The American Dream

Has the American Dream ever been killed? One man felt like perhaps it had and ended up writing its eulogy. But at the exact same time, another man was proving it was still alive and did so in the biggest way imaginable. 

The American Dream is an ideal shared the world over. You hear it most often when someone makes it big as a musician or becomes rich because of an invention. But the American Dream isn’t actually about owning a Rolex, driving a Ferrari, or becoming a movie star. 

The American Dream is that America provides everyone the opportunity to better themselves regardless of your class, race, or income. And while the concept of the American dream originated here in the United States, it’s not truly the only country offering the same opportunity, it’s just sometimes the loudest voice gets the most attention.

The phrase “American Dream” was actually coined in 1931.

In 1918 someone used the words American Dream in a sentence but not the same way.

It was James Adam Truslow in 1931 who created the notion. James was born back in 1878 when America was rushing to conquer the West. He also lived during World War I and the Great Depression, three very different periods of American history.

And to make the case for his authority on the subject even stronger, between In 1921 and 1926, he completed a three volume trilogy of the history of New England, meaning he had ample time to thoroughly research and discuss what America offered its people.

His definition of the American Dream is about a place that should be better and richer with each generation, a place with opportunity for each according to his or her ability or achievement. He ended his story with the perfect s symbol of the American dream in action.

But it wasn’t an immigrant who’d become a self-made millionaire by pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

For Truslow, it was the main reading room in the Library of Congress. For him, it was the perfect example because it was a room the nation had gifted itself so that every American, old or young, rich or poor, black or white, executive or laborer, the general or the private, the noted scholar or the school boy could sit together in peace and pursue self-improvement.

Peace is actually one of the five ideals of the American Dream.

Whether you’re looking at the American Dream from the inside of America or from the out, both see them the same. Peace, hegemony, capitalism, democracy, and culture.

Every year, 1 million people people come to America in search of these ideals.

We expect to live in peace.
Those who come here hope for the same.

We expect America will remain a leader and dominant country in today’s world.
Those who come here seek the same.

We expect capitalism to give us the chance to earn an income for our families.
Those who come here believe capitalism will give them opportunities even if they are new arrivals.

We expect democracy to allow us to change our own futures.
Those who come here see they too could be part and we expect the culture of America to always be facing happiness.

Even in 1931 during the Great Depression, the American dream gave everyone the feeling of hopefulness. Hopefulness that things will one day change for the better. Even the music of the Great Depression, the big band sounds of Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman got you up off the floor and dancing in the middle of the biggest economic depression.

And even when the political culture changed to World War II, swing, jazz, and the crooners were there providing an air of happiness.

The American dream got even stronger in the 1940s when World War II brought the nation together and got us out of the depression.

For the soldiers in the war, the dream wasn’t the five ideals. The dream was getting home to mom, hot apple pie, and a white Christmas.

For the kids at home, waiting for their big brothers and sisters to return from the war, they got their own symbol of America.

In 1940, Marvel created a new character designed to take on Adolf Hitler.

That symbol was Captain America.

After World War II, the rise of the automobile created suburbia. Western expansion became extra urban expansion. Blue jeans, transistor radios, leather jackets, and Elvis became the new symbol.

Living rooms had televisions and garage bicycles from the Sears catalog. Elvis Presley, Chuck Barry, Bill Haley, and Bo Diddley dominated the charts. And capitalism created newspaper delivery boys to deliver the daily good news directly to the doorsteps of America.

Which brings us to the first three heroes of our story, all chasing their American dream.

 Oh Boy! Buddy Holly

Charles was born in Leach, Texas in 1936 during the depression. His family was musical, so he grew up in talent shows playing instruments where he had really no talent at all, like the violin.

When his older brothers went to war, Charles learned to play piano. But after he saw a boy on the bus playing guitar, he wanted to learn guitar, too.

Charles grew up listening and learning to play like country artists Bill Monroe and Hank Williams. But after he saw Elvis perform in Leach, he knew rock and roll was for him. He and his buddies would sit in the car listening to R&B and rock and roll on the radio at night when the radio could pick up far away stations.

In their attempt to grab have a piece of the American Dream. He and his buddies would play locally, sometimes getting on local radio, sometimes opening for touring bands.

