Advanced Placement English Language

Term Three

Student AnthologyThe American Dream

How accessible is the American Dream?

To what extent does the American Dream represent modern America?

The American Dream is a term coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams (1878-1949), U.S. writer and popular historian in "Epic of America."

“[The American Dream is] that dream of a land in which life should better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Table of Content

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Table of Contents..........................................................................................................................................................

The American Dream Is Dying........................................................................................3

INFOGRAPHICS AND ANALYSIS: New American Dream Poll 2014..................................7

No Help Wanted............................................................................................................9

The Case for Working with Your Hands.......................................................................15

How to Restore the American Dream..........................................................................24

Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers....................................................26

Materialism in American Culture.................................................................................29

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The American Dream Is DyingTo save it, we’ll have to repair our broken culture.

By David French — December 9, 2016

Tim was a goofy, big-hearted kid who everyone liked and everyone just knew was doomed. His dad took off when he was young, and the child support payments were inconsistent, at best. His mom had a job and kept a roof over their heads, but her two great vices — men and booze — left her little time for maternal love. She cycled through boyfriends and whiskey bottles, leaving Tim to fend for himself.

Tim tried. He really did. He buckled down and got decent grades in high school, even if his attendance was inconsistent. He got jobs, but he’d quit quickly if a manager was mean or if he just felt like sleeping in. His mom yelled at him, but who was she to tell him what to do? Besides, half the time she yelled she was drunk.

Then, one day, he tried some of his mom’s booze. He found out if he just drank a little bit from a few bottles, he could get drunk off her supply, and she wouldn’t even notice. By his senior year, he was missing more classes. He was “sick,” he’d say, when actually he was hung over. His mom got worse, he cared less, and during his senior year in high school he moved out of the house and stayed with a friend in a spare bedroom.

Tim graduated from high school, but only because it’s tough not to graduate if you can show up just enough. He was 18, he had a high-school diploma, an alcoholic mom, an absent dad, and no real plan. He couldn’t hang with his friend any longer. So he decided to leave town and move in with his father, a hot-tempered man with an even worse drinking problem.

That move would likely mean the end of Tim. He was leaving his friends, leaving the church that nagged him until he came to youth-group meetings, to disappear into the same bottle that had claimed his parents. He was still just a teenager, but his future hung in the balance, and no one was optimistic he’d pull through.

I thought of Tim (not his real name) yesterday, when I read the first of three disturbing reports about the slow death of the American dream. If you were born in 1940, there was a 92 percent chance you’d do better than your parents. That number has declined every decade since — from 79 percent for those born in 1950, to 62 percent in 1960, 61 percent in 1970, to a low of 50 percent for those born in 1980. Even worse, younger people who do better than their parents are highly concentrated in the upper-middle class. Those born outside of the top-30th income percentile were likely to make less than their parents:

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The American Dream Is Dying

As I was reading and digesting this information, I saw the news that American life expectancy has decreased for the first time in decades. The decline is due to increases in deaths from multiple causes, including heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and suicide. And hidden within the statistics is the third disturbing report, a rise in fatal heroin overdoses so dramatic that heroin deaths have for the first time surpassed gun homicides:

None of this should be surprising, and none of it is easy to fix. I’d argue that the two most important books of the decade are Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids. Murray’s book potently demonstrates how the upper-middle class is diverging from the rest of America. Prosperous families tend to delay childbearing until after marriage, complete their educations, get married, and stay married. Poor and working-class families have children out of wedlock, struggle to finish school, and divorce or remain unmarried at much greater rates.

Putnam’s book details the heartbreaking impact of early-childhood trauma from dissolving families and economic instability. By the time kids reach young adulthood, they’ve been shaped by their backgrounds in indelible ways. That doesn’t mean that individual kids can’t rise above their troubles, but the large-scale impact is decidedly negative.

