to revise our questionnaire for a further administration toward the end of the semester for our Spring, 2012 class. Our method for revising the design of our survey was reflexive. Thus, we chose to focus on the content of our Spring, 2012 students’ responses in Survey I to revise our approach. Thus, we analyzed the content of the responses looking for every intellectually distinct or idiosyncratic response we could identify. We then broke down and re-stated our open-ended question regarding the nature of each student’s American Dream by turning the inquiry into a close-ended

5 Finally, we noted that 26 out of 29 respondents believed they could achieve the American Dream—not that different than the response from our previous group, but with a special wrinkle: two of the students who said they could not achieve the American Dream were foreign students (both Japanese; one male, one female) who explicitly stated the reason they could not achieve it was because they did not have an American Dream. Further, we elected to ‘throw out’ and not consider one response because it was clearly written in jest. Thus, excluding these three responses, we were faced with the rather remarkable fact that 26 out of 26 students, when queried, stated that they possessed an American Dream, specified it to a degree, and then affirmatively declared they believed they could achieve it. Non-scientific or not, this kind of unanimity is difficult to ignore.

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 369question with response choices derived from the specific answers and men-tions which students themselves offered us on Survey I. The result may be seen in Appendix I: The American Dream Survey II, page 1. The effect of this revision is that rather than simply permitting students to tell us their understanding of their current American Dream, we asked whether—and how important—being active in one’s church was to their American Dream. Likewise, we solic-ited responses as to whether—and to what degree—having one’s own family; serving the less fortunate; and “just being happy” were important to each stu-dent’s American Dream.6 Perhaps most importantly for our present purposes, there were no specific answers or mentions that suggested our students were expressing an awareness of the global context that might influence their Ameri-can Dreams. Our manner of permitting respondents to express the relative degree of importance for the various themes that might play a part in their Amer-ican Dream was accomplished through the use of a standard scaling technique, the Likert scale (Denzin 1970:108-109). Students could choose to say the impor-tance of any given item (or variable) was “very important,” “important,” “neutral,” “somewhat important,” or “unimportant” (See Appendix I).

We also took the opportunity in Survey II to revise our approach to the ques-tion of whether or not our student respondents believed they could achieve the American Dream. Rather than simply ask the entirely open-ended question without any context, we chose to create a preamble to the question which recited some of the then-current economic and social statistics broadly influencing the United States. Thus, we noted that the US unemployment rate remained at the historically high rate of 8.2 percent (March, 2012, the most current figure then available); that 2011 saw the most home foreclosures ever; that the average American college graduate leaves school with $25,250 in debt; and that the median salary for American college graduates in 2010 was only $27,000 and down from $30,000 in 2008 (See Appendix I: The American Dream Survey II, p. 2). The results were quite revealing.

With respect to the content of our group’s combined American Dreams, our close-ended question forced our students to further particularize their concep-tion of their American Dream. Thus, the increased number (there were 17 dis-tinct variable items) and specificity of the close-ended query typically forces respondents to confront their choices more directly and evaluate each more carefully. The result is often a hardening in the assessment of those items deemed “very important” and “unimportant” along with attenuated importance

6 We also provided, first, the response, “I don’t have an American Dream, so I can’t answer” based on the responses of our two Japanese foreign students in our first survey. One female Amer-ican student chose this response; no male student did.

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indicated for the remaining items. The consequence is that a more distinct picture emerges.

Generally, our 25 respondents to Survey II (9 males; 16 females) confirmed that having one’s own family; marriage; and a good job were high on the list of features to their American Dream. To this they overwhelmingly added “com-pleting college” while at the same time framing their financial goals as being “debt free and financially secure” but not “wealthy.” Indeed, “wealth” along with “being active in one’s church” and achieving “political influence” were the items least likely emphasized by both men and women. Some intriguing gen-der differences existed: women emphasized “completing college” as “very important” 100 percent of the time (16 out of 16), whereas men only empha-sized it as “very important” about half the time (4/9). Indeed, 4 men rated this item “neutral”—neither important nor unimportant. Moreover, both men and women rated having one’s own family as more important than marriage—a vote of less than full confidence for that institution. The full range of responses for this query may be seen in Appendix II (for males) and Appendix III (for females).