In fact, Charles got to open for Elvis when he played at the local Park Coliseum. That same year, he opened for Bill Haley and the Comets.

That’s when his American Dream really began to come true.

He was spotted by a record label executive. But instead of addressing the contract to his legal name, Charles, they went with the name name all his friends and family called him. No one called him Charles.

His nickname since he was a kid was Buddy.

Mr. Buddy Holly.

In 1956, he and his brothers went and saw the new John Wayne movie, The Searchers. And in that was a famous John Wayne line, “That’ll be the day.” That line inspired a song that Buddy Holly would release, which became their first number one hit song.  “That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

And then shortly thereafter, Buddy’s American Dream came true.

“Peggy Sue”, then “Everyday” then “Oh, Boy”.

Buddy Holly became an American icon.

Ritchie Valenzuela

Around that same time, Richard Valenzuela had been going after his American Dream as well.

He was born in 1941 at the beginning of World War II in the San Fernando Valley of California.

While Buddy grew up listening to country music, Richard was brought up listening to traditional Mexican mariachi music as well as flamenco.

By age five, he could play guitar, trumpet, and the drums. And in high school, he was motivated to play in a local band where he played guitar and sang.

After getting a tip that Valenzuela was fantastic on guitar, a record producer heard him play on a Saturday morning doing a local gig. He liked Richard so much he signed him to a record deal.

His first song, “Come on, Let’s Go” was an immediate hit in 1958.

And then his second song, “Donna” was a hit.

But America wasn’t falling in love with Richard Valenzuela.

Nope.

The record company had him create a stage name. Over 1 million people bought his next record, “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens.

The demands on his time were now so big he actually had to drop out of high school. And Ritchie got to do something he never dreamed would be possible with his record royalties. He bought his parents a home.

As Truslo had said in his 1931 definition of the American Dream, America was the place with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.

And though he was 11 years older than Ritchie, our third hero was also pursuing that same American dream. 

The Big Bopper

Giles Perry Richardson wasn’t a young buck like Buddy and Ritchie. In fact, he had had a world of experiences by 1958. Not only had he gone to college and had his own radio show, but he’d also served two years in the military.

And actually to make a big splash on radio as his return from the military, he attempted to break the world record for continuous radio broadcasting. He actually broke the record by 8 hours, playing 1,821 records over 5 days, 2 hours, and 8 minutes, only taking bathroom breaks during 5-minute news segments.

On his return, he decided his onair radio character needed a name.

And since the dance called “The Bop” was the hottest rage, he started to call himself “The Big Bopper.”

In addition to being a DJ, he played guitar and wrote songs. In fact, that year, 1958, he wrote the song “White Lightning” for George Jones that became a number one hit.

But rock and roll was more his style, and he loved writing novelty songs.

There was a popular song called “The Witch Doctor” and another called “Purple People Eater” to which he wrote a follow-up novelty song called “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor”, which became a hit.

But in order to print that record, he needed a b-side song.

He remembered a drive he had in Houston where a song had come to him in the spur of the moment, and so he stopped and he wrote an entire song in the car.

At the time, he called it “That’s What I Like”, but when they printed the album, they’d called it “Chantilly Lace”.

It was an instant hit and made The Big Bopper a star.

In fact, it was released in 37 countries and made the best seller list the first week in every one of them.

He had a wife at home and a baby on the way. His plan was to only play for two more years, then buy a radio station of his own. That was his American Dream.

The Winter Dance Party

Well, all three of them were looking for ways to promote their songs and make money. They had independently done concert tours, TV shows, and private parties.

And then in December of 1958, a promoter Buddy Holly had worked with several times suggested that he do a 24 city Midwest tour.

Buddy Holly at the time needed money himself and agreed.

Since not a lot happened in the upper Midwest during the winter months, all of the ballrooms were looking to tour operators to see if they could host one of the concerts of the tour.

The tours were extremely popular, selling out wherever they wanted because there was a hole in the popular music scene at the moment.

A year earlier, Elvis had joined the army.
Little Richard had quit music to pursue the ministry.
Jerry Lou Lewis had married a 13-year-old and was being ostracized by everyone.
And Bill Haley’s last hit was in 1958, and so he was resting.
The Buddy Holly Tour was the last tour going.