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There is simply an overwhelming amount of social science showing that single-parent and unstable families do worse economically than the stable, mother-father household. If you look at the charts above and then look at the charts below, reality slaps you in the face. From the Heritage Foundation, here are the percentages of out-of-wedlock births in the U.S. over time:

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As Murray and Putnam show, charts like this conceal an ocean of heartbreak. Kids and adults aren’t blank slates, possessing equal prospects for success regardless of family situation. Adults in broken families experience the pain of separation and the psychological challenge of uncertainty and conflict in the most important relationships of their lives. Kids in broken families are often traumatized in ways that linger with them throughout their adult lives. Government can’t fix trauma. Government can’t make a man and a woman stay together.

What does this all mean? In real terms, it means that our nation is changing. We’re producing a generation of poor and working-class young people who are less equipped to take advantage of economic opportunity and a generation of upper-middle-class kids who are fully prepared to enjoy the fruits of the world’s most potent and innovative economy. In other words, it’s a great time to be prosperous in America. It’s a terrible time to be poor or working-class.

It also means that Americans need to redouble their efforts to care for one another, to reach beyond class lines and intervene in individual lives. Which brings me back to Tim — and Tim’s church.

On the very day that he was packing to leave home, to live with his alcoholic and unstable father, his church arrived. Kids from his youth group begged him to stay, promising to be his new family. A couple from the church pledged to pay the security deposit and first month’s rent on an apartment if he could find a job. He found an apartment next door to that family, and they checked on him virtually every day, bringing him food and inviting him over for dinner. They hovered like mother hens as friends from church helped him get a job that he kept (in part because those same friends held him accountable), and he started a relationship with a beautiful young Christian girl from a loving, intact home.

It turned out that Tim wasn’t doomed. He married that girl, and now they have a loving, stable home and are launching kids out into the world who grew up knowing nothing but the support of a mom and dad. This is how lives change. This is how America can start to repair itself. But instead of focusing on loving our neighbor, all too many of us focus instead on finding a political savior, the man on the white horse who’ll make things right. When culture changes this profoundly, it creates wounds public policy simply can’t heal.

Instead, through God’s grace, America can heal itself, but it won’t be easy. It will take a culture change on the same scale as the sexual revolution that fractured families and even now relentlessly teaches the gospel of self-indulgence. It will take a renewed love for the “least of these” in our American family, and it will take men and women who care for others not just by sending money but by creating deep and meaningful relationships.

The American Dream is slipping away, and only the American people can bring it back from the brink.

— David French is a staff writer for NATIONAL REVIEW, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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INFOGRAPHICS AND ANALYSIS: New American Dream Poll 2014

What does the “American Dream” mean today? How—and how successfully—are Americans achieving this dream? How has the concept of the “American Dream” shifted over the past 10 years?

These questions are at the heart of the Center for a New American Dream's 2014 national survey, conducted in partnership with PolicyInteractive.

The survey, which polled 1,821 U.S. citizens ages 18 and over, illustrates the shift in public consciousness around the topic of the American Dream and sheds new light on the topics of advertising, the environment, consumption, and the sharing economy.

Major findings include:

1. The majority of Americans believe that it is more difficult to achieve the American Dream than it was a decade ago, due primarily to the high costs of education and healthcare.

2. Americans who have chosen to work fewer hours report an overall improvement in quality of life, indicating that this shift has positively affected their lives by allowing for more free time and reduced stress.

3. Americans are interested in increasing their sharing practices and learning more about the sharing economy. Over half of respondents believe that sharing lowers environmental impact, builds community, and helps save money.

4. Americans feel strongly that the way we live produces too much waste, and that our high consumption levels are largely responsible for global environmental problems. An overwhelming majority feel that we will need to make major changes in the way we live to counterbalance this phenomenon.

5. Americans believe that commercialism and advertising have gotten out of hand in the United States, and that the government should do more to combat it. Almost three-quarters of Americans believe there should be limits on advertising to children, including limits on advertising in public spaces and in schools.