Interestingly, our students did not appear to reflect the values attributed to the ‘Globals’ (or “First Globals”). Thus, while “travel”—without any qualifica-tion as to “domestic” or “international”—was offered as a possible element for selection in our class survey, the item was not among the more popular. For men, travel ranked fourth (4th) from the bottom among the seventeen (17) valued items offered. For women, travel was selected 9th from the bottom/9th from the top—that is, the middle choice among 17 possible items. More telling, perhaps, is the fact that in response to our open-ended query regarding whether class members believed they could achieve the American Dream, not a single respondent in either 2010 or 2012 suggested that they could only achieve their American Dream by recognizing that “globalism” had become the norm and that, perhaps, they would need to “go global” in one manner or another to achieve their Dream. To the contrary, a number of our students did suggest that they would need to “trim” or “re-orient” their Dream in other ways to accommodate social and economic trends. In short, our students showed how little the impact of globalism was having on their conceptions and life aspira-tions regardless of its actual effect on the economy and society they live in.

With respect to the question of whether or not each student believed they could achieve their American Dream, our preamble emphasizing some of the more negative features of the contemporary American economic and social landscape had the predictable effect. Generally, more students were willing to contemplate the possibility that they might not achieve their American Dream or, at the very least, that they were less certain whether they would, in fact, be

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 371able to accomplish their goals. Thus, of the 16 females responding, one was eliminated as not having an American Dream, while 9 responded that they could achieve it, and 5 acknowledged now that they were uncertain as to whether or not they could achieve it. For the men, 5 indicated they could achieve their Dream; 2 indicated they were uncertain; and 2 indicated they did not believe they could achieve their Dream.7

DiscussionSo what did we learn? Perhaps the most important thing we have learned from the two occasions we have offered the class our various surveys is simply that the American Dream is a powerful ideology that generates overwhelming sup-port from our fairly typical group of American college students. The Dream seems to achieve this effect in part by its high level of abstraction and general-ity. Thus, the American Dream is, effectively, an empty basket into which any American can place his/her hopes and aspirations. One can, for example, con-ceive of an entirely traditional domestic American Dream or one can re- conceive of a twenty-first century globalist Dream. As one breaks down the level of abstraction, generality, and mystery regarding the Dream concept, the support for various features of the Dream—as well as one’s likely success in achieving the Dream—becomes less strong across the group. Thus, the Dream is a flexible vehicle for affirming identity as an American and belief in its importance and efficacy is strongly held by our students. It is in this sense a cornerstone and foundation for the cultural optimism for which Americans are famous (or infa-mous) across the globe. In short, despite the global recession, and the advance of globalism generally, the more traditional American Dream remains alive and well among our American students. It appears that little can truly shake their faith and hope in it, or in the broad outline of the way of life it supports.

ConclusionIn this year of global dystopia, the United States finds itself divided politically, as it has been increasingly in recent years (especially post-9/11). On the one side, activists at the core of the Occupy Wall Street! movement are driven by

7 Responses to our newly added question about each respondent’s religion produced little of interest. Both men and women at our private, religious-based (Catholic Benedictine) university indicated mixed responses to practicing a formal religious (Yes: men—4; women—11. No: men—5; women—5.) and wrote down the same general array of Catholic, Protestant and “Christian” as their preferences.

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their alarm at the wide divide between the “99 percenters” and the “one per-centers.” Describing themselves as a “leaderless resistance movement,” in 2011-2012 thousands occupied and camped out in Zuccotti Park, New York City as well as other cities throughout the country. While Time magazine declared earlier this year that the “movement has proved its worth” (Rawlings 2012), oth-ers have noted that no more than 200-300 committed activists lived continu-ously, day in and day out, in its encampment. Across the political divide, the conservative Tea Party has made inroads into establishment politics with its demands for smaller government (although the Tea Party’s desire to place extensive governmental controls on abortion and other “social” issues belie this belief ); strict constructionist philosophy with respect to our foundational political charter; desire for what it claims would be more fiscal responsibility; and free market ideology. In a recent referendum (June 2012), Wisconsin voters re-affirmed their support for Governor Scott Walker’s Tea Party-driven initia-tives and turned back an effort to overturn his legislation curbing the collective bargaining rights of public sector union employees.

