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Poetry: A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allen Poe 

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Poetry: A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allen Poe 

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In this poem, Edgar Allen Poe explains the struggle in trying to determine what is reality and what is a dream. What we think we perceive as reality could just be an unrealistic goal we have, we see this when he writes "All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream." In the second verse, Poe explains finding grains of golden sand and he writes how they are falling "through my fingers to the deep." He explains you could get so close to reaching your dream but it slips through your fingers as if it was too small to be real. Parallel to Poe, Gatsby reached the level of wealth he dreamed of but he never got the love he gave returned. Though he was constantly surrounded by people he was completely alone even after his death. Poe questions the reality of dreams in the last line "Is all that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream?" he is questioning if he can make these fantasies into something real and attainable.

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A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe | Poetry Foundation

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In this movie, Jose M Hernandez shares his story of how he went from working with his family in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley to chasing his dreams and becoming a NASA astronaut. As a child, his family sacrificed their financial situation and stayed in the US for his education. Eventually, he graduated college in electrical engineering, and he started a new job but was treated differently because he was Mexican. Despite this, he quickly grew in this job and went up positions but he wasn't truly fulfilling his dream of being an astronaut in space. Similar to Hernandez, Gatsby reached a high level of wealth and had all the luxuries he could want but didn't reach his full dream, of being loved by Daisy. Hernandez was rejected 11 times by NASA and each time he added more to his application. Eventually, he was accepted and became one of NASA's astronauts, as well as fulfilling his lifelong dream. Because of the love his parents and wife had for him where they were willing to sacrifice aspects of their life his goal never changed and he was able to achieve.

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A Million Miles Away - Official Trailer | Prime Video

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Non-Fiction Writing: How the "American Dream" Has Changed for Young Americans 

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Non-Fiction Writing: How the "American Dream" Has Changed for Young Americans 

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There were survey results released about what The American Dream means to 1,586 people ages 18 to 34. It was found that different generations have changed their view on The American Dream and what success means. Older generations saw marriage, owning a house, and having children as more important aspects than the younger generations who value self-fulfillment and freedom above it. Older generations also had more faith in government resources to help them reach their goals; younger people now are more skeptical of the capacity in politics and government. This can be compared to the new and old money in The Great Gatsby, for example, someone whose old money like Tom married Daisy because of her looks and social status while someone whose new money like Gatbsy wants to be with her because he is in love with her as a person.

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How the "American Dream" has Changed for Young Americans

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How has the "American Dream" evolved over time? Learn how the American Dream has changed for young people & about their views on societal factors here.

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Green Light is the first track on Lorde's "Melodrama". The song explains the ending of a relationship and the inability to move on, waiting for the green light to know it is time. In The Great Gatsby, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock symbolizes his undying love for her and his inability to reach his American Dream. The green light symbolizes a guiding light for both Gatsby and Lorde, they both waiting for a sign to proceed with their goal. Gatsby wants to be led towards his American Dream, which is connected to his love for Daisy, and the wealth he gains to achieve this goal. Lorde wants to move on from the love she once had, but she's haunted by the memories of her relationship. Lorde sings "I wish I could get my things and just let go. I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it." This parallels the scene in Gatsby where he throws his clothes up in the air the first time Daisy visits him, symbolizing the life of love and wealth she could have had with Gatsby. While Lorde is now picking up her "things" and leaving, they stay being a reminder of her past relationship and she can't "just let go". Both speak about physical reminders of what they could've had or did but wished that it never did. Gatbsy sees this as a new opportunity to rekindle what they once had he's just waiting for that "green light" from Daisy that she still loves him. Similar to this, Lorde is also waiting for a "green light" but hers is not to relive the past but to move on from it.

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Ted Talk: Pooja Mahajan | Living the American Dream

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Ted Talk: Pooja Mahajan | Living the American Dream

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Pooja Mahajan was born and raised in India but moved to The United States to pursue her dream, she became an environmental engineer working at a global consulting firm. She speaks about what truly is the meaning of The American Dream and if it still exists. Mahajan begins by explaining her view on The American Dream while she was still living in India, "that glamourous dream of having a six-figure salary, a luxurious car, a big house, and a whole lot more." After struggling to get a job and a work visa, she finally accepts the first job that wants to hire her. She had to move cities away from her husband and was living alone. She was overworked in this job and eventually was fired after two years. Mahajan, devastated, thinks to herself "What have I gained by chasing this American Dream?". She had this huge vision of what moving to America would do to her life but when she got here her dream started to change and she began to measure her success on her level of wealth. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby's dream was for Daisy to choose him, but she did not because of his social class. We see him gain a huge amount of wealth to reach his American Dream of his love being returned back to him. Mahajan realized that The American Dream is really "about making intentional choices for yourself" which is what Gatsby never truly realized because he was blinded by his love for Daisy.

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Does the American Dream still exist? In this talk, Pooja inspires the listeners to reevaluate the meaning of the American Dream by sharing her personal story of moving to the United States for pursuing the American Dream and failing to achieve it, or not.

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Artwork: The American Dream by Adele Soll Aronson 

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Artwork: The American Dream by Adele Soll Aronson 

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The American Dream by Adele Soll Aronson is an oil painting done in 2018. The painting feature three homeless people and their dog sleeping in front of a clothing store. One of the people who are sleeping is covered with an American flag blanket. In The Great Gatsby, though he did end up reaching the level of wealth he wanted, he was never truly accepted by the upperclass who was born into theirs. This piece captures that sad reality because though they are living in the US and they are just outside the expensive store, they can't go inside it. At the bottom of the painting it says "The American Dream...ers" this demonstrates the idea that those chasing The American Dream are only dreamers.

