The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation

From the Puritan wish for religious freedom to the freeing of the slaves, American history has been one long struggle for freedom since the beginning. The question of equality has always persisted alongside these various fights for freedom, often uncomfortably. For the author of this book, both freedom and equality are necessary conditions for the American Dream to be meaningfully fulfilled.

Cullen writes that for the American colonists before the Revolution, “freedom was not a goal to be gained; it was a cherished possession the colonists wanted to prevent being lost” (44). After the influence of published works like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the colonists began to feel themselves as existing in a state of unfreedom in their relationship to Britain and fought to achieve freedom during the Revolution.

The obvious contradiction here is that the American Revolution was a revolution for freedom carried out by slaveholders. The Founding Fathers to some extent realized that “the attainment of their dream could encourage others to pursue theirs” (47)—namely, the Founding Fathers’ own slaves—and Thomas Jefferson himself labored with this contradiction in his drafting of the