A Novel Approach to the American Dream (2024)

“The French menu was a nice touch,” offered Dutch. “The wines were exquisite—Puligny-Montrachet, Château Corton Grancey, and Dom Pérignon—and expensive too. Did the taxpayers pick up the tab?”

“Of course not,” replied Jack. “French wine is now my only vice. And given the topics tonight, I brought along three light, dry wines. Maybe they’ll keep us from dozing off during Jimmy’s sermons.”

“Dutch, did you know Grace Kelly?” asked W slyly.

“Not really, our careers never crossed. Different eras, different studios . . .”

“Different sets,” Harry added. “While Dutch was making Bedtime for Bonzo, she was costarring in High Noon with Gary Cooper.”

“At least I wasn’t threatening a Washington Post reporter with a broken nose, a black eye, and a kick in the balls,” Dutch responded. “But the Lord knows how often I wanted to. . . .”

“Me too,” admitted Dick, Bill, and Lyndon simultaneously.

“OK, OK, I get it,” interjected Jack. “Three wines were three too many. So before we let our passions get the best of us, let’s turn the pulpit over to Jimmy.”

“Actually, we need to dispense with these dinners entirely,” Barack began. “We have three months and two weeks left to finish our work. And we will need every minute, including the minutes allocated to these feasts and fellowship, to accomplish what we have set out to do: redefine and reawaken the dream’s possibilities.”

“Okay,” whined W. “But I really miss the White House mess.”

“Don’t we all,” offered Bill.

“Not to worry, my sermon won’t be all fire and brimstone. Too many guys around the table have direct experience,” Jimmy paused to let the barb sink in.

“Fire and brimstone did, however, drive James Truslow Adams’ most remarkable work. In 1921, he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Founding of New England. It was only the fifth prize for history ever awarded, and it went to an unknown author for a book about a homegrown yet tyrannical theocracy: the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

“What had been swept under the rug of history was revealed in all its sordidness by an amateur historian. Adams pulled no punches. He laid out how a small group of religious fanatics who had fled religious persecution in England during the 1630s used torture and far worse across New England for the next sixty years.

“In my opinion, Adams did so with complete justification.

If there is reason to condemn the Church in England for requiring the Puritan minority to conform, then the Puritans themselves must be condemned just as strictly for their oppression of minorities in New England. There cannot be two cannons of judgment for the same act; and, in fact, as we shall see later, Puritans then in power were, if anything, the more guilty of the two.1

“Adams kept posing unsettling questions throughout The Founding. Given the ‘ecclesiastical struggle between the Nonconforming Puritans and the Church,’ Adams asked ‘whether a powerful organization which thoroughly believed in itself and its own importance . . . should allow itself to be turned out of control by a small minority, whose attitude it considered detrimental, not only to itself, but to religion and the State.’2

“The original conflict between the ‘ever lasting Saints’ and the Church of England’s clergy was not over theology, dogma, or doctrine. It was over power—who had it, who wanted it all. And that hunger for power grew as Adams dug deeper.

“Adams focused on one of the most famous documents in American history, but not in the usual fawning fashion:

Before anyone was permitted to land, therefore, the famous Mayflower Compact was drawn up, by which the signers agreed to combine themselves into a “civil body politick” . . . As events developed, however, it came about that the Compact remained the only basis on which the independent civil government in Plymouth rested, as the colonists were never able to get a charter conferring right to jurisdiction.3

“We are as aware of the Mayflower Compact, Jimmy, as we are of your own

religiosity,” interrupted Gerry.

“And your sanctimony,” scoffed Dick.

“Why rehash the life and times of Cotton Mather?” finished Gerry. “What does that have to do with the American dream?”

“Everything,” Jimmy said.

“Adams’ argument applies even today. Instead of ever lasting Saints, we are confronted with an eternity of evil. The man upstairs takes Mammon as his savior and makes the golden calf his idol. His power comes from a small, shrinking, and seemingly mindless minority. And Adams’ research shows what happens when things spin out of control.

