The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope

The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies

by Andrew Delbanco

Since we discovered that, in Tocqueville's words, "the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the heart," how have we Americans made do? In The Real American Dream one of the nation's premier literary scholars searches out the symbols and stories by which Americans have reached for something beyond worldly desire. A spiritual history ranging from the first English settlements to the present day, the book is also a lively, deeply learned meditation on hope.Andrew Delbanco tells of the stringent God of Protestant Christianity, who exerted immense force over the language, institutions, and customs of the culture for nearly 200 years. He describes the falling away of this God and the rise of the idea of a sacred nation-state. And, finally, he speaks of our own moment, when symbols of nationalism are in decline, leaving us with nothing to satisfy the longing for transcendence once sustained by God and nation. From the Christian story that expressed the earliest Puritan yearnings to New Age spirituality, apocalyptic environmentalism, and the multicultural search for ancestral roots that divert our own, The Real American Dream evokes the tidal rhythm of American history. It shows how Americans have organized their days and ordered their lives--and ultimately created a culture--to make sense of the pain, desire, pleasure, and fear that are the stuff of human experience. In a time of cultural crisis, when the old stories seem to be faltering, this book offers a lesson in the painstaking remaking of the American dream.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics, Philosophy, School, Theology

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 1999

About the author

Andrew H. Delbanco (born 1952) is Director of American Studies at Columbia University and has been Columbia's Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities since 1995. He writes extensively on American literary and religious history.

Reviews

[Meggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because Tim Keller referenced it in Counterfeit Gods. I was curious what this scholarly book (taken from DelBanco’s three speeches at Harvard in 1999) would say for our current world/culture and for my outlook on life. Turns out that even though these speeches were delivered 17 years ago, DelBanco continues to have insight on our culture’s self-worship and lack of direction.
DelBanco traces our nation’s focus and purpose since the Puritans. First, we were directed by God and our faith in Him, then to nation worship and patriotism and now to a directionless focus on self. His insight helped me understand that we are all designed to worship something, and our country as progressed (or regressed) in that worship. While DelBanco does not expressly offer Christian views, he certainly points to how our current path of self-worship is so destructive. He quotes Tocqueville and Emerson extensively, and I was amazed at how those old voices continue to speak truth about our culture today.
Here is one insightful quote. Keep in mind that this was written in 1999, but yet remains so insightful for our current state of social media and self-absorption:
“...the modern self tries to compensate with posturing and competitive self-display as it feels itself more and more cut off from anything substantial or enduring. It breaks down under bombardment by images that merge fantasy with reality, or by advertising that becomes news. In such a world it is impossible to distinguish foreground from background or the spurious from the authentic.” (p. 104).

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another one of those "books on my shelves" that I picked up -- long ago (2000) -- but only now rediscovered and read. And yet, it has weathered time well.

It's an amazingly brief work (120 pp) in today's world of mega-page novels and tomes, but it has some lovely ideas therein nonetheless.

In essence, he is probing the nature of what we Americans have thought to be "the American dream" -- the "transcendent narrative that we tell ourselves about ourselves" --since our beginning as a people on this continent.

He discusses this in three chapters entitled "God," "Nation," and "Self." Under the first, he notes the extreme religiosity that marked so many of the early colonists and which continued throughout the Revolutionary period. Since so many of the first settlers were "dissenters" from the prevailing state religion of their homelands in the early years -- primarily that of Anglicanism in Britain -- they saw themselves as a "new people" in a "new land," given an opportunity by God to create a pure order apart from the failings of the Old World. (Delbanco notes, however, that this conception struggled with the awkward fact that this "new world" was filled with Native peoples with whom the colonists frequently clashed and whom, over time, were expelled from their homelands by these same colonists.)

In the second period -- "Nation" -- this same religious "tone" was transferred to "the people as a nation," and manifested itself through the rapid spread of Americans throughout the continent (further displacing Native peoples and leading to war with the Mexicans). Now "the nation" was destined by God to be a unique place of freedom for all peoples (except for the Natives, Mexicans, and Blacks); America had a unique Manifest Destiny to fill the land "from sea to shining sea" as well as to serve as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to all humankind.

Delbanco tells this story but by no means does so in a way that debunks or mocks it, in good part because our history is far from being only negative or oppressive. The greatest parts of the American myth -- freedom and justice for all -- has also served, however long the time to be fully realized, to eliminate slavery, to correct workplace injustices, and to enlarge the understanding of who has the right to participate in, and fully belong to, the polity.

