A Tale of Two Times

Dear Leading Ladies,

Forgive this letter for speaking from one voice instead of four, but I grabbed the mic this week! With the year rapidly coming to an end, I felt moved to tell the story of the American Dream in 1921 and 2021.

When my mother was a young girl of 10 in 1921, she would go to bed at night sharing a bed with a cast of characters that might expand by morning. When she described the situation to me many years later, all I could think of was the children’s rhyme, “There were ten in the bed and the little one said, Roll over, Roll over.” In fact, many nights, a new cousin or child of her parents’ friends would arrive during the night by train, probably from New York, after disembarking from the bowels of a ship after a long journey that began in a shtetl in Poland or Russia. The new arrivals might stay a few nights or maybe a month before finding permanent lodgings. Sharing a bed with my mother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1921 was the beginning of their American Dream.

For people like these immigrants, as well as for my mother and her parents, there would be challenges and obstacles. They would face discrimination, bigotry, poverty, and limited resources. My grandfather lacked any gift for making money, but excelled at learning languages, so he conversed with all the customers in his little grocery store who came from more than a handful of different countries. He extended them credit, too, until he went bankrupt and had to close the doors and go to work in a men’s haberdashery. His brother, on the other hand, had a real gift for business, making millions in the burgeoning field of radio.

All the same, the next generation moved to the head of the class, all puns and literal and figurative meanings intended. My uncles went to the University of Wisconsin and Chicago, respectively; my mother stayed home to help with the store and went to Milwaukee State Normal School to train to be a teacher. (Wasn’t she thrilled when it later became the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee so she could say that she, too, graduated from UW!) She met my father, whom my brothers and I came to call a Mayflower Jew because his family came from Germany in the 1860s, which sounded like ancient times compared to the migration from Eastern Europe after 1900. The German Jews enjoyed some greater assimilation and middle class status, but still suffered from anti-Semitism. My dad attended the University of Chicago as a commuter on a full scholarship after his big brother quit high school to make a home for his smartypants kid brother and their mother. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa but gave up his dream of becoming a doctor because he couldn’t afford the tuition and feared the quota on Jewish applicants. Nonetheless, he had a successful career as a chemist and an executive for chemical companies.

Needless to say, my parents’ three children never awoke to find strangers in their beds who had just arrived from the old country. My mom and dad achieved the American Dream. They worked hard and made sure their children had opportunities their parents could only have imagined.

So what about the American Dream today?

How does it work for immigrants and for our youth?

Implicit in the idea of the American Dream is the belief that if you work hard, you can get ahead. This requires keeping youth motivated and confident that they really can get ahead. That’s tough now, when one in seven young adults ages 16-24 are not in school or working—totaling 5.5 million “disconnected youth,” according to Opportunity Nation. “Quite simply, the opportunity gap is widening in America, making it harder for young people to get ahead. The U.S. must do more to retool our educational supports, economic systems and federal policies so that our young people can meet the challenges of the 21st century global economy.”

Moreover, “the idea that every American has an equal opportunity to move up in life is false,” according to the World Economic Forum. “Social mobility has declined over the past decades, median wages have stagnated and today's young generation is the first in modern history expected to be poorer than their parents. The lottery of life — the postcode where you were born - can account for up to two thirds of the wealth an individual generates.”

“Inequality is much more than a side-effect of free market capitalism,” the World Economic Forum posits. “It is a symptom of policy negligence, where for decades, credit and monetary stimulus shortcuts too easily substituted for structural reform, investment and economic strategy. Capitalism has been incredibly successful at boosting wealth, but it has failed at redistributing it. Today, without a push to redistribute wealth and opportunity, our model of capitalism and democracy may face self-destruction.”

“The American Dream has never been a privilege extended to persons of color, and that is certainly seen in both post-war consumerism as well as modern-day America.”

Kaileigh White, a student at Allegheny College, pointed out in the school newspaper last spring that one of the major problems with the American Dream ethos is that it never reflected the true experiences of the BIPOC population. “The American Dream sets an inherently racist expectation, one that focuses on the ‘perfect,’ white American family that BIPOC folk should assimilate to. It effectively disregards the existence — and therefore, importance — of families of color,” wrote White. “The American Dream has never been a privilege extended to persons of color, and that is certainly seen in both post-war consumerism as well as modern-day America.” Let’s not forget that the GI Bills, which promised mortgages and college educations systematically excluded Black veterans as it created a white suburban middle class.

Yet, even accounting for racism, White believes the American Dream is dead for many of her generation because of vast income inequality. As more jobs require education beyond high school, “Much to the working class’s disadvantage, the cost of higher education has disproportionately risen in comparison to the income of average Americans. This makes a college education much harder to achieve for people from lower-income families.” A generation and a half ago, students could pay for their tuition with the proceeds of a summer job flipping burgers. With tuition costs of $50,000 and higher, that is far from possible today. Enter huge student debt that can delay or prevent the achievement of the American Dream. And buying a house? The costs have risen far faster than salaries, another indication that today’s young adults cannot afford the lives their parents could.

How do we move forward?

So, as we leave 2021, let’s remember that young people in our country – whether immigrants or born here – face far greater obstacles to the American Dream than our generation or even the one before. And my grandparents? Yes, they deserve high praise for the lives they built here after coming across the ocean with no money, no English, and no guarantee of where they might sleep. People are inspired by experiences like theirs.

Yet, as we look to face the truth of US history, here, too, is an area we need to view clearly. We need to acknowledge that the same opportunities that led to the American Dream were never open to BIPOC people in our country. We also need to recognize that the American Dream is not as easy to achieve today for our immigrants or even our native born as it was 100 years ago.

We promised you a message of hope as we turn the page on 2021. Here it is. We have learned so much in the past year about our endurance and our strength; our ability to be alone and also to be together long distance via Zoom and Facetime. We have learned to tell others we love them and need them; to ask for help and offer support. We have been challenged to stay close to those we love and to be patient with those who are having a tough time. When we step back and view this time of trial and tribulation, we are hopeful for our humanity. Overall, we have become our better selves. And that is something.

Happy New Year!

Judy for all of us!
Therese
Mary
Beth
Leading Ladies Executive Team
Leadingladiesvote.org
ladies@leadingladiesvote.org