The American Dream: a Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.
• Position: Book Review

BY JIM CULLEN OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2003, 214 PAGES, $25.00

Martin Luther King, Jr. was no the only American who had dream. Conceived through a collective dream of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the U.S. is nation of oneirophiles. What connects its motley population and distinguishes it from every other society is not ethnicity, religion, or language, but a set of shared ideal and aspirations commonly referred to as the American Dream. No on can begin to understand this court try without coming to terms with this vision.

In this compact study, Jim Cullen limits his ambitions, as if mocking the grandiosity of his subject. The author offers his take on a half-dozen overlapping views of the American Dream. He recognizes that his accounts are not exhaustive and that he has left other versions undiscussed. Nowhere does Cullen's book even mention one of the most influential of American dreamers--Horatio Alger, Jr., the prolific concocter of popular novels about young men who, by dint of luck and pluck, rise above their modest origins to the pinnacle of worldly success. However, Cullen's insights and anecdotes fulfill his goal of being suggestive and provocative.

The American Dream, which evolved out of its author's attempt to trace the history of our nation's patriotism, is organized in rough chronological order--from the English Puritans whose Biblical vision inspired a struggle to construct what Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop called a "city upon a hill" to contemporary citizens who yearn for an effortless existence. Cullen delineates the Puritan model of the good life in the New England wilderness from the secular aspirations of the nation's Founding Fathers. He identifies later variants in the dream of upward mobility, equality, and home ownership, as well as the gambler's...