Post-War Realization of the American Dream

After World War II, soldiers came home, families began, lives started where they had once been halted and life changed in significant ways. It was as though America had accomplished some long overdue journey and that they had arrived at last in paradise. Walter Lippmann is quoted in The Unfinished Journey as follows, “We talk about ourselves these days as if we were a completed society, one which has no further great business to transact.” (P.105)
This said, if the American Dream truly was coming to pass, then the American Dream could accurately be described as a dream of affluence and rest: a rest from war, a rest from fear and, perhaps more than anything, a rest from complication. Surely, during a long-fought war, physically demanding and mentally wearisome, the soldiers kept their spirits up with hope and dreams. The American Dream did not find itself birthed in its homeland in the 1950s, but had rather grown and expanded during a long exodus abroad. Soldiers and fighters dreamed of home, of the things they had left behind, of the future that surely awaited them. Inevitably, the dreams that had left with the troops would come back bigger, bolder, and

The dream for life to unfurl as these men and women dreamed about when they were young or when they were suffering the tragedies of the second World War. The 1960s and 1970s would bring complication with them, naturally, as the only thing that can ever be counted on is change, but after the turmoil of the 1930s and the war of the 1940s, the American Dream is one of simplicity. Simple material goods and simple ambitions. A simple meal at a simple family dinner table with a simple family who simply loves you and whom you simply love. America was no stranger to complication, as they had suffered deeply two consecutive decades of horrific