Langston Hughes and The American Dream
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The American Dream: The Endless Pursuit
Draft #3
Freedom, equality and opportunity, there is something inherent about these ideals to America and Americans. They are the essence of the American Dream, a dream of personal happiness and material comfort. It is of ever-limitless possibility, yet it is this very notion that limits the success of the American Dream becoming a reality. This notion of possibility is what America was founded upon. Thousands of people leaving an old world of ancient rule and order to embark on a fresh unspoiled land. Re-creation is what this land was founded upon and that is what it will end with. Nothing is ever tangibly achieved because someone somewhere else is already trying to revolutionize it. Langston Hughes, a premiere figure of the Harlem Renaissance and Alexis de Tocqueville, a French government official, two men seperated by time and culture both identify this contradiction of the American soul in their writings.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote on the behavior and democracy of Americans during the middle 1800s. In his acclaimed work Democracy in America Tocqueville brutally exposes our precious right to "the pursuit of happiness" as an ingrained dysfunction rather than our patriotic duty...