“Under the Puritans, Massachusetts became the first American nightmare. By 1630, it was a ‘Bible-Commonwealth … a church-state [where] no civil question could be considered aside from its possible religious bearings; no religious opinion could be discussed apart from its political implications. It was a system which could be maintained permanently only by the most rigid denial of political free speech and religious toleration.’4

“And it only got worse. Roger Williams was banished from the Bay Colony in 1635 for asserting that ‘magistrates should be limited to civil matters’; Anne Hutchinson was banished in 1637 for breaking the fifth commandment and for bringing ‘reproach upon the fathers of the commonwealth’; and in 1638, Katherine Finch was ‘whipped for criticizing the government and clergy.’

“More than Finch’s back was laid bare,” Jimmy pressed on. “Adams felt that, by 1651, ‘the theocracy had reached such a height of intellectual pride, of intolerable belief in themselves, as the sole possessors of the knowledge of God, and as the only legitimate interpreters of his will, that either all freedom of thought in Massachusetts must die, or their power must be destroyed.’5 He was sadly mistaken.

“Individual Quakers, members of the Society of Friends, nearly toppled the theocracy of the Bay Colony. . . .”

“Those are my people, although I shouldn’t say so. Their ‘Inner Light’ stopped shining for me decades ago,” explained Dick.

Ignoring the interruption, Jimmy explained, “Adams found that more than forty Quakers ‘had been whipped, sixty-four imprisoned, over forty banished, one branded, three had their ears cut off, five had had the right of appeal to England denied them, four had been put to death, while many others had suffer in diverse ways.’6 By 1662, new laws required Quakers to be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart’s tail, and whipped through three towns—down from eleven.

“The persecution of the Quakers did not end the theocracy’s reign of terror. Twenty years would pass before the king of England revoked the Bay Colony’s charter. Even then, the ever lasting Saints ‘fought to the end to perpetuate religious intolerance, and the entrenched privilege of a minority to tax an unenfranchised majority four times as numerous, and the right to concentrate all political power in the hands of one religious sect.’7 It was a history lesson forgotten for 230 years.

“Adams demystified the Puritans. He stripped their theocracy, their odious oligarchy, of even a fig leaf to cover their indecencies.”

“Jimmy, did you read The Founding, or just the CliffsNotes?” asked W. “The Notes often left out key passages, usually the ones on the final exam.”

“He’d never do that,” explained George. “As a navy officer on a nuclear submarine, he followed checklists. He’d never fly by the seat of his pants as you. . .”

“Come on, Dad. Jimmy’s as serious as a heart attack. I was only teasing him.”

“I get the joke. But you’re right. I didn’t touch their treacherous treatment of Native American tribes, their duplicitous dealings with other colonies, their witch hunts in Salem, or how desperately their clergy clung to power. Since Dick had the whole house wired, I didn’t want to give the man upstairs any ideas. I felt discretion was needed,” replied Jimmy.

“Well, if the man upstairs wasn’t listening, he is now,” observed George.

“Your discretion was indiscreet. You just triggered the listening system I had installed.”

“How so?” asked Jimmy.

“I could never remember the series of numbers given me, so we settled on a two-word password: ‘witch hunts,’” answered George.

“No worries. Your system was ripped out, except for in the Oval Office. And there, it is sound activated,” observed Barack. “So yes, there are tapes.”

“Good to know,” offered Franklin. “I often visit my old haunts to see how the new guy’s doing. And until now, I never worried about the resurrection of fascism, national socialism, or, God forbid, a kleptocracy akin to the Soviet Union. Now I worry night and day.”

“Can we hear Jimmy’s second sermon? I’d like to hear why he thinks The Epic of America was so epic. Is it true that its working title was The American Dream, but his publisher nixed it?” asked Ike.

