The American Dream Ethos
As we stare out the windows of this building we ponder what we want to do with our lives. What do we want to do after we leave this place with a degree in hand? Most people think lofty high rises and six figure salaries. Yet if you asked most youth and working class citizens about how they view the future you’d get bitterness and uncertainty rather than hope and joy and in their voices. The American dream has constructed and enforced an idealized concept due to the emotional and physical barriers in the economy, politics, and it’s portrayal in the media.
The American dream is a national ethos of the United States. In the colonial days, it was easier to hold the right of freedom of speech without holding the fear of being censored or threatened …show more content…
To achieve widespread consumerism, manufactured items came with consumer credit offered on a revolving basis, often by the manufacturers of the goods. During that decade, about two-thirds of the gross national product became attributable to consumer spending; this share has persisted ever since.
The set of ideals that make up the American Dream have been discussed and glorified by various American writers throughout history. The phrase “American Dream” was popularized by historian, James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book “Epic of America”. The idea was aided immeasurably by political events from the 1930s through the 1970s.
The concept of home ownership and mortgage credit was the first part of the dream that was given government assistance, beginning in the 1930s. Using a model first developed during World War I to aid farmers by providing standard mortgages, the Hoover administration, followed by the Roosevelt administration, began extending government intervention to the banks making residential mortgages. During the Great Depression many banks failed, and in order to preserve their assets and stabilize the market for home mortgages, Congress created several agencies dedicated to preserving the market for mortgages which benefited both homeowners and banks. The Federal Housing Administration and the Federal National Mortgage …show more content…
This term was coined in 1949 at the beginning of what turned out to be the baby boom. The phrase ''nuclear family,'' meaning a married man and woman living with their offspring, was introduced by the anthropologist George Murdock, who openly acknowledged the implicit metaphor: ''Among the majority of the peoples on earth, nuclear families are combined, like atoms in a molecule, into larger aggregates.'' But he also noted that in our own society, the nuclear family was the type of family recognized to the exclusion of all others. This would become the normal family structure throughout the 1950’s and 60’s. The baby boom, as this explosion was called, was a product of and a cause for conservative family values—especially about the place of women in American society. Dr. Benjamin Spock, author of the wildly successful Baby and Child Care (1946), suggested that mothers devote themselves to the full-time care of their children. Popular culture depicted marriage and feminine domesticity as a primary goal for American women, and the education system reinforced this portrayal. This revival of domesticity as a social value was accompanied by a revival of religion. Religious messages began to creep into popular culture as religious leaders became famous faces. It was during the 1950s that Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of
The American dream is a national ethos of the United States. In the colonial days, it was easier to hold the right of freedom of speech without holding the fear of being censored or threatened …show more content…
To achieve widespread consumerism, manufactured items came with consumer credit offered on a revolving basis, often by the manufacturers of the goods. During that decade, about two-thirds of the gross national product became attributable to consumer spending; this share has persisted ever since.
The set of ideals that make up the American Dream have been discussed and glorified by various American writers throughout history. The phrase “American Dream” was popularized by historian, James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book “Epic of America”. The idea was aided immeasurably by political events from the 1930s through the 1970s.
The concept of home ownership and mortgage credit was the first part of the dream that was given government assistance, beginning in the 1930s. Using a model first developed during World War I to aid farmers by providing standard mortgages, the Hoover administration, followed by the Roosevelt administration, began extending government intervention to the banks making residential mortgages. During the Great Depression many banks failed, and in order to preserve their assets and stabilize the market for home mortgages, Congress created several agencies dedicated to preserving the market for mortgages which benefited both homeowners and banks. The Federal Housing Administration and the Federal National Mortgage …show more content…
This term was coined in 1949 at the beginning of what turned out to be the baby boom. The phrase ''nuclear family,'' meaning a married man and woman living with their offspring, was introduced by the anthropologist George Murdock, who openly acknowledged the implicit metaphor: ''Among the majority of the peoples on earth, nuclear families are combined, like atoms in a molecule, into larger aggregates.'' But he also noted that in our own society, the nuclear family was the type of family recognized to the exclusion of all others. This would become the normal family structure throughout the 1950’s and 60’s. The baby boom, as this explosion was called, was a product of and a cause for conservative family values—especially about the place of women in American society. Dr. Benjamin Spock, author of the wildly successful Baby and Child Care (1946), suggested that mothers devote themselves to the full-time care of their children. Popular culture depicted marriage and feminine domesticity as a primary goal for American women, and the education system reinforced this portrayal. This revival of domesticity as a social value was accompanied by a revival of religion. Religious messages began to creep into popular culture as religious leaders became famous faces. It was during the 1950s that Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of