6. Millennials make use of sharing economy services—such as bike sharing and peer-to-peer lodging—at a rate more than double their Baby Boomer and Gen X peers, and are interested in expanding their sharing practices. They are also more optimistic than Baby Boomers and Gen Xers that they will be able to achieve the American Dream.

7. Non-white Americans are more interested in sharing practices than white Americans.

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No Help WantedAuthor Exposes How the American Dream Turned Into a Middle-Class Nightmare

By Bob ThompsonWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, September 7, 2005

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.--Maybe it was the missing lapel pin that doomed Barbara Ehrenreich's search.

She couldn't get a job and she couldn't figure out why. She'd hired job coaches, haunted Internet job boards, endlessly massaged her résumé and networked, networked, networked. She'd paid an "image management" consultant to help her upgrade her wardrobe.

But she never got around to replacing her sedate silver pin -- deemed "not corporate" by her clothing guru -- with the recommended gold.

Well, fine. Her job search flameout wasn't such a big deal personally, though she confesses that not being wanted by anyone was a little hard to take. But Ehrenreich knew that when she finished researching "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream" -- a Dantesque tour through the world of the white-collar unemployed for which she posed as an out-of-work professional -- she'd have a well-established career as an independent writer to go back to.

The beaten-down, middle-aged job seekers she encountered along the way, however, lack the luxury of such a fallback position. And as for still-employed fiftysomethings, fortysomethings and thirtysomethings who will likely make up much of her book's readership, Ehrenreich's failure story is a chiller.

She might as well have called it "This Could Happen to You."

'How Does Anyone Live?'

“Bait and Switch" is the second of what you might call Ehrenreich's walk-a-mile-in-my-shoes series. For the first, the 2001 bestseller "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," she cast herself as a member of the working poor. She took a series of minimum-wage jobs, tried to live on her meager earnings and produced what one reviewer called a "heart-wrenching, infuriating, funny, smart and empowering" report on a universe that comfortable, affluent Americans tend not to see.

It wasn't her idea to turn into Barbara Ehrenreich, Undercover Reporter. Well, actually it was -- sort of. But we'll get to that.

She's a small, fit-looking woman of 64 with sensibly short hair that hasn't been permitted to go gray. She moved from Florida to Charlottesville after her daughter, a University of Virginia law professor, produced her first grandchild four years ago. (There are now two.) "They're a big drug," she says. "I get completely involved with whatever they're looking at or doing." When daughter and family head to Georgetown for a visiting professorship this fall, Ehrenreich -- who is divorced and says "all I need is a laptop" to work -- will tag along.

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It would be a mistake, however, to push this cuddly image too far.

There is a tough, sarcastic edge to Ehrenreich's writing and conversation. Her laughter sometimes comes in flat, staccato bursts -- heh-heh-heh-heh -- that seem to say: Watch out, I see right through you. Describing her father, who started as a Montana copper miner and rose to be vice president for research at Gillette, she calls him "an extremely unusual person, smart and ambitious." She also says, "He was a genius; he told us that himself," and notes that he was eventually destroyed by drink.

His daughter is no slouch herself in the smart-and-ambitious department.

Ehrenreich got a PhD in cell biology from Rockefeller University in 1968, but before she could do much with it she hooked up with a group of activists trying to improve health care for poor New Yorkers. "Health seemed related to biology," she says, and it turned out she loved reporting and writing on the subject.

Before long, her feminist-socialist take on the world was showing up in magazines like Ms. and Mother Jones. A well-reviewed 1983 book called "The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment" earned her assignments from the New York Times -- and a foot in mainstream journalism's door. From 1990 to 1997, she wrote a regular column for Time. By then she'd also written a number of other books, including "Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class" and the densely researched "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War."

She'd never gone undercover, though.

One day in 1998, in conversation with Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, she threw out a question that has long concerned her: "How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?" She followed this with the offhand suggestion that "someone" -- presumably a younger, hungrier someone -- should just "go out there and try it for themselves."

