The American Assumption

Abstract

Abstract While the power of the American Dream persists, in Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, W. E. B. Du Bois challenges the historicity of the concept by detailing a profoundly different origin story. Du Bois details an alternative history placing the American Dream as a mid-twentieth-century invention and outgrowth of the Great Depression. Rather than a founding premise, in Du Bois’s rendering of the American Dream, it is nothing more than a derivative of what he terms the “American Assumption.” With great historical specificity, Du Bois proves that the American Dream is intentionally devoid of the context of enslavement, land dispossession, and the events preceding and following the Civil War and Reconstruction. This essay combines key passages in Black Reconstruction with sociobiographical context to excavate key Du Boisian contributions to the sociology of knowledge, poverty, mobility, and inequality through the dissection of the American Dream mythology.