Then, like so many other observers, he notes that "the '60s" and all that followed seemingly broke something. There was a societal retreat from trust -- in institutions, yes, but also in each other -- and a retreat into the Self, which is his third portion of the book. "What was lost," he writes, "was any conception of a common destiny worth tears, sacrifice, and maybe even death.... Once one gets past the gestural difference between flag waving and nose thumbing, it is hard to find, on the right or the left, anything resembling genuine engagement with the life of the polity." And, he observes, "such engagement is rare because it requires a collective vision of a better future, which has become even rarer."

He says that his book can also be looked at as an attempt to portray our "history of hope" in something larger than ourselves, something accountable for who we are and what we have collectively accomplished. "Today, [however] hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone." Of course, he wrote this before the rise of today's tribal groupings in which a large number of people seem to have transferred their hope.

There has always been an especially acute sense of tension between the "individual" and the "larger community" -- what the Founders called "the commonwealth" -- in the United States, and the focal point has shifted widely (even wildly) over the years. But the Founders -- and such great successors as Abraham Lincoln -- "never disconnected [the idea] of competitive individualism under protection of the Union from the demand that each citizen bear some measure of responsibility for his fellows." For Lincoln, especially, "his deepest belief was that to save the Union mean tot enlarge the circle of hope."

But, Delbanco asks, "who looks today to the widening of the circle?"

This remains a good question. Too many of us, it seems to me, are intent upon perhaps widening OUR circle but refuse to acknowledge that there is possible any sort of more inclusive circle. "People who think like me" we welcomed but otherwise...?

Where, indeed, can we find a more hopeful INCLUSIVE vision of the future? Who, indeed, is there who dares to try to envision such today?

Must we be stuck with shrunken souls and limited sight?

Good questions to ponder and, more important, urgent ones demanding an answer...SOON!

[Trinki Brueckner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This superb little book is part history, part political philosophy. It has three chapters: God, Nation, Self, and discusses how each of these informed the American dream and helped ward off melancholy and give individuals and our country an animating principle, something to be part of, and to strive for. I just ordered my own copy - it is definitely worth owning.

[Neil C · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The quest for prosperity is no remedy for melancholy, but a passion to secure justice by erasing the line that divides those with hope from those without home can be.”

[Isabella Roh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating account of culture, based off a postmodern definition of the term, recounting American history from an assumption of God and patriotism both being myths. Delbanco's work reads a bit like a patchwork quilt, made of other people's words--namely Tocqueville, Whitman, and Emerson.

[Paul, · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I thought his analysis of American history was compelling.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

Tocqueville thought that envy and longing were built into American life: that Americans suffered from the illusion that equality could eradicate their envy and prosperity could quench their yearning for happiness. These were illusory hopes, he believed, because "the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy [the human] heart. "4

THE HISTORY of hope I have tried to sketch in this book is one of diminution. At first, the self expanded toward (and was sometimes overwhelmed by) the vastness of God. From the early republic to the Great Society, it remained implicated in a national ideal lesser than God but larger and more enduring than any individual citizen. Today, hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone.

But, in a paradox that Tocqueville grasped long ago, the cost of possessive individualism can be the loss of the nation itself- I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.37 Lincoln never disconnected his ideal of competitive individualism under protection of the Union from the demand that each citizen bear some measure of responsibility for his fellows. Everything he wrote about the rights of the self (culminating in the Second Inaugural Address) was inflected by a sense of public responsibility; and, of everything he believed, his deepest belief was that to save the Union meant to enlarge the circle of hope.

There is a phrase in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks that strikes me in this connection as a useful way of thinking about the life cycle of ideas-a geological metaphor by which Gramsci represents the time-lag between the appearance of new ideas and the disappearance of old ones. "All previous philosophy," he says, leaves "stratified deposits in popular philoso- phy."41 The deposited ideas of Christianity and civil religion are still the bedrock of our culture, whatever intellectuals may think of them. And the history of ideas is usually better understood as a process of incorporation and transformation than as a series of successive movements discrete and distinct from one another.

This sapping of symbolic power from transcendent ideas such as God and nation cannot, in the end, be replenished by intensified local commitments-because the most urgent problems of our time are not local problems. We have a global marketplace, but the meager regulatory institutions we have developed (United Nations, World Bank, World Court, International Monetary Fund) have nothing like the power they need to moderate the turbulence of the market or to check the cruelties of local political regimes. From time to time we are embarrassed to be reminded that our gym shoes are made in sweatshops by Asian children, or that our tobacco companies, a bit more hampered than they used to be at home, are free, and zealous, to export cancer abroad. But embarrassment, alas, has no efficacy.

[Evelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays are adapted from a series of lectures given at Harvard University in 1998. They survey hope as epitomized through the American dream from the colonial period through the present day. The focus in the essays is first on colonial New England where hope was defined and manifested through religious belief. Then on the early American experiment until the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction where hope became part of the great social experiment and was advanced through government actions.

