The American Dream Theme Analysis

[Little Boy] felt that the circumstances of his family’s life operated against his need to see things and go places. For instance he had conceived an enormous interest in the works and career of Harry Houdini, the escape artist. But he had not been taken to a performance. Houdini was a headliner in the top vaudeville circuits. His audiences were poor people—carriers, peddlers, policemen, children. His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped form bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, […] a rolltop desk, a sausage skin.

At this time in history Jacob Riis, a tireless newspaper reporter and reformer, wrote about the need of housing for the poor. They lived too many to a room. There was no sanitation. The streets reeked of shit. Children died of mild colds or slight rashes. Children died on beds made from two kitchen chairs pushed together. They died on floors. Many people believed that filth and starvation and disease were what the immigrant got for his moral degeneracy. But Riis believed in airshafts. Air shafts, light and air, would bring health. He went around climbing dark stairs and knocking on doors and taking flash photos of indigent families in their dwellings. […] After he left, the family, not daring to move, remained in the position in which they had been photographed. They waited for life to change. They waited for their transformation.

The prisoner was sitting at a table laid with linen and service. On the table were the remains of a large meal. An empty bottle of champagne was stuck upside down in a cooler. The iron cot was covered with a quilted spread and throw pillows. A Regency armoire stood against the stone wall. The ceiling fixture had been ornamented with a Tiffany lampshade. Houdini could not help staring. The prisoner’s cell glowed like a stage in the perpetual dusk of the cavernous prison. The prisoner stood up and waved, a stately gesture, and his wide mouth offered the trace of a smile.

Millions of men were out of work. Those fortunate enough to have jobs were dared to form unions. Courts enjoined them, police busted their heads, their leaders were jailed and new men took their jobs. A union was an affront to God. The laboring man would be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, said one wealthy man, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom had given the control of the property interests of this country. If all else failed the troops were called out. […] In the coal fields a miner made a dollar sixty a day if he could dig three tons. He lived in the company’s shacks and bought his food from the company stores. On the tobacco farms Negroes stripped tobacco leaves thirteen hours a day and earned six cents an hour, man, woman, or child.

This was the day Evelyn Nesbit considered kidnapping the little girl and leaving Tateh to his fate. The old artists had never inquired of her name and knew nothing about her. It could be done. Instead, she threw herself into the family’s life with redoubled effort, coming with food, linens, and whatever else she could move past the old man’s tormented pride. She was insane with the desire to become one of them and drew Tateh out in conversation and learned from the girl how to sew knee pants. For hours each day, each evening, she lived as a woman in the Jewish slums, and was driven home by the Thaw chauffeur form a prearranged place many blocks away, always in despair.

Houdini walked through the streets. His ears burned with humiliation. He wore a hat with the brim turned down. He wore a tight-fitting double-breasted linen jacket and he kept his hands in the pockets of the jacket. He wore tan trousers and brown and white shoes with pointed toes. It was a chilly autumn afternoon and most people wore coats. He moved swiftly through the crowded New York streets. He was incredibly lithe. There was a kind of act that used the real world for its stage. He couldn’t touch it. For all his achievements, he was a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician. What was the sense of his life if people walked out of the theater and forgot him? The headlines on the newsstand said Peary had reached the Pole. The real-world act was what got into the history books.

The mill owners in Lawrence realized that of all the stratagems devised by the workers this one, the children’s crusade, was the most damaging. If it was allowed to go on, national sentiment would swing to the workingmen and the owners would have to give in. This would mean an increase in wages that would bring some workers up to eight dollars a week. They would get extra pay for overtime and machine speed-ups. They would get off without any punishment for their strike. It was unthinkable. The mill owners knew who were the stewards of civilization and the source of progress and prosperity in the city of Lawrence. For the good of the country and the American democratic system they resolved there would be no more children’s crusades.

Tateh shook his head. This country will not let me breathe. In this mood he slowly came to the decision not to go back to Lawrence, Massachusetts. His belongings, his rags, he would leave to the landlord. What do you have with you, he said to his daughter. She showed him the contents of her small satchel—things she had taken for her trip away from home. Her underthings, her comb and brush, a hair clasp, garters, stockings, and the books he had made for her of the trolley car and the skater. From this moment, perhaps, Tateh began to conceive of his life as separate from the fate of the working class. He stood and she stood and took his hand and together they looked for the exit. The I.W.W. has won, he said. But what has it won? A few more pennies in wages. Will it now own the mills? No.

He’d always thought of himself as progressive. He believed in the perfectability of the republic. He thought, for instance, there was no reason the Negro could not with proper guidance carry every burden of human achievement. He did not believe in aristocracy except of the individual effort and vision. He felt his father’s loss of fortune had the advantage of saving him from the uncritical adoption of the prejudices of his class. But the air in this ball park open under the sky smelled like the back room of a saloon. Cigar smoke filled the stadium and, lit by the oblique rays of the afternoon sun, indicated the voluminous cavern of air in which he sat pressed upon as if by a foul universe, with the breathless wind of a ten-thousand-throated chorus in his ears shouting its praise and abuse.

But now the authorities were embarrassed. The Ford stood as tangible proof of the Black man’s grievance. Waterlogged and wrecked, it offended the sensibilities of anyone who respected machines and valued what they could do. After its picture was published people began to come see it in such numbers that the police had to cordon off the area. Feeling that they had compromised themselves the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen issued a new series of condemnations of the colored madman and said that to negotiate with him in any way at all, to face him with less than an implacable demand to surrender himself, would be to invite every renegade and radical and black man in the country to flout the law and spit upon the American flag.

Coalhouse Walker was never harsh or autocratic. He treated his followers with courtesy and only asked if they thought something ought to be done. He dealt with them out of his constant sorrow. His controlled rage affected them like the force of a magnet. He wanted no music in the basement quarters. No instrument of any kind. They embraced every discipline. They had brough in several cots and laid out a barracks. They shared kitchen chores and housecleaning chores. They believed they were going to die in a spectacular manner. This belief produced in them a dramatic, exalted self-awareness. Younger Brother was totally integrated in their community. He was one of them. He awoke every day into a state of solemn joy.

Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they led was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would life themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn’t know of what it would consist, she never had. But she now no longer waited for it. […] she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied he infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.

He was against all Negro agitation on questions of political and social equality. He had written a best-selling book about his life, a struggle up from slavery to self-realization, and about his ideas, which called for the Negro’s advancement with the help of his white neighbor. He counseled friendship between the races and spoke of promise for the future. His views had been endorsed by four Presidents and most of the governors of Southern states. Andrew Carnegie had given him money for his school and Harvard had awarded him an honorary degree.

It is a great honor for me to meet you, sir, [Coalhouse] said. I have always stood in admiration for you. He looked at the marble floor. It is true I am a musician and a man of years. But I would hope this might suggest to you the solemn calculation of my mind. And that therefore, possibly, we might both be servants of our color who insist on the truth of our manhood and the respect it demands. Washington was so stunned by this suggestion that he began to lose consciousness. Coalhouse led him from the hall into the West Rom and sat him down in one of the red plush chairs. Regaining his composure Washington […] gazed at the marble mantle of the fireplace as big as a man. He lanced upward at the polychrome ceiling that had originally come from the palace of Cardinal Gigli in Lucca.