The American Dream

Car culture in the mid to late 20^th century can be summed up as cutting edge. Technology was being pushed further and so was design. The car was becoming a part of life that was more and more necessary for the average American, and America was designing itself especially for the car. From drive-in movie theaters of the 1950s to cohesive shopping centers with parking, the car was now a permanent aspect of the nation. More to the point vehicles saw a wave in design and function from the chrome covered cars of the 50s, to Hot Rods and sports cars, to SUVs and trucks. “In a world of increasing conformity…these vehicles gave their owners a distinctive individuality.” [1] The car also offered varying levels of equality for blacks and women who could purchase and ride off in any vehicle helping them, in the case of blacks, avoid as Cullen quotes Thomas J. Sugrue “the insults of Jim Crow.” [2]

The California version of the American Dream is basically upward mobility with little effort. Cullen puts it best in the first line of Chapter six in The American Dream when he says “The American Dream was never meant to be a zero-sum solution: the goal has always been to end up with more than you started with.” [3] Beginning with plucky Americans traveling West in search for gold, to the entrepreneurs of Las Vegas, and finally to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood movie stars today, California and its inhabitants epitomize the dream of wealth without work but a heaping amount of luck. 

If taking the California Dream down to its core it is about money, the vast accumulation of wealth and the freedoms from want that it can bring. Late 20^th century car culture is many things including freedom, individualism, and at times obsession. This, to me, is what they have in common. Both can bring out the best in people giving them freedom to go where they want and when, both can help create and display characteristics of the individual, and both can become obsessions that take over ones thoughts. It is specifically this last idea where I see the most significant connection. Las Vegas and the gambling it represents can become a serious problem for some people driving them to spend hours at a time at games of chance, losing life savings, homes, and family members (wives and husbands who seek divorce). Cars and those who collect them and restore them also can become an obsession, where someone invests serious amounts of money they may or may not have, spends a great deal of time at car shows and tracking down missing parts, and then also neglects family members (and possibly loses them).

However the California Dream also feeds the car culture of America. It is the ideal of having that perfect car, be it an expensive foreign sports car or for the teenager just simply a car that can also be considered a California Dream. For the California Dream is not necessarily realistic, and perhaps owning a car worth three times as much as ones house isn’t either.

American culture is ever changing. Our wants, needs, creations, they are always becoming better, different, and more expensive. In the last 50 years alone telephones went from indoors attached with a short cord, to cordless phones capable of being walked around the house, to car phones, to large cell phones being totted everywhere, to smaller and smaller cell phones that now it seems are as important to our lives as our cars if not more so. American culture rapidly changes, and it is sometimes impossible to keep up, but it is this ever changing atmosphere that pushes technology and innovation.  It pushes men and women to think larger and dream bigger, and imagining that anything is possible if one tries and works hard enough is the American Dream.

[1] John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009), 134.

[2] ibid., 135.

[3] Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford Press, 2003), 159.