“Yes,” Jimmy said. “A few years before he died, Adams wrote to an admirer that his publisher’s ‘objection was that no red-blooded American would pay $3.50 for a dream. Red-blooded Americans have always been willing to gamble their last peso on a dream and the one phrase from my whole book which has become journalese is the American dream.’8

“And it has. Used but thirty-five times in The Epic, the phrase has become ubiquitous. Adams first ascribed it to early Dutch and English settlers. In the 1630s and 1640s, ‘the American dream was beginning to take form in the hearts of men. The economic motive was unquestionably powerful, often dominant, in the minds who took part in the great migration, but mixed with this was also the hope of a better and freer life, a life in which a man might think as he would and develop as he willed.’9 He made that up out of whole cloth. No one then living in New Amsterdam was driven by a dream, just survival in an extremely hostile land.

“Seven pages later, Adams wrote that ‘their hope was for a civilization . . . in which they would be freer, richer, and more independent.’ And that troika— freer, richer and more independent—recurred throughout The Epic.

“As the pages turned, Adams took an ‘inchoate and unexpressed’ concept—his words, not mine—and forged it in the fires of self-government. He wrote that ‘even the poor were better off, freer and more independent than they had been in Europe. Above all, they had glimpsed the American dream. English, Irish, Scotch, Germans, all who had come to our shores, had come to find security and self-expression.’ Adams then describes how these northern Europeans ‘had come with a new dynamic hope of rising and growing, of hewing out for themselves a life in which they should not only succeed as men but be recognized as men, a life not only of economic prosperity but of social and self-esteem.’ But Adams was never a passive observer; he sprinkled his history with opinions, his own opinions.

“He claimed that ‘the dream derived little assistance from the leaders in America.’ He opined that, in spite of opposition from the upper classes, the dream ‘was steadily and irresistibly taking possession of the hearts and minds of the ordinary American.’10 In his mind’s eye, that dream drove the democratization of the American colonies.

“Adams argued that ‘the establishment of government by free consent of all had become imbedded in the mind of the average man, as an essential part of the American dream. [Samuel] Adams himself . . . felt that he alone, and those who believed as he did, were in possession of the truth, and that those who differed from him were enemies of truth and God.’ That was not the commonly held view of Samuel Adams, a renowned rabble-rouser and Founding Father.

“Nor did that view square with Adams’ own broader assessment. ‘The American dream had so deeply affected the hopes and aspirations of the common men, the more radical among them, in town and on frontier, echoed with wild enthusiasm’ for the statements of Samuel Adams. Under the pressure of pecking out five thousand words per day, internal consistency became a luxury for Truslow.

“As much as James Truslow Adams loved the ideal of the common man, he detested its reality. Throughout The Epic, his descriptions were harsh beyond measure. Had he written the following passages today, only the man upstairs and some—but not all—of his supporters would agree. Most of America would be appalled at his racism:

The negroes, particularly the women, of the more docile tribes imported made excellent house servants, though the men were not so useful unless their work was simple and more or less uniform in nature.11

Failures there were in plenty. The whole front of the American advance was strewn with them, men and women who dropped down to the moral, economic, and intellectual level of a hopeless and shiftless poverty.12

These Slavs, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Italians, Russians, Lithuanians, Jews, and others representing man’s races and their blends, were of a very different type from the Irish, British, Germans, and Scandinavians. It was not merely that 35 percent of them were illiterate as compared with the 3 percent of the earlier immigration.13

“Adams embraced racial and ethnic bigotry without qualms. He even wrote that ‘the problem of great slums and of unassimilable racial groups often numbering several hundred thousand in a single place had come to us, thanks, to a great extent to the shortsighted selfishness of the great industrial employers who cared only for cheap and “manageable” labor.’ But he went even further and wrote that ‘the earlier demand for slave labor had left us with the free-negro problem. This later demand for cheap white labor left us with another racial problem, although somewhat less serious, since, after a generation or two, these people can be absorbed, whereas the negro cannot.’14 Who ‘these people’ were . . .”

“He sounds like the Imperial Blizzard of the Klan, the one who put a price on my head.”

“Harry meant to say ‘Wizard,’” offered Bill.

“I meant to say what I said, goddamn it! Those guys were all frigid air. I confronted them once, stood on a bale of hay at one of their cross burnings down near the Arkansas-Missouri border, and I told them sons of bitches to go ahead and shoot me right then and there. They didn’t; they were chicken sh*ts. And so was this hack,” Harry replied.