"You," said Lapham, smiling.

She says she didn't want to do it. But she was a freelance writer who needed to eat.

So she went to work in Florida, struggling to pay the rent and gaining new appreciation for the stamina of waitresses. ("The break room summarizes the whole situation: There is none, because there are no breaks . . . For six to eight hours in a row, you never sit except to pee.") The resulting Harper's piece got a ton of attention and earned her a contract with Metropolitan Books.

"My book editor said, 'Oh, go out and do some more of this and we'll have a book,' " Ehrenreich recalls. "Easy enough for you to say, Sara!"

Heh-heh-heh-heh.

She signed on with a cleaning service in Portland, Maine, where she learned to scrub floors "the old-fashioned way" (on her knees) and to distinguish the three kinds of excrement stains that must be removed from toilets (don't ask). She also watched in horror as a co-worker hopped around cleaning on one leg: Afraid to anger the boss, the woman refused to go to the emergency room after a fall had badly injured her ankle.

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Later, while earning $7 an hour at a Minnesota Wal-Mart, she learned that bathroom trips and conversations among employees were banned as "time theft." Ehrenreich rebelled by sneaking into the rest room before she punched out for her 15-minute break.

There were obvious downsides to the undercover shtick. She had to change most people's names, for one thing, making it harder for readers to trust her. What's more, maintaining her cover meant that she couldn't delve too deeply into the lives of her minimum-wage colleagues.

The upside?

"It is a kind of reporting that people respond to," says Lapham. "It's the same thing an embedded journalist does in Iraq."

"Nickel and Dimed" has sold more than a million hardcover and paperback copies combined, according to its publisher; the paperback edition has spent 92 weeks on the New York Times's bestseller list. Considering the usually modest sales of conventionally reported books about poor people, it seems reasonable to conclude that you need some kind of stunt to get the public's attention.

Small wonder Ehrenreich wanted to try it again.

But she decided to go white collar this time.

Transitionland

The decreasing economic security of the American middle class has been the subject of considerable journalistic attention. "Over the last 25 years," as the Los Angeles Times summed up the situation in one lengthy 2004 report, "economic risk has been steadily shifted from the broad shoulders of business and government" and placed on the backs of individual employees.

This development can be spun positively or negatively, depending on your point of view. Considered as a whole, the Times noted, the transformed economy has performed well. At the same time, "a broad array of protections that families once depended on to shield them from economic turmoil -- among them "stable jobs, widely available health coverage, guaranteed pensions" -- have been either sharply reduced or eliminated.

Leah Gray knows all this firsthand. An unemployed marketing specialist Ehrenreich met while working on "Bait and Switch" -- she's one of the few subjects who agreed to have her real name used -- Gray said in a telephone interview that she'd gotten used to hearing things like "Leah, this is really difficult, you did a superb job and you're really well liked, but . . . " as she was being let go.

"I've never been a woe-is-me kind of person," she said. But she has no health insurance. She cried when she had to cash in her 401(k) plan. And she has sometimes gotten too depressed to look for work.

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"Bait and Switch" was inspired, in part, by letters Ehrenreich received from people in situations like Gray's. We've done everything right, the message was -- gotten an education, worked hard -- and we still can't find stable jobs. Why not write about us ?

So she decided to investigate what she calls "this tremendous churning in and out of the corporate world." She wanted to know how it feels to be scrambling for work because you've been downsized, outsourced or restructured out of your white-collar job. The plan was to portray herself as a PR professional, an area where she had plausible skills, and go looking for a job with health insurance and a salary of maybe $50,000 a year.

She figured it would be easier than scrubbing toilets.

She was wrong.

Deciding to begin by hiring a "career coach" -- she'd been freelancing all her life, after all, and was a little weak on corporate job-hunting skills -- she found herself in the bizarre world of the "transition" industry, whose self-appointed experts spice up their coaching presentations with Elvis dolls and characters from "The Wizard of Oz."

