Class News
Gus Speth ’64 writes “Three Arguments Over America: A Look Back at Our History”
Three Arguments Over America: A Look Back at Our History
by Gus Speth
September 30, 2025
Throughout U.S. history, there have been alternative, competing visions of what America should aspire to and become. The story of how these competing visions have played out is prologue to an important question: do we need a new American Dream?
A look back in our history can help us answer this question.
In this essay, I will explore three arenas where alternative visions — three alternative sets of cultural values — have been offered. In each case American society has made its choice clear, and the results are what we see today.
1.
We begin with Jefferson’s declaration that we have an unalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness.” Darrin McMahon in his admirable book, Happiness: A History, will be our guide here. McMahon locates the origins of the “right to happiness” in the Enlightenment. “Does not everyone have a right to happiness?” asked the entry on that subject in the famous French encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot.
“Judged by the standards of the preceding millennium and a half, the question was extraordinary: a right to happiness?” McMahon notes. “And yet it was posed rhetorically, in full confidence of the nodding assent of enlightened minds.”
Thus, when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration in June of that memorable year, the words “the pursuit of happiness” came naturally to him, and the language sailed through the debates of June and July without dissent.
McMahon believes this lack of controversy stemmed in part from the fact that the “pursuit of happiness” phrase brought together, ambiguously, two very different notions. “The ‘pursuit of happiness,'” McMahon writes, “was launched in different, and potentially conflicting, directions from the start, with private pleasure and public welfare coexisting in the same phrase.”
But Jefferson’s formula almost immediately lost its double meaning in practice, McMahon notes, and the right of citizens to pursue their personal interests won out. This victory was reinforced by waves of immigrants to America’s abundant shores, for whom America was truly the land of opportunity. “To pursue happiness in such a land was quite rightly to pursue prosperity, to pursue pleasure, to pursue wealth.”
It is in this jettisoning of the civic-virtue concept of happiness in favor of the self-gratification side that McMahon finds the link between the pursuit of happiness and the rise of American capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
“If economic growth was now a secular religion,” McMahon observes, “the pursuit of happiness remained its central creed, with greater opportunities than ever before to pursue pleasure in comfort and things.”
The story of the pursuit of happiness in America is a story of its close alliance with capitalism and consumerism. But in recent years, many researchers have begun to see this relationship as one of misplaced allegiance. Has the pursuit of happiness through growth in material abundance and possessions actually brought Americans happiness?
What the social scientists are telling us is of fundamental importance. Two of the leaders in the field, Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, carried out a review of the already voluminous literature on well-being in their 2004 article, “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being.”
A good place to begin is with the studies that compare levels of happiness and life satisfaction among nations at different stages of economic development. They find that the citizens of wealthier countries do report higher levels of life satisfaction, although the correlation is rather poor and is even poorer when factors such as quality of government are statistically controlled.
Moreover, this positive relationship between subjective well-being and national per capita income further weakens when one looks only at countries with higher GDP per capita.
Diener and Seligman report that peoples with the highest well-being tend to live where political institutions are effective and human rights protected, where corruption is low, and mutual trust high.
Even more challenging to orthodox thinking is time-series data showing that throughout almost all of the post-World War II period, as incomes skyrocketed in the United States and other advanced economies, reported life satisfaction and happiness levels tended to stagnate or even declined slightly.
Instead of income, Diener and Seligman stress the importance of personal relationships to happiness: “The quality of people’s social relationships is crucial to their well-being. People need supportive, positive relationships and social belonging to sustain well-being … [T]he need to belong, to have close and long-term social relationships, is a fundamental human need … People need social bonds in committed relationships, not simply interactions with strangers, to experience well-being.”
In short, what the social scientists are telling us is that as of today, in Ed Diener’s words, “materialism is toxic for happiness.” Whether or not the pursuit of happiness through evermore possessions succeeded earlier in our history, it no longer does. When one researcher was asked to state simply what makes people happy, he said, “Other people.”
Two excellent overviews are by Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, and Robert Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. I discuss these and other studies in my book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Yale, 2008). More recently, see Arthur C. Brooks, The Happiness Files.
2.
Norton Garfinkle traces another dueling duality in the American tradition, one reflected in the title of his helpful book, The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth. Although the phrase “the American Dream” entered the language thanks to James Truslow Adams and his 1931 book, The Epic of America, Garfinkle argues that the force of the concept, if not the phrase, derives from President Lincoln. “More than any other president,” Garfinkle believes, “Lincoln is the father of the American Dream that all Americans should have the opportunity through hard work to build a comfortable middle-class life.”
For Lincoln, liberty meant above all the right of individuals to the fruits of their own labor, seen as a path to prosperity. “To [secure] to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible,” he wrote, “is a most worthy object of any good government.”
“The universal promise of opportunity,” Garfinkle writes, “was for Lincoln the philosophical core of America.” Lincoln described a “just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all.” Garfinkle writes that this was, for Lincoln, “the American Dream, the raison d’être of America, and the unique contribution of America to world history.”
James Truslow Adams’ vision of the American Dream is at least as compelling as that of Lincoln. Adams used the phrase, “the American dream,” to refer, not to getting rich or even especially to a secure, middle class lifestyle, though that was part of it, but primarily to something finer and more important: “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a 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.” That American Dream is well worth carrying with us into the future.
The competing vision, the Gospel of Wealth, found its origins in the Gilded Age. In his 1889 book, The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie espoused a widely held philosophy that drew on Social Darwinism and, though less crudely expressed, that has many adherents today.