The author then skips to the present day (1990s) to bemoan the contraction of hope and its current manifestation as a part of self. That self-focus has led to a variety of social ills and depression that won’t be cured until a new broader definition of hope is developed that once again focuses on curing societal ills and not simply on me.

The essays can be tedious at times and occasionally feel dated. Yet they remain surprisingly relevant. The last one arguably is quite accurate in describing what ails the United States today despite people being inherently collegial and good … it is the absence of the hope because people have become self-centered and focused upon consumerism rather than the Biblical values of charity and goodness. It offers hope that once these issues are addressed the country can overcome its malaise.

[George Dibble · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

When I was a kid I wanted to be a Marine. Desperately so. I had a real Marine uniform from the San Diego Navy base and I had all these pins and medals on its chest. I would read books about World War II and about Green Berets and Army Rangers. I'd lie in bed and stare at the ceiling so pleased, thinking about being in the Middle Eastern desert with a fully automatic gun with my brothers. I used to have this idea of being a good guy; and how the best guys are the ones keeping us safe over there. And, really, anyone who serves, especially on the front lines, they have my respect. All of it. But, if I were to join the military, my reasons are no longer the same.

--

Read for a class and I enjoyed it. Didn't know much about the Puritans beforehand and now I do. I didn't know how much the LDS church is basically Puritan. I also enjoyed learning more about Abraham Lincoln and learned him more as a person.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting way to briefly consider the ways in which Americans have thought of themselves as part of a bigger story than their individual lives. Delbanco doesn't idealize the past, and he notes that jeremiads lamenting a lost sense of purpose have a long history in American culture. These guardrails help him to offer a thoughtful overview of American identity. He looks at the Puritan view of individuals and society under God and then the emergence of 19th- and 20th-century American nationalism based on the ideal of equality for all, and follows those considerations with an attempt to make sense of our more fractured, consumeristic, and individualistic age in which we have a more difficult time agreeing on a shared story.

[Tony Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book (more of a long essay published in 1999) reflects how hope defined the American experience and its place in developing our nation's institutions. From the early settlements in New England to the end of the 20th Century, one can gleen Andrew Debanco's intellectual depths to help us understand the American dream and its evolution.

An insightful reflection. It reminded me of my time deeply engaged in American Intellectual History, and Debanco allowed me to contemplate his perspectives on the American dream in the 2020s.

Caution: This is not a "light" read. Expect a more academic narrative when undertaking this book.

[Jaewon Park · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Real American Dream, Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor, traces the contours of hope through American history. His diagnosis: the capacity of hope has significantly diminished to a near vanishing point as the source of hope has shifted from God to Nation and finally to Self. Delbanco offers little solution in this short book, but he clearly shows that human beings must connect with something larger than themselves in order to have hope in any meaningful sense of the word

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant. Delbanco traces the movement and ever diminishing American center of transcendence and source of meaning from God at it's founding, country, to, ultimately, self. He also predicts the rise of a new civic cultus that will emerge to fill the growing void and dissatisfaction with our disenchanted world.

[Hayden Nesbit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic survey of American life and the primary “stories” inhabited to bolster hope. The story of a transcendent God gave way to the story of united Nation which then, with diminishing narratives and symbols, weakened to the fragile story of Self. Now, unless compelling narratives or symbols of hope arise we will continue to endure Tocqueville’s “melancholy in the midst of abundance.”

[Michael Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit dated, as most social commentaries are a quarter century after publication, but still insightful. The first two chapters are excellent. I’d love to know how Delbanco would write the third chapter today.

[Mike Maughan]

Read in Provo, UT. Recommended by Neil York

[Paul Womack · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read in 1999, a re-read for the new year. Much food for thought on ideas and perceptions that shape individual’s and the culture. Very fine book.

[Mark Clinard · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read by author, Andrew Delbanco. Brings much I site about the history of our country as it pertains to cultural criticisms. This book is well researched.

[J. J.]

So much prescience in such a small package! Delbanco is a fascinating thinker. I’m hooked.

[Lydia Newman]

Read for class!

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful and challenging (and brief) reflection on the sources of American hope. What follows is more summary (with extensive quotation) than critique. If I had criticism it would be about transitions from period to period, especially from nation to self, but that does not diminish his thought and beautiful style. "The premise of this book is that human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days - pain, desire, pleasure, fear - into a story. When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope. And if such a sustaining narrative establishes itself over time in the minds of a substantial number of people, we call it culture." In surveying American history he moves through various sources of hope, from God, through nation, to the self.