Sadly, however, the tour itself was poorly planned with each day requiring over 250 miles of driving to get to the next venue.

Bus breakdowns and other problems made the tour quite difficult for the bands.

On the 20th day of the tour, the guys found themselves in Clear Lake, Iowa with a 365 mi ride. ride to Morehead, Minnesota the next day.

Buddy, who needed rest, decided to charter a plane and take his two band members with him, Tommy Alsup and Waylon Jennings.

The Big Bopper wasn’t feeling very well and asked Waylon if he could take his seat. And Ritchie Valens asked Tommy Alsup if he’d flip a coin for his seat.
And they did.
And Richie Valens won the coin toss.
So that night, the three of them, Buddy Holly, Richie Valance, and the Big Bopper boarded a plane in Clear Lake, Iowa, and headed out in cold weather for Morehead, Minnesota.

It wouldn’t be until morning that it was discovered their plane never made it.

Upon investigation, they quickly learned that some sort of error occurred just after takeoff, resulting in them crashing a few miles away, leaving a high impact crater and four dead bodies.

That morning, most of America woke to the tragic news. 

While their American dream was over, America itself had to process such a colossal cultural loss.

American as Apple Pie

And while rock and roll, leather jackets, blue jeans, Coca-Cola are the symbols most of the world sees from the outside, internally apple pie is the symbol.  In fact, when American soldiers in World War II were asked why they were fighting, they’d almost always say, “For mom and apple pie,” meaning to keep their mothers safe and the American Dream alive. 

But how did apples become so American when they were brought here from other places?

Well, that takes us back to 9 years after the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.

That’s when the Massachusetts Bay Colony requested apple seeds be included in future shipments from England.

Culturally, apple juice and its fermented alcoholic counterpart, apple cider, had been regular staple drinks in the UK. And in this new America, there wasn’t a safe source of drinking water.

Apples, on the other hand, could be juiced, providing a safe, bacteria-free drink.

Growing apple trees, therefore, was considered a necessity.

By 1644, 90% of the orchards in Maryland alone had apple trees. And as America began its march westward, apples took their place in the process.

In 1783, the US Congress passed the Timber Culture Act, allowing homesteaders to get 160 acres of land if they planted trees on one quarter of it. Their goal was to turn the arid plains into more agriculturally fertile and thought trees would help change the climate.

Most who did this plan planted apple trees. And then four years later in 1787, the US Congress of the Federation created the Northwest Ordinance, the nation’s first organic incorporated territory.

One company, the Ohio Company of Associates, negotiated a deal with the government to buy 1.5 million acres in what is now Ohio. They would then deal with the settlers themselves.

If a settler wanted to homestead a permanent residence, they’d grant the settlers 100 acres if they agreed to plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in the first 3 years, thus making apples an even greater part of American expansion.

And then apple pie itself was included in the first American cookbook.

A young entrepreneur named John Chapman saw an opportunity in this apple climate in Ohio to make some money.

Living in Pennsylvania, he gathered a knapsack and filled it with apple seeds. Then he traveled all around the Northwest Ordinance, planting small orchards ahead of the frontiersmen.

When the frontiersmen came to settle the land, he’d sell them the growing apple trees to meet the Ohio Company requirements. His apple exploits became so popular he became known as Johnny Appleseed.

Apples were truly becoming American.

Then by 1902, an American newspaper suggested apple pie was now the new symbol of American prosperity. And actually in becoming such a common patriotic symbol, your status in society could be determined by the pie you were serving.

To save money, on lard and flour, the less affluent in society would make their apple pies with only a bottom crust.

The affluent, on the other hand, would make enough dough for the sides and the top, soon acquiring the label “the upper crust”.

In 1920, John J. Fitzgerald began referring to New York City, America’s biggest city, as “The Big Apple” and products looking to distinguish themselves from European imports began using the phrase “as American as apple pie.”

Finally, in 1948, Disney produced a short feature called Melody Time, heralding the great Johnny Appleseed. Instead of portraying him as an avid drinker of apple cider who spent most of his life in the dirt, Disney’s Johnny Appleseed was surrounded by singing birds and beautiful flowers, while eating apples. Which brings us back to 1959 and the tragic plane crash of Buddy Holly, Richie Valance, and the Big Bopper.