She paid one coach $200 an hour to polish her résumé, only to notice that, somehow, the job was never quite finished. "The white-collar unemployed have become a market," Ehrenreich explains, because unlike their blue-collar counterparts, they have assets -- at least for a while.

Before long, other coaches were bombarding her with dubious tests -- of the same type used by many personnel departments -- designed to reveal her personality type and what kind of job would be right for her. The results were mixed, to put it mildly. It was nice to hear that one test scored her as "original, effective, good and loving." But the same test indicated that, besides being "overly sensitive and prone to melancholy," she probably didn't write well and would need "intensive journaling workshops" to compensate.

She began attending public support groups and networking events for white-collar employees in transition (the term is preferred over "laid off" or "unemployed"), where she started to encounter her fellow seekers -- a disproportionately depressed-looking lot. At one session, she learned that she'd need a darn good explanation for any gap in her résumé whatsoever.

Even if it was from taking time off to raise children?

"The challenge is to be a beggar with a great story," she was told.

The full saga of Ehrenreich's adventures in Transitionland is too long to summarize here. But in the end, what outraged her the most was the pervasive blame-the-victim ethos she encountered. Personal responsibility is a fine thing, she says, but it's not the same as omnipotence. Yet over and over, the newly unemployed were told: You totally control your own fate. At an "executive boot camp," the leader hammered the core message home:

"It's never about the external world," he said. "It's always between you and you."

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So never mind if you're on the street because your job was transferred overseas, or because the whole industry you work in went under. Never mind if it's because you've done too well, achieving a salary high enough to put a cost-cutting bull's-eye on your back. In Transitionland, Ehrenreich found, it's all about attitude -- and if you can't stay positive and focused, you don't deserve a job.

"I find that inexcusably cruel to people," she says. "When they're down, when they've sustained what may have been the worst blow in their adult lives -- and you tell them that it's their fault!"

A corollary is that white-collar job seekers are constantly required to hide their emotions, to fake an eagerness they rarely feel. This is what Ehrenreich found harder than cleaning toilets or waitressing.

"You can't fake being a waitress," she says. "The food gets to the table or it doesn't." But in the world of the white-collar unemployed, "you're constantly being told to be something different than you are. You have to be upbeat, positive, perky, obnoxiously self-confident."

The corners of her mouth twitch grimly upward.

"I know!" she says when this is pointed out. "I'm trying to put the smile on right now!"

Rugged in America

But . . . but . . . but . . . you think, as you approach the end of Ehrenreich's tale. Sure it's rough out there. But why couldn't the Undercover Reporter, with all her experience and skills, even come close to finding work?

This is a line reviewers may take, she fears. At least one, which showed up in today's mail, already has. "It was something like "not as involving as 'Nickel and Dimed' because she doesn't get a job," Ehrenreich reports. "That's going to be the curse of 'Bait and Switch,' being the little sibling of 'Nickel and Dimed.' "

She had handicaps, to be sure. She was in her sixties, hardly the most marketable age, and had to disguise this on her resume. She had no professional contacts to start with, she points out. What she doesn't say -- though it's clear from the book -- is that she spent too much time networking with other jobless folks and not enough beating down the doors of the gainfully employed.

Still, she says, "I don't think my effort was shabby compared to that of the other job seekers I was interacting with."

Okay. What about the widely shared belief -- most widely shared among the securely employed, of course -- that America is all about rugged individualism? That competition is the engine of the capitalist economy, which is the source of our prosperity, and that winners and losers are just part of the game?

"I say, well fine, but what are we competing about ?" she counters. "I'm not attacking notions of competitiveness or individuality, really. But I'm looking at a system which casts people out whether or not they're good."

