Prep: The American Dream

Argument

Closely read each of the three texts below and write a source-based argument on the topic below.

Topic: Is the American Dream still alive?

Your Task: Carefully read each of the three texts provided. Then, using evidence from ALL THE TEXTS, write a well-developed argument regarding whether or not the American Dream is still alive. Clearly establish your claim, distinguish your claim from alternate or opposing claims, and use specific, relevant, and sufficient evidence from the three texts to develop your argument. Do not simply summarize each text.

Guidelines:

Be sure to:

• Establish your claim regarding whether or not the American dream is still alive.

• Distinguish your claim from alternate or opposing claims

• Use specific, relevant, and sufficient evidence from at least three of the texts to develop your argument

• Identify each source that you reference by text number and line number(s) or graphic (for example: Text 1, line 4 or Text 2, graphic)

• Organize your ideas in a cohesive and coherent manner

• Maintain a formal style of writing

• Follow the conventions of standard written English

Texts:

Text 1 – Rethinking the American Dream

Text 2 – The American dream Is Not Dead

Text 3 – Saving Horatio Alger

Article 1: From "Vanity Fair” magazine

"Rethinking the American Dream"

by David Kamp

March 5, 2009

As a people, we Americans are unique in having such a thing, a more or less Official National Dream. (There is no correspondingly stirring Canadian Dream or Slovakian Dream.) It is part of our charter—as articulated in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, in the famous bit about “certain unalienable Rights” that include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—and it is what makes our country and our way of life attractive and magnetic to people in other lands.

But now fast-forward to the year 2009, the final Friday of January. The new president is surveying the dire economy he has been charged with righting—600,000 jobs lost in January alone, a gross domestic product that shrank 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 2008, the worst contraction in almost 30 years. Assessing these numbers, Barack Obama, a man who normally exudes hopefulness for a living, pronounces them a “continuing disaster for America’s working families,” a disaster that amounts to no less, he says, than “the American Dream in reverse.”

In reverse. Imagine this in terms of Hart’s life: out of the taxicab, back on the subway, back to the tenements, back to cramped cohabitation with Mom and Dad, back to gray mornings and the grim smell of actual want.

You probably don’t even have to imagine, for chances are that of late you have experienced some degree of reversal yourself, or at the very least have had friends or loved ones get laid off, lose their homes, or just find themselves forced to give up certain perks and amenities (restaurant meals, cable TV, salon haircuts) that were taken for granted as recently as a year ago.

These are tough times for the American Dream. As the safe routines of our lives have come undone, so has our characteristic optimism—not only our belief that the future is full of limitless possibility, but our faith that things will eventually return to normal, whatever “normal” was before the recession hit. There is even worry that the dream may be over—that we currently living Americans are the unfortunate ones who shall bear witness to that deflating moment in history when the promise of this country began to wither. This is the “sapping of confidence” that President Obama alluded to in his inaugural address, the “nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.”

Article 2: From CNBC

American dream is not dead

by Jessica Dickler

Thursday, 4 Feb 2016 | 7:54 AM ET

Rumors of the American dream being dead have been greatly exaggerated.

To that point, 63 percent of Americans believe they are living the American dream, according to a recent report, up from 59 percent in 2011.

More Americans also credit determination and hard work as the most important success factors in their financial well-being than in the report's recent history. The Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll reprise the same questions each year to compare sentiment now to sentiment during and after the Great Recession.

"When it comes to getting ahead, more people than ever think it's their own talents and hard work," noted Joseph McMahon, the poll's lead researcher. "There's a belief it's on you as an individual to make it happen."

No doubt for those trying to get by, it's been a rough ride. There are also signs that plenty of people still feel under financial pressure.

Almost half, or 45 percent, of those polled rated their personal financial situation as excellent or good, which was a three-year high. However, 54 percent said their personal financial situation was only fair or poor.

During the recession, 59 percent were confident they had enough of a financial cushion in the event of a job loss or significant decrease in income, but fewer said the same in 2016. Nearly half of the respondents said they still find it difficult to save for retirement. Another 15 percent said it was hard to make ends meet every month.

"There's a contradiction going on here," said Alec Levenson, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. With low unemployment but sluggish wage growth, the economy has been growing at a steady but slow rate since the recession.

"This is the economy that continues to stump us in terms of which direction we are heading," he added.

"We have people who are worried about their future and people who think they are fine. One reason is because they are paying down debt, so they don't have as much cash on hand," Levenson said. "In economic terms, they are in better shape, but until they get out from underneath that debt entirely, they won't feel more financially secure."

In fact, nearly twice as many Americans said that personal debt is an obstacle rather than a stepping stone to achieving the American dream.

Fifty-seven percent of those polled said easy credit encourages people to spend beyond their means, ultimately burdening them with high levels of debt and years of interest payments, compared to just 36 percent who said it makes it possible to pay for college, start a business, buy a car and purchase a home.

Still, 42 percent of the people surveyed said they expect their financial situation to improve in the next year, up slightly from 37 percent six years ago.

"The thing about this country, even in the midst of things not going that well economically, there's this strong spirit," Levenson said, adding, "That's always been one of the things that made America resilient."

The Allstate/National Journal poll surveyed 1,000 adults in January to measure changes in opinions and attitudes.

Article 3: From the Brookings Institution

“Saving Horatio Alger” by Richard V. Reeves

Many countries support the idea of meritocracy, but only in America is equality of opportunity a virtual national religion, reconciling individual liberty—the freedom to get ahead and “make something of yourself”—with societal equality. It is a philosophy of egalitarian individualism. The measure of American equality is not the income gap between the poor and the rich, but the chance to trade places.

In his second inaugural address in 2013, Barack Obama declared: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

President Obama was not saying that every little girl does have that chance, but that she should. The moral claim that each individual has the right to succeed is implicit in our “creed,” the Declaration of Independence, when it proclaims “All men are created equal.” In his first draft of that historic document, Thomas Jefferson was more expansive, writing that all were created “equal and independent.” Although the word was edited out, the sentiment was not.

The Declaration was a statement about the relationship between the United States and Great Britain, but it was also a statement about Americans themselves. The United States was to be a self-made nation comprised of self-made men. Alexis de Tocqueville—the first of many clever Frenchmen to wow the American reading classes—suffused his Democracy in America with admiration of the young nation’s “manly and legitimate passion for equality,” while Abraham Lincoln extolled his countrymen’s “genius for independence.”

There is a simple formula here—equality plus independence adds up to the promise of upward mobility—which creates an appealing image: the nation’s social, political, and economic landscape as a vast, level playing field upon which all individuals can exercise their freedom to succeed. Hence the toddlers who show up at daycare centers in T-shirts emblazoned “Future President.” Hence Americans’ culture of competitiveness, their obsession with sports, their frequent and all-purpose references to “the rules of the game” and to “fairness.” Hence the patriotism-tinged pride of the successful, exulting not only in their own grit and prowess, but also in the meritocratic system that gave them scope and opportunity.

Take one standard indicator of mobility: the likelihood that children will, as adults, ascend to a higher rung on the income ladder than their parents. In a completely mobile, fluid society, a child raised on the bottom rung of the income ladder (usually defined as the bottom fifth of the distribution) would theoretically have as good a chance as any of making it to the top, and no greater risk of remaining trapped at the bottom. But the U.S. suffers from a high degree of intergenerational "stickiness" at the bottom of the income distribution. Children born on the bottom rung have a four in 10 chance of remaining stuck there in adulthood (between 36 percent and 43 percent, depending on the dataset), and a very slim chance (between 4 percent and 10 percent) of making it to the top.