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The Great Gatsby was written and takes place during the 1920s, also known as The Jazz Age. Jay Gatsby is known for the lavish parties he throws every Saturday at his mansion in Long Island, New York. During the 1920s, there was an increase in consumerism because of there being new products on the market and also new marketing techniques. Americans were spending a lot of money and they had more of it to spend. They go out to see new Hollywood movies, buy the latest fashion, and buy new consumer goods. A huge part of the Jazz Age was the rise of Jazz culture and music. During the 1920s, many people just wanted to go out dancing at the many parties that took place during this decade. Social class, success, and wealth were important ideals during this age which is what inspired Fitzgerald to write The Great Gatsby. A big theme in the novel is new money and old money, those who live on East Egg are known as old money and those who live on West Egg are considered new money. Characters like Daisy and Tom are considered old money because they inherited their wealth while Gatsby is new money because he grew up poor and was self-made to become wealthy. With the increase of consumerism, there were a lot of people who were climbing up the social ladder and creating their own wealth during this time. Though many got lost in trying to achieve this goal, we see how Gatbsy was motivated solely by his love for Daisy, his idea of his dream was corrupted. The Jazz Age was a decade of luxury, wealth, and economic prosperity, and though there were many good parts of it, The Great Gatsby shines a light on how the chase for wealth impacts someone's life, sometimes leading to their original American Dream getting lost along the way.

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Flappers: The 'New Woman'

Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the "Roaring Twenties" is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said "unladylike" things, in addition to being more sexually "free" than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before Black women in the South could fully exercise their right to vote without Jim Crow segregation laws.

Millions of women worked in blue-collar jobs, as well as white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children.

In 1912, an estimated 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mid-1920s, more than 60 percent did. And with this electrification came new machines and technologies like the washing machine, the freezer and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgeries of household work.

Did you know? Because the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act did not make it illegal to drink alcohol, only to manufacture and sell it, many people stockpiled liquor before the ban went into effect. Rumor had it that the Yale Club in New York City had a 14-year supply of booze in its basement.

Fashion, Fads and Film Stars

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend-and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios.

The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh's KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920. Two years later Warren G. Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio -and three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.

People also swarmed to see Hollywood movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week, and actors like Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead became household names.

But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities.

By 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers' needs-as did the burgeoning oil industry.

The Jazz Age

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them "bedrooms on wheels.") What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music's "vulgarity" and "depravity" (and the "moral disasters" it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.

The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism and excitement of the Jazz Age-Fitzgerald once claimed that the 1920s were "the most expensive orgy in history"-while other writers, artists, musicians and designers ushered in a new era of experimental Art Deco and modernist creativity.

Prohibition Era

During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of "intoxicating liquors," and at 12 a.m. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any "intoxication beverages" with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.

This drove the liquor trade underground-now, instead of ordinary bars, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies, where liquor was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago's police force on his payroll.)

To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation's cities. For instance, to the so-called "Drys," beer was known as "Kaiser brew." Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time

Immigration and Racism in the 1920s

Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti- Communist "Red Scare" in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).

Immigrants were hardly the only targets in this decade. The Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture-jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance-discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, not just in the South but across the country, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

By the middle of the decade, the KKK had two million members, many of whom believed the Klan represented a return to all the "values" that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for Black Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.

Early Civil Rights Activism

During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more work came more exploitation.

In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions for Blacks. And as housing demands increased for Black people in the North, so did discriminatory housing practices that led to a rise of urban ghettos, where Black Americans-excluded from white neighborhoods-were relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.

Black Americans battled for political and civil rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into Black disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, as well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a law to make lynching a federal crime, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Black Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest, a Chicago Republican, became the first Black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what one historian called a "cultural Civil War" between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, "New Women" and advocates of old-fashioned family values.

But coming immediately after the hardships of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic, the Roaring Twenties also gave many middle-class Americans an unprecedented taste of freedom, unbridled fun and upward economic mobility unsurpassed in U.S. history.

Sources

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably). Smithsonian Magazine.
The Roaring Twenties. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The Roaring 20s. PBS: American Experience.

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Roaring Twenties: Flappers, Prohibition & Jazz Age - HISTORY

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The Roaring Twenties were a Jazz Age burst of prosperity and freedom for flappers and others during the Prohibition era, until the economy crashed in 1929.

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Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father became a salesman for Procter & Gamble after his business failed because of this Fitzgerald moved back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse New York. Eventually, his family moved back to his birthplace to live off his mother's inheritance when his father lost his salesman job. This is where he attended St. Paul Academy and had his first piece of writing in the school newspaper at the age of 13. When Fitzgerald turned 15, he was sent to the Newman School in New Jersey. Here he met Father Sigourney Fay who encouraged him to pursue literature. He stayed in New Jersey after graduating and attended Princeton University where he continued to study writing. He wrote scripts for the Triangle Club musicals, articles for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine, and also short stories for the Nassau Literary Magazine. After being placed on academic probation, Fiztgerlad decided to drop out of school and join the U.S. Army. Before reporting to duty, he wrote a novel and though it was rejected the publisher encouraged him to submit more work in the future. Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry but the war ended before he was ever deployed in 1918. After this began the 1920s known as the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald published his first novel This Side of Paradise which began his celebrity status at the age of 24. His newly acclaimed wealth and status only grew when he published his second book, but it also inspired him to write what is known as his best work The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald moved to Valescure, France to write about the story of tragic love, materialism, and the American Dream. Jay Gatsby who began life as a poor boy from North Dakota struggled to gain the level of wealth and status we see in the novel, yet he was never truly accepted by the higher class. We see this mirrored in Fitzgerald's own life and his struggles to reach success and wealth of his own during the Jazz Age.