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It's bad for capitalism, she says, when corporate culture creates a disconnect between achievement and reward. These days, you can be laid off through no fault of your own if the CEO changes your company's direction. But that same CEO may not be accountable if the direction change fails. "We see CEOs who preside over companies that are tanking raise their pay and perks."

What are her hopes for "Bait and Switch"? She wants her middle-class readers to stop thinking of poor people as "the other," some kind of unique species, fundamentally different from themselves.

"I want the 35-year-old middle manager at a bank to be thinking: I have something in common with a homeless person. It could happen. I'm not so far away from that."

She's got hopes for the article you're reading, too.

"Just be sure to describe me as a really terrific PR person who has been overlooked by the corporate world," she says. "They lost their chance!"

Heh-heh-heh-heh.

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How to Restore the American DreamTechnology and globalization are shattering the middle class. With the midterms around the corner, the good news is that a bipartisan policy agenda can return the U.S. to prosperity. But no one says it will be easy.

By Fareed Zakaria Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010

The American dream for me, growing up in India in the 1970s, looked something like the opening credits of Dallas. The blockbuster TV series began with a kaleidoscope of big, brassy, sexy images — tracts of open land, shiny skyscrapers, fancy cars, cowboy businessmen and the very dreamy Victoria Principal. We watched bootlegged copies of the show, passed around on old Betamax cassettes. America (certainly the CBS soap-opera version of America) seemed dazzling and larger than life, especially set against the stagnant backdrop of India in the 1970s. Everyone I knew was fascinated by the U.S., whether they admitted it or not. Politicians who denounced the country by day would go home in the evenings and plot to send their kids to college in "the States."

Of course, the 1970s were actually tough times in America — stagflation, malaise, the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate — but they were brutal in the rest of the world. Hyperinflation racked most third-world countries; coups and martial law were familiar occurrences, even affecting staunchly democratic India, where emergency rule was enforced from 1975 to 1977. Set against this atmosphere of despair, the U.S. looked like a shining city on a hill.

A few years later, when I got to America on a college scholarship, I realized that the real American Dream was somewhat different from Dallas. I visited college friends in their hometowns and was struck by the spacious suburban houses and the gleaming appliances — even when their parents had simple, modest jobs. The modern American Dream, for me, was this general prosperity and well-being for the average person. European civilization had produced the great cathedrals of the world. America had the two-car garage. And this middle-class contentment created a country of optimists. Compared with the fatalism and socialist lethargy that was pervasive in India those days, Americans had a sunny attitude toward life that was utterly refreshing.

But when I travel from America to India these days, as I did recently, it's as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future. After centuries of stagnation, their economy is on the move, fueling animal spirits and ambition. The whole country feels as if it has been unlocked. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the mood is sour. Americans are glum, dispirited and angry. The middle class, in particular, feels under assault. In a Newsweek poll in September, 63% of Americans said they did not think they would be able to maintain their current standard of living. Perhaps most troubling, Americans are strikingly fatalistic about their prospects. The can-do country is convinced that it can't.

Americans have good reasons to worry. We have just gone through the worst recession since the Great Depression. The light at the end of the tunnel is dim at best. Sixteen

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months into the recovery, the unemployment rate is higher than it was in the depths of all but one of the postwar recessions. And as government spending is being pared back, the economy is showing new signs of weakness.

Some experts say that in every recession Americans get gloomy and then recover with the economy. This slump is worse than most; so is the mood. Once demand returns, they say, jobs will come back and, with them, optimism. But Americans are far more apprehensive than usual, and their worries seem to go beyond the short-term debate over stimulus vs. deficit reduction. They fear that we are in the midst of not a cyclical downturn but a structural shift, one that poses huge new challenges to the average American job, pressures the average American wage and endangers the average American Dream. The middle class, many Americans have come to believe, is being hollowed out. I think they are right.