Somewhere in the vast middle stand—or, perhaps more accurately, sit or lie passively—our American Studies course students. To conscript a label from an earlier era, our students constitute perhaps the “silent majority” in American life. Quietly distrustful, chastened by the years of recent economic recession, apolitical for the most part, our students still remain stalwart supporters of the traditional American Dream. They remain committed to a traditional under-standing of an American way of life they can only loosely explain or define—even as they acknowledge increasing doubts that they can achieve their American Dream. Isolationist rather than internationalist, our students may fit within another label from the Nixonian 1960s and 1970s: our students are per-haps today’s “Nowhere (Wo)Men”(with apologies to John Lennon):

Doesn’t have a point of view.Doesn’t know where he’s going to.

Whether you believe this “Nowhere (Wo)Man” is the same as “you or me” tells you just about all you need to know about your (or our) politics and each of our estimates of the state of the contemporary American Dream within the con-temporary global system.

ReferencesAdams, J. T. 1933. The epic of America. Garden City, NY: Garden City Books.Denzin, N. K. 1970. The research act. Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing.

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 373Derber, C. 2011. The wilding of America: Money, mayhem, and the new American Dream, 5th ed.

New York, NY: Worth Publishers.Duina, Francesco. 2011. Winning: Reflections on an American obsession. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.Ehrenreich, B. 2005. Bait and switch: The ( futile) pursuit of the American Dream. New York, NY:

Metropolitan Books.Elbow, P. 1998. Writing with power: Techniques for mastering the writing process. New York, NY:

Oxford University Press.Fitzgerald F. S. 1995. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner.Fossum, J. E. 2009. “Europe’s ‘American Dream’.” European Journal of Social Theory. 12(4):483-

504.Hauhart, R. C. 2011. “Exporting the American Dream: Global Implications.” International Journal

for the Humanities. 9(2):1-12.Kennedy, J. F. 1988. “Let the word go forth”: The speeches, statements, and writings of John F. Ken-

nedy, 1947 to 1963. Edited by T. C. Sorensen. New York, NY: Laurel.Larmer, B. 2012 (March 16). “Building the American Dream in China.” New York Times Sunday

Magazine.Lennon, J. and P. McCartney. 1966. “Nowhere Man” from Rubber Soul. London, UK: EMI Studios,

Parlophone Records.Lindsey, L. L. and S. Beach. 2002. Sociology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Messner, S. F. and R. Rosenfeld. 2007.Crime and the American Dream, 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Thom-

son Wadsworth.Phillips, B. 1971. Social research: Strategy and tactics. New York, NY: Macmillan.Rawlings, N. 2012 (March 19). “Six months in, Occupy Wall Street marches on.” Time. (http://news-

feed.Time.com/2012/03/19/occupy-wall-street-six-months-in-strength-in-small-numbers/).Reagan, R. 1989 (January 11). “Farewell address to the nation.” (http://www.archives.gov/federal-

register/publications/presidential-papers.html).Sanders, Sam. 2012 (July 10). “ ‘Globals’ generation focuses on experience.” National Public Radio.

(http://www.npr.org/2012/07/10/156463825/globals-generation-focuses-on-experience).Shepard, A. 2008. Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the search for the American dream. New York,

NY: Harper.Slater, P. 1990. The pursuit of loneliness. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Steinbeck, J. 2002. The grapes of wrath. New York, NY: Penguin Books.Turner, F. J. and J. M. Faragher. 1998. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The significance of the

frontier in American history”, and other essays. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.Winthrop, J. 2007. “Amodell of Christian charity.” Pages 155-166 in The Bedford anthology of

American literature: Volume 1. Edited by S. Belasco and L. C. Johnson. Boston, MA: Bedford/ St. Martins.

