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576 Unit 5 Social Change
Case Study: Is the American Dream Dying?
Americans have long expected to achieve a higher standard of liv- ing than their parents. Instead, according to Katherine Newman (1994), social and economic change are placing the American Dream in jeop- ardy. The downscaling of jobs and pay that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s has replaced earlier optimism with anger, doubt, and fear.
Newman spent two years conducting personal interviews with 150 Americans living in “Pleasanton,” a suburban community representative of much of America. Pleasanton is a mix of skilled blue-collar workers and white-collar professionals from a variety of ethnic and religious ori- gins. Her respondents were schoolteachers, guidance counselors, and sixty families whose children were then grown.
The residents of Pleasanton believed that the promise of America had taken an unexpected wrong turn, and they were trying to make sense of it. Newman attempted to understand the residents’ view of this downward mobility. The stresses associated with changing economic conditions, she believed, would bring cultural expectations, disappoint- ments, and conflicts close enough to the surface for a trained social sci- entist to see. As the study progressed, she did, in fact, see conflict between parents and grown children, disagreements along lines of race and ethnicity, and unhappy marriages. The following statement reveals a baby boomer’s shattered confidence in the American Dream.
I’ll never have what my parents had. I can’t even dream of that. I’m living a lifestyle that’s way lower than it was when I was growing up and it’s depressing. You know it’s a rude awakening when you’re out in the world on your own. . . . I took what was given to me and tried to use it the best way I could. Even if you are a hard worker and you never skipped a beat, you followed all the rules, did every- thing they told you you were supposed to do, it’s still horrendous. They lied to me. You don’t get where you were supposed to wind up. At the end of the road it isn’t there. I worked all those years and then I didn’t get to candy land. The prize wasn’t there . . . (Newman, 1994:3).
After a detailed and often personal exploration of what Newman calls the “withering American Dream,” she turns to the larger social and polit- ical implications for society. She explores the transition from a society of upward mobility based on effort and merit to a society in which social classes of birth increasingly dictate future social and economic positions.