How the American Dream has changed for the worse over time - Research Paper Example

It is now infused with both an obsession with work and a desire to get rich quickly. Benjamin Franklin first talked about the American Dream in his Autobiography. He viewed it as in part the religious freedom that Pennsylvania embodied (Guercio). In modern times, religious freedom is not encompassed in our American Dream because we have largely accomplished it. No longer do religious minorities have to live in fear, there is an enforced freedom of religion in our nation, and thus I contend that that is why religious freedom is no longer part of the American Dream.

But with the loss of this virtue comes a loss of some tolerance. We still have religious persecution. For instance, after 9/11 we saw a rapid increase in both state sponsored and personal harassment against Muslims. Many see Islamicists as threats to our freedom, and thus have no problem infringing upon religious freedom to ensure our safety. The Early American dream, however, is best embodied by the American story of immigrants. Our nation was built on immigrants, Chinese Immigrants built our transcontinental railroad, Irish Immigrants helped hold our nation together by fighting in the civil war, and German immigrants like Albert Einstein helped ensure we could maintain our presence around the world in World War 2.

These immigrants built an idea of the American Dream that it was not necessarily easy, but that, with hard work, economic success could be gained. It was the willingness to work hard, to accept horrible conditions and racism, that helped immigrants like the Irish work their way up the societal totem pole and become accepted members of society. At first, they were hated by many, denied jobs, and even spit on (Irish Immigrants). While this hatred of the Irish was not part of the American Dream, what the Irish were able to accomplish was.

After all, within about a century of being the scourge of the nation, an Irishman, John F Kennedy, was elected President. This advancement through social prejudice was once key to the American Dream, the kind of ideals our Founding Fathers used to enforce the ideas of our young nation, in contrast the oppression and prejudices of the old world (Todays American Dream). Some aspects of the American Dream were also defined with the settlement of the West, as settlers sought a place where they were not bound by laws or social constructs (Zinn).

Yet this willingness to sell everything to head west was part of a wider aspect of the American dream, it embodied the idea that material possessions were worth nothing when compared to freedom and equality (Kozol). Manifest destiny, the settlement of Alaska, and the movement to explore space were all parts of this exploration aspect of the American Dream (Library of Congress). Yet these ideals of the American dream began to fall apart with industrialization. With factories and mass-produced consumer goods, people became less obsessed with freedom and more obsessed with amassing material wealth (Bender).

They were someone content with their current state of freedom, white males at least, and thus accepted their situation and, rather than try and change the system as a whole, accepted it and just tried to improve their situation. With the advent of credit and a huge new advertisement program, Americans became obsessed with material goods. This