The first two posit something outside the self as a source of hope. Delbanco is a careful and sympathetic student of the Puritans, and while these Calvinists saw no room for human effort in salvation, he finds their emphasis on right human actions as the measure of salvation a connection to the wider stream of American pragmatism.

Puritan salvation is about getting beyond the self. He tells a wonderful story about attending an AA meeting and hearing a first time attender rail with wounded pride against the unfairness of his situation. He says he came to a better understanding of the Puritan understanding of the human condition and grace when the man sitting next to him leaned over and said "I used to feel that way too, before I achieved low self-esteem." For the Puritans self must be escaped from into the service of other people. "This was the core idea of the first phase of American history - that the radical helplessness disclosed by self-love can only be transcended by loving God, and that love of God is manifest in love of other persons."

From the Puritans he discusses the movement of hope from God to nation using Emerson, Toqueville, and especially Lincoln. He quotes Toqueville saying that Americans displayed a "strange melancholy in the midst of abundance," but yet they found their hope in the possibility of human re-creation. Lincoln connects the melancholy and the hope -

"The lesson of Lincoln's life - the life he lived, and the life that endures in our national memory - is that the quest for prosperity is no remedy for melancholy, but that a passion to secure justice by erasing the line that divides those with hope from those without hope can be."

Delbanco's final chapter begins with an acknowledgement that he is pursuing a jeremiad of sorts. "The HISTORY of hope I have tried to sketch in this book is one of diminution. At first, the self expanded toward (and was sometimes overwhelmed by) the vastness of God. From the early republic to the Great Society, is remained implicated in a national ideal lesser than God but larger and more enduring than any individual citizen. Today, hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone."

It is a self defined by consumer culture, that has experienced "the disappearance of judgment, the absorption of the reflective self (the "temperate" mind that Jefferson thought indispensable to democracy) into unconscious conformity with other interchangeable products of the marketplace." For Delbanco consumer culture has a strong ability to "evacuate the self" and leave us alone with ourselves. "In its forced consumption of masscult, the modern self becomes all and nothing at the same time, and Toqueville's free individual, which he considered American's gift to the world, becomes the creature he so presciently described - marooned in a perpetual present, playing alone with its trinkets and baubles." This is because though "we live in an age of unprecedented wealth, ... in the realm of narrative and symbol, we are deprived."

Here, in discussing the loss of symbols in modern culture, and in several other places (talking about statistics and self-esteem) this book echoes some of the same themes in Stiver's Technolgy as Magic.

Delbanco is not afraid to ask some difficult questions about modern "culture." (Go back to the definition he began with for context) "From the comfort of the academy, we look at our past and are quick to say that a culture with too little freedom and too much brutality was a bad culture. But do we have the nerve to say of ourselves that a culture locked in a soul-starving present, in which the highest aspiration - for those who can afford to try - is to keep the body forever young, is not culture at all?" Amid all of this he finds an "unslaked craving for transcendence" and many new voluntary associations that unfortunately "turn inward away from public engagement." He is confident faith will reemerge, but predicting its form is impossible. Instead what the teacher needs to do is to follow Emerson and "let us do what we can to rekindle the smoldering nigh quenched fire on the altar."

[Francine Apollo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little book (only 118 pages with great Notes section for further reading) is a tad academic but don't let that scare you off. Delbanco talks about the customs and institutions that have formed American culture for over 200 years. This is really a spiritual history of America.

I found this book reasonable and entertaining at times. The author puts forth some fascinating ideas. I have always believed that this Nation came into being because of Hope; Delbanco makes his case for the same idea and discusses our current age in which so many do not feel Hope.

This book is worth a few hours of your time. Look for it!

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting short work on the larger trends of American history - from Faith in God to Faith in Democracy to Faith In Self. Last chapter seems a bit dated but still some thought provoking ideas and questions.

If you are interested in American history, literature and culture it is worth a read.

[Ke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Story and culture (1), Melancholy (2-5), History of pugilism in America (4-5), Why? (8) (in history), Love of God vs. hate of people (18), Nation (79), power (91-), Polls for children, Observations of the present

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wonderful little book captures the progress (or decline?) of the American "soul" in three stages: God, Nation, Self. Delbanco artfully weaves classic literature and personal reflection into a profound meditation. I recommend this as an excellent comfy chair and hot beverage book.

[Jeremy]

Mentioned positively by Tim Keller here. The primary grand narrative of U.S. society moved from God, to nation, to self. Keller summarizes part of this book in Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (pp. 75–77).

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

A depressing book, believe it or not.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. A jeremiad against our Western love-affair with human autonomy. Very sharp. Loved this book.

[Bradford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delbanco's account of hope, American style: from God to Nation to Self. Short, readable, profound, thought-provoking.