“And yet Adams raised our eyes to the broadest, most exemplary possibilities of the American dream,” countered Jimmy. “To him, it was that ‘dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement . . . a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain in the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.’ He was, after all, writing for an audience that could afford his books and ignore his biases.

“Franklin was absolutely right. We must separate the phrase-maker from his iconic phrase. Because, in reality, that ‘dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves,’ and, I would argue, in spite of the author’s own despicable attitudes toward the American people.

“Perhaps we should let Adams have the last word,” suggested Jimmy. “Ultimately, whatever happens to the dream will depend on the very men and women he so despised.

If the American dream is to come true and abide with us, it will, at bottom, depend on the people themselves. If we are to achieve a richer and fuller life for all, they have got to know what such an achievement implies. . . . There is no reason why wealth, which is a social product, should not be more equitably controlled and distributed in the interests of society. But, unless we settle on the values of life, we are likely to attack in the wrong direction.15

“No way Adams gets the last word. We do,” Dutch broke in angrily. “And, yes, I absolutely do believe in an America where the people are ‘freer, richer and more independent.’ Because that’s what I tried to convey in my ‘City on the Hill’ speech.”

“Adams also wrote about a ‘city of dreams, shimmering besides the lake where only a few generations earlier there had been nothing but savages and a few traders in furs,’”16 offered Barack icily. “He was referring to the Chicago World’s Fair in the 1890s, not your—or more accurately, John Winthrop’s—‘City on a Hill.’

“Adams ignored how African American contributions to human progress were literally whitewashed from the White City, the alabaster island at the fair’s center; how Colored People’s Day was turned into a shameful racist joke by vendors, reporters, and cartoonists alike; and how Frederick Douglass was heckled by white men even as he spoke these words: ‘There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution. . . . We Negroes love our country, we fought for it. We ask only that we be treated as well as those who fought against it.’17

“The White City was a celebration of whiteness. Worse still, the fair’s pseudoscience consigned blacks ‘to a lower position on the evolutionary scale.’ Its ‘insulting buffoonery,’ its ‘ethnographic displays,’ and its watermelon hawkers sought only their humiliation. So much for his ‘city of dreams.’

“Inexplicably, towards the end of his book, Adams argued that ‘the one [institution] which best exemplifies the dream is the greatest library in this land of libraries, the Library of Congress.’”18

“He did what?” exclaimed Bill.

“He defined the American dream as a taxpayer-funded building,” said Barack. “What he didn’t know—or care to learn, apparently—was that the men whose art and artistry adorned the White City also decorated the exterior and interior of the Library of Congress. The same architects, the same sculptors, the same artists. Adams’ use of the Library of Congress as the exemplar for the American dream was an affront to all of us.”

“To Adams, the institution was the exemplar, not the building,” suggested Jimmy. “The institution dates back to Thomas Jefferson’s gift of his own library to the American people. The Library of Congress amassed the knowledge of the American people generation after generation; its stacks bulged with millions of books; its collections contained maps, photos, sheet music, and the records of a representative democracy at work. In Adams’ mind, the fact that all classes and races and walks of life had access—and helped to pay for—its priceless collections offered a metaphor for what a free people could do if they put their minds to it.”

“That’s an overly generous interpretation,” responded Bill. “Adams had to know the connection between the White City and the Library of Congress. He spent too many hours in the Jefferson Reading Room, too many days roaming the stacks, too many weeks making lists of the books its librarians located for him. He was playing to his audience, patting them on the back for being literate, for being bibliophiles.”

“Either that, or he knew his ‘city of dreams’ was, in fact, an exclusionary, segregated, and obnoxious reality. And so did his readers,” replied Barack.

“So, once again, separating the phrase-maker from his iconic phrase is job one. Otherwise, we’re stuck defending the indefensible,” suggested Bill. “And none of us will do that. If we don’t focus like a laser on how each of us applied and expanded the American dream as the president of the United States, we will never get beyond Adams’ own disqualifying attitudes. He was who he was. He cannot be rehabilitated. And we shouldn’t waste another minute making excuses for a deeply racist and reactionary wordsmith.