To Carnegie, the depressed conditions of late 19th century American workers and the limited opportunities they faced were the price to be paid for the abundant economic progress made possible. Carnegie was brutally honest in his views.
“We accept and welcome,” he wrote, “as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race. Having accepted these, it follows that there must be great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale. That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures enormous rewards for its possessor.”
Garfinkle recounts the way Carnegie’s Gospel stood Lincoln’s vision on its head: “Whereas in Lincoln’s America, the underlying principle of economic life was widely shared equality of opportunity, … in Carnegie’s America the watchword was inequality and the concentration of wealth and resource in the hands of the few.”
In recent decades, of course, the Gospel of Wealth has returned with a vengeance. Income and wealth have been concentrated in the hands of the few at levels not seen for a hundred years, American wages have almost flatlined for many decades, the once-proud American middle class is fading fast, and government action to materially improve the prospects of average Americans is widely disparaged. We live in a world the Social Darwinists would approve, where great personal wealth is associated with the highest of accomplishments.
3.
A third historical tension in our history is that between an American lifestyle that revolves around consumption and commercialism — “getting and spending” — versus one that embraces living simply and conscientiously, with respect for nature and care for each other.
In her important book, The Consumers’ Republic, Lizabeth Cohen traces the rise of mass consumption in America to policies adopted after World War II: “Americans after World War II saw their nation as the model for the world of a society committed to mass consumption and what were assumed to be its far-reaching benefits. Mass consumption did not only deliver wonderful things for purchase — the televisions, air conditioners, and computers that have transformed American life over the last half century. It also dictated the most central dimensions of postwar society, including the political economy (the way public policy and the mass consumption economy mutually reinforced each other), as well as the political culture (how political practice and American values, attitudes, and behaviors tied to mass consumption became intertwined).”
However, Cohen also documents that, whatever its blessings, American consumerism has had profound and unintended consequences on broader issues of social justice and democracy.
She notes that “the Consumers’ Republic did not unfold quite as policymakers intended … the Consumers’ Republic’s dependence on unregulated private markets wove inequalities deep into the fabric of prosperity, thereby allowing, intentionally or not, the search for profits and the exigencies of the market to prevail over higher goals. Often the outcome dramatically diverged from the stated objective to use mass markets to create a more egalitarian and democratic American society.”
Another unintended consequence of consumerism has of course been the destruction of the natural environment. Today, personal consumption expenditures make up about two-thirds of GDP in the United States.
The creation of the Consumers’ Republic represented the triumph of one vision of American life and purpose. But there has been a competing vision, what historian David Shi calls the tradition of “plain living and high thinking,” a tradition that began with the Puritans and the Quakers.
In his book, The Simple Life, Shi sees in American history a “perpetual tension … between the ideal of enlightened self-restraint and the allure of unfettered prosperity. From colonial days, the mythic image of America as a spiritual commonwealth and a republic of virtue has survived alongside the more tantalizing view of the nation as an engine of economic opportunities, a festival of unfettered individualism, and a cornucopia of consumer delights.”
“The concept [of the simple life] arrived with the first settlers, and it has remained an enduring — and elusive — ideal … Its primary attributes include a hostility toward luxury and a suspicion of riches, a reverence for nature and a preference for rural over urban ways of life and work, a desire for personal self-reliance through frugality and diligence, a nostalgia for the past, a commitment to conscientious rather than conspicuous consumption, a privileging of contemplation and creativity, an aesthetic preference for the plain and functional, and a sense of both religious and ecological responsibility for the just uses of the world’s resources.”
Speaking of enlightened self-restraint, John DeGraaf has an inspiring new film on the life and times of Katharine Lee Bates, From Sea to Shining Sea: The Story of America the Beautiful. Among other points, it reminds us to consider her lyrics. Her second stanza calls us to mindfulness and restraint: “Confirm thy soul in self-control/ Thy liberty in law!”
In the end, these three arguments over America — competing over the meaning of happiness, the path to prosperity, the choice of lifestyle — tell much the same story.
There is a vision of an American Commonwealth. It is a place where the pursuit of happiness is sought in the growth of civic virtue and in devotion to the public good, where the American dream is steadily realized as average Americans achieve their human potential and the benefits of economic activity are widely and fairly shared, and where the virtues of living simply, consuming conscientiously, and revering nature predominate.
That powerful vision has not prevailed.
Instead, the Commonwealth vision has been overpowered by the rise of consumerism, anthropocentrism, and a particularly ruthless variety of winner-take-all capitalism that has aggrandized the wealthy almost beyond comprehension, left half the country struggling paycheck to paycheck, and helped to greatly endanger both the planet’s life-sustaining biogeochemical cycles and our norms-based democracy.
The Commonwealth traditions may not have prevailed to date, but they are not dead. They await us, and indeed they are today being awakened across this great land. New ways of living and working, sharing and caring, are emerging. They beckon us with a new American Dream.
There is an America beyond despair. Ask a parent, ask yourself, what America would you like for your children and grandchildren, and the odds are good that in the reply, in that outpouring of hope, a new America unfolds, one rebuilt from the best of the old, drawing on the best of who we were and are and can be.
For more essays by Gus, see his blog Essays from the Edge. Gus is a fellow at Vermont Law School and a Distinguished Next-System Fellow at the Democracy Collaborative. A former dean of the Yale School of the Environment, he also co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, was founder and president of the World Resources Institute, and served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. He is the author of six books, including the award-winning The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, and Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment.