Oscar Wilde might have said, “they make us believe our own advertising.” The God of American destiny has answered our prayers beyond Jules Verne’s imaginings. He has given us domination over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. But no power is without price. Have we been doomed to make our dreams into illusions? A dream is a vision or an aspiration to which we can compare reality. It may be very vivid, but its vividness reminds us how different is the real world. An illusion, on the other hand, is an image we have mistaken for reality. We cannot reach for it, aspire to it, or be exhilarated by it; for we live in it. It is prosaic because we cannot see it is not fact. America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. The American Dream was the most accurate way of describing the hopes of men in America.