“Barack used Adams’ phrase almost as many times as I did. He even made it the subtitle of his best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. And to tell you the truth, I used ‘restoring the American dream’ as my campaign and governing theme from 1991 until 1996. But neither of us did a deep dive into this Adams guy. If we had, we’d never have used his phrase at all.”

“Gentlemen, Jimmy wasn’t finished. We owe him a chance to do so,” asserted Jack.

“Our words and our actions are more powerful than Adams’ ever were. We took his phrase and applied it to the more diverse and accepting nation we have grown to become. His closing paragraphs, however, gives us a starting point for our work. It ends with a clear warning, a warning we need to heed. So, let me read to you Adams’ final thoughts. . . .”

Amidst groans from around the table, Jimmy plunged on.

If the American dream is to be a reality, our communal spiritual and intellectual life must be distinctly higher than elsewhere, where classes and groups have their separate interests, habits, markets, arts and lives. If the dream is not to prove possible of fulfillment, we might as well become stark realists, become once more class-conscious, and struggle as individuals or classes against one another. If the dream is to come true, those on top, financially, intellectually, or otherwise, have got to devote themselves to the “Great Society.”19

“Hot damn. I’m all over that,” Lyndon whispered aloud.

“May I continue?” Jimmy asked.

And those who are below in the scale have got to strive to rise, not merely economically, but culturally. We cannot become a great democracy by giving ourselves up as individuals to selfishness, physical comfort, and cheap amusem*nts. The very foundation of the American dream of a better and richer life for all is that all, in varying degrees, shall be capable of wanting to share it.

If we are to make the dream come true we must all work together, no longer to build bigger, but to build better. There is a time for quantity and a time for quality. There is a time when quantity may become a menace and the law of diminishing returns begins to operate, but not so with quality. By working together I do not mean another organization, of which the land is as full as was Kansas of grasshoppers. I mean a genuine individual search and striving for the abiding value of life. In a country as big as America it is as impossible to prophesy as it is to generalize, without being tripped up, but it seems to me that there is room for hope as well as mistrust.

“As our time grows short, I will skip a paragraph and get to Adams’ warning:

The sky is not all black, and there are not a few signs of clearing. Revolt is growing particularly among the young, and there is no need to abandon hope. We have, it is true, a long and arduous road to travel if we are to realize our American dream in the life of the nation, but if we fail, there is nothing left but the old eternal round. The alternative is the failure of self-government, the failure of the common man to rise to full stature, the failure of all that the American has held of hope and promise for mankind.16

“Thank you, Jimmy, for the sermons,” offered Jack. “The table reconvenes a week from today with its regularly scheduled programming.

“Without objection, Franklin and I will chair our discussion of Harry and Ike’s use of the American dream. Hearing none, we stand adjourned.”

Sitting behind the Resolute Desk, the man upstairs was anything but resolute. He was raging. He had not listened in on the conversation in the Blue Room, but he felt uneasy and anxious in what Harry once called “the crown jewel of the federal penal system.” He could not know that the dangers he sensed came from one floor below.

1. Adams, James Truslow. The Founding of New England. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), p. 73.

2. Ibid, pp. 76-77.

3. Ibid., p. 98.

4. Ibid., pp. 142-143.

5. Ibid., p. 262.

6. Ibid., p. 272.

7. Ibid., p. 395.

8. Nevins, James Truslow Adams: Selected Correspondence, p. 296.

9. Adams, The Epic of America, p. 31.

10. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

11. Ibid., p. 53.

12. Ibid., p. 124.

13. Ibid., p. 312.

14. Ibid., pp. 314-315.

15. Ibid., pp. 421-422.

16. Ibid., p. 428.

17. McFeely, William S. Fredrick Douglas. (New York:W.W.Norton & Co., 1991), p. 371.

18. Adams, The Epic of America, pp. 413-414.

19. Ibid., p. 422.