Going GlobalFor a picture of the global economy, look at America's great corporations, which are thriving. IBM, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel and Caterpillar are all doing well. And they share a strategy that is becoming standard for success. First, technology has produced massive efficiencies over the past decade. Jack Welch explained the process succinctly on CNBC last September. "Technology has changed the game in jobs," he said. "We had technology bumping around for years in the '80s and '90s, and [we were] trying to make it work. And now it's working ... You couple the habits [of efficiency] from a deep recession [with] an exponential increase in technology, and you're not going to see jobs for a long, long time." Welch gave as an example a company owned by the private-equity firm with which he is affiliated. In 2007 the business had 26,000 employees and generated $12 billion in revenue. It will return to those revenue numbers by 2013 but with only 14,000 employees. "Companies have learned to do more with less," Welch said.

Next, companies have truly gone global. The companies on the S&P 500 generate 46% of their profits outside the U.S., and for many of the biggest American names, the proportion is much higher. You might think of Coca-Cola as the quintessentially American company. In fact it is a vast global enterprise, operating in 206 countries. "We have a factory in Ramallah that employs 2,000 people. We have a factory in Afghanistan. We have factories everywhere," explains Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coke. Nearly 80% of Coca-Cola's revenue comes from outside the U.S., and an even greater percentage of its employees are in foreign countries. "We are a global company that happens to be headquartered in Atlanta," says Kent.

America's great corporations access global markets, easy credit, new technologies and high-quality labor at a low price. Many have had to cut jobs at home, where demand is weak, and have added them in the emerging markets that are booming. They are not "outsourcing" jobs. That word makes little sense anymore. They simply invest in growth areas and cut back in places where the economy is weak. None of them will ever give up on the American market — it is too large, too profitable and too central to their businesses — but the marginal dollar is more likely to be invested abroad than in the U.S.

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Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers

By SARA RIMER

FEB. 17, 2008

BOSTON — Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated two years ago from China, has never seen anything like the huge mansions that loomed over Long Island Sound in glamorous 1920s New York. But F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to her.

She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said.

“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”

Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love — or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.”

The novel had fallen into near obscurity by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, said Charles Scribner III, whose great-grandfather signed the author with the family publishing company in 1919. It was revived in the 1950s and ’60s when Mr. Scribner’s father, Charles Scribner Jr., started publishing a paperback version and a student edition for colleges and high schools.

Its popularity soared after Robert Redford played Gatsby in the movie in 1974. In more recent years, a musical version made its debut at the New York Metropolitan Opera and the novel has been turned into a hip hop movie, “G,” set in the Hamptons. The book now sells more than half a million copies a year, with high schools and colleges making up the biggest share of the market, Mr. Scribner said.

Jinzhao’s teacher, Meredith Elliott, and other teachers at Boston Latin and other urban schools, say their students see in “Gatsby” glimmers of their own evolving identities and dreams. The students talk about the youthful characters — Gatsby; Daisy Buchanan, the married woman he loves; Tom, Daisy’s husband and a onetime Yale football star; and the narrator, Nick Carraway — as if they were classmates or celebrities.

“I see Tom as this really mean jock,” said Vimin To, a 15-year-old Boston Latin sophomore who is in Kay Moon’s American literature class. “When he was in high school, he was king of the hill. He had it all. He was higher than everyone, even the teachers.”

As for Daisy, in Vimin’s view: “She’s turned into an empty person. Like Paris Hilton.”

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Vimin’s father works in a restaurant — “not very glamorous,” Vimin said — and came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam. Vimin relates to the story of Gatsby’s rise from the backwoods of North Dakota to New York. “It’s a very inspirational tale, especially when you’re from a background such as Mr. Gatsby,” he said.

His version of Gatsby’s dream: “My goal is to make my parents proud of me. I’ve always been told to succeed, to take advantage of the opportunities they’ve given me — just to be financially stable, to be able to support your family.”

At the nearby Fenway School, some of Fran Farrell’s seniors, who read “Gatsby” this year as part of their study of the American dream, found different lessons in Gatsby’s life and violent death.

