Book Review / Waking from the American Dream

The Day Before Yesterday: Reconsidering America's past, Rediscovering the Present Michael Elliott Simon and Schuster, New York, $24

A foreigner arriving in the US in this election season will notice its invisible presence. It is invoked in every candidate's speech; its condition is monitored as closely as a car crash victim in intensive care. It is, of course, the "American Dream" - variously held to be vibrant or fading, re-emerging or imperilled, depending on whether the speaker is in or out of office.

"Restoring the American Dream" was the slogan of the Republican convention in San Diego, where even the dour Bob Dole acquired oratorical wings as he spoke about the better America of his youth, "I know, because I was there. I have seen it." A few days later, Ross Perot proclaimed: "I have lived the American Dream," promising that if elected President he would ensure that anyone else could be a billionaire if they really wanted. And as surely as Lake Michigan laps at the shores of Chicago, Bill Clinton will be extolling the Dream in the Windy City next week.

But what is the Dream - and, if it is so lofty and inspiring, why do most modern Americans whine so much about their lot? No matter that the economic recovery is now in its sixth year, that unemployment is half that of Europe and inflation next to non-existent, and America stands proud and unchallenged as the world's guardian superpower. Alas, for its lucky but complaining inhabitants, this is not enough. Poll after poll shows a large majority convinced that the country is "on the wrong track".

Such is the paradox of modern America which Michael Elliott masterfully explains. His thesis is simple: that the country is living under a crippling illusion, that one single period of exceptional harmony and prosperity has been the natural birthright of every American, from the Founding Fathers to the present day.

Instead, as Mr Elliott argues, this period by which all is measured was a freak, lasting from 1945 to the late 1960s (indeed its end might be dated to the riots of August 1968, the last time the Democrats gathered in Chicago). It was when family values truly reigned, when wives did not have to work and when I Love Lucy and Sergeant Bilko ruled the airwaves. Everyone grew better off, year after year. This was what later generations have mythologised as the "American Dream".

As is to be expected from an ex-Economist man, Mr Elliott is an unquenchable pro-American optimist. But in an age when so many Americans seem just the opposite, that is a positive relief. And he performs the priceless service of reminding us that the Golden Age was the exception, not the rule. It was brought about by a World War that physically laid waste America's competitors, and nurtured by a Cold War which only strengthened a sense of shared national purpose. America's chronic tensions and inequalities were blunted by the spectre of Communism abroad, by progress towards civil rights at home and by abnormally low immigration. One way and another, the country was as homogeneous and as at peace with itself as it has ever been.

Of course the Golden Age couldn't last. Alas, for people who were children or young adults in those years - among them Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and the generations who run today's America - it was the formative period.

In fact, America today is not so much going to the dogs as reverting to type. Perhaps the verbs in the subtitle of Mr Elliott's book should be reversed. The American past is not so much to be reconsidered, as rediscovered. For in so many ways the modern US resembles America before the First World War. That too was a turbulent, messy, violent but infinitely creative place. Just as now, huge earlier waves of immigration were changing the face of the country. Just as it leads the information revolution today, so America led the revolutions of electricity and mechanisation a century or more ago. Then as now, unsettling change was a constant. If only Americanshad politicians who dared tell them so, instead of engaging in a bidding war of impossible promises - how much saner and more contented the country would be. If only. Welcome to Campaign '96.

RUPERT CORNWELL

Washington