In his 1997 book Assimilation, American Style, Peter D. Salins argues for the value of immigrants in American life while simultaneously mounting a conservative critique of the types of cultural changes engendered by immigration, including multicultural instruction, institutionalized use of languages other than English, and “anti-Americanism” more generally.
Salins? arguments, as fits his pro-assimilationist position, are predicated on stability. America is a constant value and “immigrants would be welcome as full members of the American family” if they could adapt themselves to the fixed core ideas that define that “family”: “First, they had to accept English as the national language. Second, they were expected to take pride in their national identity and believe in America?s liberal democratic and egalitarian principles.
Third, they were expected to live by what is referred to as the Protestant ethic (to be self-reliant, hardworking, and morally upright)” (6). But these core ideas themselves are situated atop an even firmer ideological bedrock. “Americans,” Salins claims, “have been animated by two primordial impulses that have distinguished them from other nations […]: a millenarian faith in their country?s historic destiny as the world?s exemplar of liberal principles of governance and an unrelenting determination that the United States should expand on all fronts” (20). Given the progressive, expansionist nature of these principles, it?s easy to see why Salins would recognize immigrants? value since their marginalized position, a function of both their distance from the promised bounty of American success and their unfamiliarity with established ways of doing things in their new country, made them a motivated labor force that was, crucially, also able to provide a regular infusion of new ideas to support the United States? expansion Immigrants? value to America, in other words, has been a function of their difference, their ability to incite change.
As Salins points out, “Americans? enduring enthusiasm for „progress?” means that America is “a country that is always willing to embrace change” (54-55). The rub here, of course, is that while immigrants? cultural difference, as a precipitant of progress and change, gives them the potential to become ideal Americans, it also threatens to collapse the meaning of Americanness by robbing the term of any stabilizing center.
This is why Salins feels the need to define the “simple precepts” of Americanness that he places at the core of his assimilationist project: they provide a stabilizing referent to counterbalance the potentially destabilizing changes wrought by a social imperative towards “unrelenting” expansion. There is nothing particularly revolutionary about Salins? definitions of Americanness here, and in fact they should seem quite familiar. The contractual elements that Salins identifies are more widely circulated as core tenets of that central American story: the American Dream. In this narrative, the self-made man, the paradigmatic American Dream figure, is able to rise to success so long as he works hard and buys into the American way.
The self-made man, however, is an ideal American Dream figure not just because he believes in the type of American principles that Salins describes—particularly the Protestant ethic—but also because he embodies the “primordial impulses” that Salins refers to: because the notion of self-making encodes the idea of a new self, he is the ideal representative figure for a nation that thinks of itself as a new world. Just as Salins places American precepts side by side with animating American ideals, even though they would appear to be in tension, so too is the story of the self-made man as newly created, self-propelling individual told alongside that of the self-made man as hard-worker, despite the way that the newness encoded in the former seems to be undercut by the conventionality of the latter.
I suggest that disentangling these narrative threads helps to reveal the role the American Dream—as a meta-narrative about the meaning of both America and Americanness—plays in mediating the relationship between the center and the margins in American society. Despitethe way that these two narratives conflict—because of their respective presuppositions of fluidity and change, on the one hand, and order and stability, on the other—they are often told together, I suggest, as a way of encouraging the assimilation of the energy and innovation found on the margins—a spur to progress—while maintaining the essential division between center and margin—a means of ensuring a stable social structure. In short, I will argue in this dissertation that the American Dream exists as an (often self-reflexive) narrative of American identity that attempts to balance social stability with the freedom and creative energy demanded by a national commitment to progress.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Another Essay on The Great Gatsby and the American Dream: Passing,
Criminality, and the Self-Made Man
Chapter 2: The Gangster in the Boardroom: Scarface and the Alger Hero
Chapter 3: Coming Home: Mobility, Domesticity, and the American Dream in On
the Road
Chapter 4: The Joy Luck Club and the Margins: Relocating the American Dream
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Vita
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The American Dream And The Margins in Twentieth Century Fiction
