American Dream

The Colonial Period

The explicit formulation of the American Dream began in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (written between 1771 and 1789), which has established him as the colonial era's archetypal self-made man, led Weber to identify him as the personification of the capitalist work ethic. Through his own example, Franklin promoted an organized and virtuous lifestyle as the best means to secure wealth in an expanding commercial economy. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur offered an agrarian counterpart: Touting the promise of American agrarian life, he suggested in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) that the availability of land in America promised the individual who worked hard the opportunity to become a “new man.” Configured as a product of character and self-determination, the American Dream of wealth and success thus became a defining aspiration for white American men.

The Nineteenth Century

If Franklin and Crèvecoeur embodied formulas by which economic success could be achieved, the market revolution, urbanization, and industrialization, provided many Americans in the nineteenth century with the conditions necessary for its fulfillment and prompted the emergence of a middle class that associated manliness with character and the achievement of success. The United States' rapidly expanding cities offered business and industry as paths to the American Dream, and Horatio Alger's stories of impoverished urban male characters rising to positions of affluence encouraged a belief in economic mobility, the myth of the self-made man, and the notion that hard work would assure business success. Meanwhile, western expansion reinforced the association between manhood, agrarianism, and the American Dream by bolstering American men's aspirations to land ownership. By 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner could affirm that the interrelation between land availability, economic opportunity, and manhood was the defining feature of American history and the basis of American national identity. In Turner's view, the availability of land in the West provided men with a chance to succeed, while the practical experience of western life reinforced qualities of individualism, self-reliance, and perseverance, all considered essential to both success and manliness.

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