PURSUING THE AMERICAN DREAM: Opportunity and Exclusion over Four Centuries

This ambitious work is the first on its subject: a history of the sense of promise that has animated American life since its beginning. The dream of opportunity and liberation from Old World shackles arrived, Jillson shows, with the first ships and spread across the land and into every heart. But the dream was sustained by more than ideas and yearnings: as Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University, illustrates in the freshest part of his book, the dream was gradually embodied in institutions, laws and practices. Yet, as Jillson is also at pains to point out, often in numbing detail, the dream always fell short of reality by excluding some people and discriminating against others. Jillson arrives at this unsurprising conclusion through an exhaustive review of the writings of religious and political thinkers. But what opportunities he's missed! No foreigners' views of the American dream, no playwrights, films, humor or caricatures. Such coverage, if substituted for some other weighty material, might have lent greater variety and lightness to a frequently tedious exposition. One final problem, from which an American author writing about the American dream can't escape: he assumes the worth of the ideal he analyzes. The full history of the American Dream will have to be written by someone from somewhere else. 29 b&w photos. (Sept.)