The Day The Music Died

The news was in every newspaper across the nation. In New Rochelle, New York, 14-year-old Don was a newspaper delivery boy who opened his bound case of newspapers to see the headline right in front of him.

Like most teenagers, the news of his musical heroes dying really hurt. For young Don especially, the next decade would be a challenging one.

Just over a year later, his father would die from a heart attack, and then the president JFK would be killed two years later.

Don’s American Dream was hard to see through the fog of grief.

And for America, every virtue of the American dream would be challenged in the 1960s.

• The virtue of peace would be taken to the brink with the Cuban missile crisis and Alabama’s “Sunday bloody Sunday”.
• Along with that, America’s hegemony in the world would be challenged by Russia. Its leadership in the space race would be dwarfed by Sputnik and our military prowess challenged by Vietnam.
• America’s pride in its democracy came under attack. When women and African-Americans had to mount enormous campaigns to get the rights they were promised in the Constitution.

The American dream seemed light years away from its post-war heyday with the counterculture producing riots, revolts, sit-ins, and protests.

But Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that the American dream was still alive when he said, “I have a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream, until his life was taken early morning April 4th when shots rang out in the Memphis sky.

By the end of the 1960s, young Don was 25 and had dedicated his life to becoming a musician.

 He’d gone to college, but music was his passion. He didn’t want to write meaningless pop songs, however, like Tutti Frutti. He wanted his music to matter.

He loved Woody Guthrie’s song “Roll on Colombia” about the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam.

He loved any song that spoke to the culture and the country; he wanted to write songs like that himself.

In 1970, he actually put out his first album, Tapestry.

It did well, but he wanted something more meaningful.

At the time, the US was a melting pot of chaos. And then one day, a line of a song came to him.
It was such a powerful line.
He couldn’t escape it and he needed to do something with it.

The words took him all the way back to 1959 when he opened his bundle of newspapers and saw the headline, “Plane crash kills Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper.”

To him, that was the day the music died.

He knew he had found his big song about America. It would be about the angst and sadness America had faced since that day.

It would be about apple pie.

Musically, he came up with the line, “Bye-bye Miss American Pie.” And the song would start with him opening those newspapers. When Don, that is Don McClean, would publish that song in 1971. It would become an instant hit around the globe.

And at 8 minutes long, it would be unlike every other song on the radio.

Despite Don McClean writing about American Pie, it touched every culture. It reached number one or number two in every country in the world.

And in the UK, it remained in the top 10 for 54 weeks.

Its power to move people is seen even today at restaurants and bars in every corner of the world.

Some say American pie is the eulogy of the American Dream that died in the 60s, allowing everyone to breathe new life into the nation.

That song eulogizing the American Dream, was released on October 24th, 1971, and Don McLean toured the country, playing everywhere to promote it.

One of those places was the Troubador in Los Angeles. 20-year-old Lorie Lieberman was in the audience at the urging of a friend, and she was transfixed. She was transfixed. by Don Mlean’s words and felt like he was singing exactly what she was thinking.

She was moved so much that she didn’t leave her seat at the end of the concert. Instead, she grabbed a napkin and started writing a poem about that moment.

She too was a singer.

The next day, she brought it to her songwriting partners. She thought the poem would make a great song.

The poem starts,

“Strumming my pain with his fingers,
singing my life with his words.
He’s killing me softly with his song.

Don’s dream of writing a song that was meaningful came true, as was his dream of becoming a successful musician.

The end of “American Pie” includes the following optimistic lyrics.

“I met a girl who sang the blues
and I asked her for some happy news,
but she smiled and turned away.”

But it wasn’t a girl who carried the happy news for America, who had the hopeful vision of the future. It was actually the man who had made Johnny Appleseed famous, Mr. Walt Disney.

The 1960s didn’t affect Walt Disney as it did many. He had big dreams despite the cultural chaos and never lost sight of those dreams. His were dreams were so clear they even survived his death in 1966.

Because on the exact same day that Don McClean released American Pie to the world, October 24th, 1971, Walt Disney had their grand opening celebration of their brand new 27,740 acre Walt Disney World theme park in Central Florida.

The American dream was not only alive. The rise of Disney World in Central Florida would prove it could never be killed because Disney would become an American icon itself.