Zogby, James. 2008. The way we’ll be: The Zogby Report on the transformation of the American dream. New York, New York: Random House.

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Appendix ITable A1

The American Dream Survey IIYour Gender: Heritage/Ethnicity:Year in School: Age:Parents’ Level of Education: Mother:

Father:Parents’ Occupations: Mother:

Father:Please describe to us Your “American Dream” by telling us how important each of the following is to your Dream:Very Important = 5Somewhat Important = 4Neutral = 3Somewhat Unimportant = 2Unimportant = 1I don’t have an American Dream, so I can’t answer _____.Active in my Church: 5 4 3 2 1Make Difference/Someone: 5 4 3 2 1Have Good Friends: 5 4 3 2 1Your Own Family: 5 4 3 2 1Serve Less Fortunate: 5 4 3 2 1Debt Free/Fin. Secure: 5 4 3 2 1Own Your Home: 5 4 3 2 1Own Land: 5 4 3 2 1Travel: 5 4 3 2 1Completing college: 5 4 3 2 1Political Influence: 5 4 3 2 1Staying Close/Family: 5 4 3 2 1Wealth: 5 4 3 2 1Marriage: 5 4 3 2 1Just Want to Be Happy: 5 4 3 2 1Exercise My Freedom: 5 4 3 2 1Good Job/Career: 5 4 3 2 1Do you profess and practice a formal religion? Yes NoIf yes, please name your religious preference:

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R. C. Hauhart, J. Birkenstein / PGDT 12 (2013) 357-376 375

Do you believe you have a realistic chance of achieving your American Dream in light of the fact that:

(a) The unemployment rate, although down from a high of nearly 10% in July, 2010, remains at the historically high rate of 8.2%;

(b) 2011 saw the highest number of home foreclosures ever—over 1 million—and 5 million homeowners are two months or more behind on their mortgage payments;

(c) The average college graduate leaves school with $ 25,250 in loan debt; and

(d) The median salary for new college graduates (2010) was $ 27,000/yr—down from $ 30,000 (2008)—and only 56% of new graduates in Spring, 2010 had jobs/job offers while nearly 90% of graduates had them in Spring, 2008?Yes, I can achieve my American Dream___

I’m not sure I can achieve my American Dream___

No, I don’t think I can achieve my Dream___

Why or why not?

Appendix IITable A2

The American Dream Survey II: Results for Males, April 26, 2012 [N = 9]Please describe to us Your “American Dream” by telling us how important each of the following is to your Dream:Very Important = 5Somewhat Important = 4Neutral = 3Somewhat Unimportant = 2Unimportant = 1I don’t have an American Dream, so I can’t answer = 0.

RATINGActive in my Church: 2.222Make Difference/Someone: 3.888Have Good Friends: 4.222Your Own Family: 4.000Serve Less Fortunate: 3.666Debt Free/Fin. Secure: 3.777

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Own Your Home: 3.777Own Land: 3.444Travel: 3.333Completing college: 4.111Political Influence: 2.777Staying Close/Family: 3.777Wealth: 3.111Marriage: 3.666Just Want to Be Happy: 3.555Exercise My Freedom: 3.777Good Job/Career: 4.000

Appendix IIITable A3

The American Dream Survey II: Results for Females, April 26, 2012 [N = 16]Please describe to us your “American Dream” by telling us how important each of the following is to your Dream:Very Important = 5Somewhat Important = 4Neutral = 3Somewhat Unimportant = 2Unimportant = 1I don’t have an American Dream, so I can’t answer = 1.

RATINGActive in my Church: 2.733Make Difference/Someone: 4.466Have Good Friends: 4.133Your Own Family: 4.466Serve Less Fortunate: 4.133Debt Free/Fin. Secure: 4.466Own Your Home: 4.333Own Land: 3.466Travel: 4.200Completing college: 5.000Political Influence: 2.266Staying Close/Family: 4.000Wealth: 2.933Marriage: 4.000Just Want to Be Happy: 4.866Exercise My Freedom: 4.266Good Job/Career: 4.666

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"Globals" and the American Dream: A Survey of Student Aspirations in an American Studies Course

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