The American Dream to me is the idea that you have to be successful and have 
money to be happy. The American Dream has many facets that change over the course of US history as well as facets that contradict each other.
There is the idea that with hard work, you can come from nothing and achieve the dream life of a happy family and successful career. The iconic Migrant Mother photograph from 1936 during the Great Depression paints a picture of poverty in the West during this time period. This photo is hard to relate to the American Dream. The mother, Florence Owens Thompson is working as a crop picker to provide her 7 children with food. This family doesn’t have a home all they have is a tent and an old car.
It is hard to relate my idea of the American Dream to this family because they are in such dire conditions. Their mother is stressed and worn down because she is unsure of where their next meal will come from. She is caring a heavy burden and wants to care for her children. Because The United States was so poor at this moment in history it was hard to pursue the American Dream without an income. Thompson could hope to achieve the American Dream but in the state she was in, as well as the state the country was in, it was more about survival than dreaming.
The problem with poverty during the Great Depression according to Dorothea Lange and Carter Revard is that it was so severe. Poverty was on a new level and when people would go to California for jobs they were met with low pay and increasing debt. This level of poverty relates to the American Dream in that the dream becomes unattainable. These people were putting in hard work with nothing in return. They were not slowly climbing the ladder to happiness through hard work. The American Dream becomes distant because during the Great Depression it is unrealistic because of the high level of poverty.
The American Dream relates to how we understand the ideas of America in the ways that America was founded. America was built on the ideal of freedom. Europeans moved to America to be free but at the same time that was a contradiction in that there were slaves and women didn’t have equal rights. This is similar to the American Dream in that the American Dream can be a contradiction. In the case of the Migrant Mother hard work didn’t lead to overall happiness and success, which is the basis of the American Dream. The American Dream is an idea that creates what America is, but its complexity has to be fully understood to find the deeper meanings of what America stands for.
Photo: http://gogetfunding.com/project/helping-families-overcome-poverty
The “Migrant Mother” photo was taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936. Florence Owens Thompson is the focal point of the picture. The woman is surrounded by three of her children. Thompson carries a worried expression. Two of her children hide their faces from the camera, perhaps out of shame. The third child is an helpless infant. The photograph displays depravity. These people are wearing old, torn clothes. They appear unbathed. The message is the mother and her family are poor. This picture is iconic for not only presenting what poverty looked like in the 1930s, but because of the emotional response it received. A parent’s job is to provide necessities to his or her family and it is apparent that Thompson was unable to do so. Lange took this picture to show the inhumanity of being one of America’s poor. For the people who were not devastated by the Depression, Lange was telling them the American Dream is not alive. The message was the system is broken and we as Americans need to do something about it. As photographer Jacob Riis brought awareness of the horrors of child labor (and poverty) around the turn of the century, Lange was doing the same with her pictures as she was exposing the degradation of poverty. Both photographers were motivating people to act. The “Migrant Mother” was an important picture then as it is today. While America has not experienced this grand level of poverty since the Great Depression, this photograph is a reminder of the time when we did. It reinstates that poverty is real and that the notion of the American Dream does not exist for all.
understand why this film exists, and why the fact that it exists is relevant, we have to examine the conditions under which L. Frank Baum created the original Wizard of Oz story in the final years of the 19th century. Baum was a member of the Democratic Populist party, and in the 1890s he ardently supported Populist William Jennings Bryan in both his 1896 and 1900 presidential campaigns – obviously, both were unsuccessful (Littlefield, 49). Henry Littlefield proposes that The Wizard of Oz is an allegory for the political climate during the time Baum was writing it: Dorothy is the common citizen, the cowardly lion is Bryan, and the Wizard represents the U.S. government leadership (the emperor has no clothes). Though Bryan’s dual losses in the presidential election proved that Baum’s Populist party was in the minority, The Wizard of Oz has a happy ending, with all of the characters realizing that what they were looking for was inside themselves all along. If Littlefield is right about the allegory, we can see The Wizard of Oz as a story that Baum wrote with the intent to empower and motivate his fellow Democratic Populists to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and perhaps be a bit smarter and braver the next time around. Baum was writing for a minority group that didn’t have the political or social clout that it desired.
allegory, I got to thinking about other movies that could have employed the same method. Some further research revealed theories about Star Wars and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz being essentially the same story. Although created in completely different eras, the resemblance between the two works is startling.
Carol on more public school field trips than any person should have to endure. But, despite these unhappy visits to the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, I have managed to preserve my love of musicals by way of Wicked: The Musical. Four t-shirts, one sweatshirt, two Collector’s Edition Grimmeries, one bootlegged soundtrack (oops), four shows in Pittsburgh, and one show in San Francisco later, my mother has forbidden me from purchasing more tickets to see Wicked, and has certainly stopped buying me overpriced clothing with the word “popular” on it.
my mom) so much money. In addition to the powerful message of believing in yourself and the importance of knowing the whole story before making judgments, the sheer creativity and modern political allegory that warns against the power of those in charge are what makes Wicked resonate so well with audiences.
the sounds of L. Frank Baum’s (author of original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) initials – LFB. This is only one of literally hundreds of references to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the children’s book that Wicked is based upon. Wicked opens as the townspeople of Oz are rejoicing in the death of The Wicked Witch of the West. Glinda The Good Witch arrives (traveling via bubble) and tells the townspeople that they should not be so quick to hate the Wicked Witch, and reveals that a long time ago she was friends with The Wicked Witch, whose name was Elphaba. The rest of the musical is a flashback to Glinda and Elphaba’s time at Shiz University.
