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The Pentagon, it appears, is seriously distressed by the fact that of the United States soldiers taken prisoner and brain-washed in China, two thirds succumbed, and one third have been permanently affected. Dr. Carpenter, of the University of California, has written a penetrating
and provoking analysis of the 'American Dream', as it has affected American literature and has been reflected through it, and deflected by it, which should be prescribed reading for all who seek reasons why the status quo in the greatest democracy on earth so often fails to provide moral and intellectual answers to totalitarian propaganda.
Dr. Carpenter points out that although the 'American Dream' has never been clearly defined, American literature differs from English because of the constant and omnipresent influence of the American Dream upon it, and he discusses this Dream in terms of its philosophers, the transcendentalists; its opponents, the genteel traditionalists; its enthusiasts, the romantics; and its critics, the realists, thus preserving the divisions commonly accorded the many authors who incorporated or interpreted the Dream, in however contrary fashion.
From 1654 to 1954 'the millennial hope of an ideal new world' was constantly repeated: in the Bill of Rights as in Leaves of Grass, in O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon as in Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith. In 1931 the Dream was described as 'the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world'. The Dream is composed of the twin ideas of progress and of 'a better, richer, and happier life', projected upon the new world—here, and only here, is the place where these hopes will materialize, since they are the 'local and temporal application of an essentially universal and eternal idea'.
But the very localization and temporality of the tripartite Dream raises many problems. Is the Dream capable of realization? Is such a realization, even if possible, desirable? The chief merit of Utopias has always