“I think this American dream is an interpretation of a white poor man’s dream,” Nicole Doñe, 17, whose family is from the Dominican Republic, said during a lively class discussion. “For me the American dream is working hard for something you want. It’s not about having money. My dream is to get an education that I can’t get in the Dominican Republic, to live comfortably.”

Several of her classmates disagreed. “The American dream has a lot to do with money,” said Harkeem Steed, 17, who compared Gatsby to his hero, Jay-Z.

“Everything in this life is about money,” said Melanie Nunez, whose family is from the Dominican Republic. “How are you going to get to college?”

These teachers take pains to present the book with a great deal of social and historical context, and they say it crystallizes for many students questions about both the materialism of Gatsby’s dream and the possibility of attaining their own versions of the dream, especially in today’s highly stratified economy.

“Here’s Gatsby out of nowhere in this mansion, having these lavish parties and really and truly fulfilling the American dream, and that’s very compelling for them,” Ms. Moran said. “But it’s a cautionary tale, too.

“The culture sells the American dream so hard and so relentlessly, but they’re wary, and they should be,” she continued. “One reason students appreciate the book is that there is a level of honesty that they value. They need these honest stories to perhaps balance what is otherwise presented as this shining possibility for everyone.”

During a recent discussion with several other students in Ms. Moon’s class, Will Murphy, 16, whose father works two jobs as a firefighter and an E.M.T., was relating Gatsby’s accumulation of enormous wealth to his own chances of hitting it big in today’s economy. “Getting rich seems so far out of the picture,” said Will, who has a part-time job scooping ice cream. “Everybody thinks about it, but the older you get, the less possible it seems.”

“In other countries, people say, ‘Oh, if you go to America, everything is going to be better,’ ” Will went on. “It’s better, but it’s not as good as you think it will be. You won’t instantly become rich.”

One of Will’s classmates, Ashley Waters, 16, who helps her father with his antique consignment business, agreed. “The American dream is possible, but it’s just really hard,” she said. “Everything is so expensive — the price of college, housing. Look at the price of gas. The economy is going down.”

Shauna Deleon, 16, whose family is from Jamaica, nodded. “The American dream is not open to everyone,” she said. “There are certain pathways, certain gateways.”

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For Shauna’s parents, as for the parents of her classmates, one of those gateways is the four-century-old Boston Latin, with its rigorous entrance exams and alumni who include five signers of the Declaration of Independence.

As a sophomore working to meet the school’s demands, Shauna sometimes feels as if her mother’s green light is her. “She puts all her hopes in me,” said Shauna, who talks about becoming a thoracic surgeon. “I have all this weight and responsibility. Sometimes I can’t live up to it.”

A couple weeks later, Ms. Moon and Ms. Elliott wrapped up “Gatsby” and, with “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Joy Luck Club” and “Ethan Frome” also behind them, moved on to the next novel on the sophomore list: “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston.

Jinzhao Wang, meanwhile, has been reflecting more deeply about the meaning of the green light. “I’m not an American citizen, so when I apply to college I will be competing with all the top students in Asia,” said Jinzhao, whose parents are teachers and who lives in the Allston neighborhood, across the river from Cambridge and the red brick buildings of Harvard. “I have to set an even higher standard.”

Here, too, she had found inspiration in “Gatsby.” “The Dutch settlers went all the way across the ocean to this new land — America,” Jinzhao said, referring to Nick’s bittersweet reflections that end the book. “America appears to the Dutch settlers as Daisy appears to Gatsby. Gatsby’s hopes and dreams are American ideals. His effort is the real ideal of the American dream.”

“I really want to go to Harvard,” she said. “But if I don’t get into Harvard, I will not die, right?”

“The journey toward the dream is the most important thing,” she said.

And, she added, “There is a green light beyond the green light.” For her that green light is China, where she hopes to use a Harvard education to help the country develop even faster.

Published in the National section of The New York Times

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Materialism in American Culture

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