1. “God, Mammon, and the American Dream”
At the end of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway stares from Gatsby’s empty mansion
across the Sound until modern houses melt in the moonlight. What comes into focus
in Nick’s imagination is the first Dutch ship that sailed along New York’s verdant
shores, with sailors dreaming “the last and greatest of all human dreams.” Readers
are not treated to the contents of the dream, only that they were awe inspiring.
Given that the final inheritor of the dream is the recently murdered Jay Gatsby, we
can surmise that ingredients of the dream included, in some mysterious local stew,
romantic aspiration, wealth beyond compare, upward mobility, and business
success.
The concept of the American dream is as wide and capacious as Jefferson’s
westward gaze from Monticello. There are as many metrics to measure success as
there have been American dreamers. James Truslow Adams, who coined the phrase
in 1931, defined it as a set of ideals that included upward social mobility
underwritten by hard work: “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone,
with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” regardless of social
class. Adams’ definition has become the nation’s typical political formulation, in
which material success and ever-increasing rewards of consumerism are beatified.
A century and a half before the tradition of material success became officially linked
to the concept of the “American dream,” the Jefferson of the Declaration of
Independence honored happiness or, rather oddly, its pursuit, along with political
liberty. His sense of equality traces its genealogy to common sense philosophy, in
which “all men” are created with the capacity of moral sentiment or sympathy to
inspire virtuous action. Two later political moments adjusted Jefferson’s vision.
First, the framers of the Constitution replaced happiness with property, explicitly
adding a material axis on which to measure the dream. Then, at the creation of the
second American republic, Bingham and other crafters of the fourteenth
amendment added legal equality.
Unlike many conceptions of the ideal state from Plato to More to Harrington, the
colonists’ version of a representative democracy was never entirely separate from
economic considerations. Merchants have been as influential as political
philosophers in defining the values that comprise the American dream. Hard work,
long ago identified by Max Weber as a core component of the Puritan vision, belongs
in the realm of Protestant ethics and underwrites many of the measures of success:
owning a home, upward mobility, education, equal opportunity. It was the
comingling of philosophical and Yankee values that caused Marius Bewley to define
the American dream as the “romantic enlargement of the possibilities of life on a
level at which the material and the spiritual have become inextricably confused.”
Given the often oxymoronic combinations of liberty and equality, individualism and
democracy, and freedom of conscience and accumulation of wealth that complicate

2. the definition of the American dream, we may well have to throw up our hands and
co-opt the fearless assertion of Walt Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well
then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Bewley’s definition in which moral and philosophical confusion reign is an attempt
to capture a late Gilded Age mentality, specifically one in which Jay Gatsby pursues a
meretricious mistress by means of criminally acquired loot. He traces the rampant
individualism that enables the romantic-materialist pursuit back to the frontier
spirit, where confidence and Emersonian self-reliance escape the confines of
civilization and meet expansive, virgin land. If we travel further back through
colonial and Puritan history, we can begin to untangle the threads of the utopian-
utilitarian dream.
In the beginning the various drives – toward political liberty or freedom of
conscience or republican virtue on the one hand and toward profit and the signs of
material success on the other – are not comingled but are competitive forces. What
appears to be constant, from the Dutch merchants sailing down the New York rivers
in Nick Carraway’s imagination to his discovery of Gatsby’s floating corpse, is an
unleashed entrepreneurial spirit in pursuit of wealth. What varies is the degree to
which that spirit can be reigned in on behalf of a moral or social or political good.
One devise American authors use to corral the odd amalgam of elements that
comprise the American dream is the pun. American literature is littered with puns,
and many of them point to the intersection of the moral and the business enterprise.
If Shakespearean puns help characterize typically male, sterile wit, or cleverness
devoid of intimate human contact, American puns treat us to the uncomfortable
yoking of the spiritual and material. Thoreau’s rich vocabulary prods at the ways the
Jacksonian merchant usurps often scriptural language. Labor, render an account,
trespass, debt, dross, minding one’s business, and calling are some of the puns that
appear in the “Economy” chapter of Walden alone. They may fall flat to the ear but
they invite readers to revel in the American ambiguities in the phrase Protestant
business ethic, in religious values that are proven by industry, and in business that
is sanctified by divine calling.
Anticipating Weber’s iron cage, in which laborers in the capitalist system, shorn of
piety, dutifully work for their subsistence, Thoreau quotes one of the most common
scriptural verses in American literature: although death awaits us, he claims, too
many men labor under a mistake, “laying up treasures which moth and rust will
corrupt and thieves break through and steal.” The brief jeremiad forces us to
confront the juxtaposition of two types of treasure that Jesus defines in Matthew 6
after offering the multitudes the beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. In Moby-Dick,
Melville will trump Thoreau and reveal another American pun embedded in this
gospel verse. As Bildad reads aloud the proscription to lay up your treasures in
heaven from a large Bible couched on his lap, Ishmael negotiates his pay with the
two Quaker owners of the Pequod. The pay is calculated as a fraction of net profits,
otherwise called a lay. The owners use the religious sentiment to encourage Ishmael

3. to take a smaller lay (as they invite him to devalue treasures of the earth), and can
do so because Jesus’ moral verb lay, whose object might be wealth or good deeds, is
also the noun for whaling wages. The material and the spiritual, at least during
salary negotiations on the Pequod, are indeed inextricably confused.
Over two centuries earlier, John Cotton traveled to Southampton, England, where he
delivered his farewell sermon “Gods Promise to His Plantation” to a congregation of
Puritans before they boarded the Arbella and the other ships of the Winthrop fleet
and sailed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Much of the sermon is a defense of
property rights – those of the colonists at the expense of the native inhabitants – as
Cotton carefully delineates the various ways God makes room for his chosen people
in the new land of promise. But the peroration asks the congregation to go forth
“with a public spirit, looking not on your own things only, but also on the things of
others.” Cotton attempts in the sermon to dull the competitive instinct. In fact, he
justifies removing from England because of the heightened competition among
merchants due to population density. Once across the Atlantic, fewer merchants will
no longer “eat up one another.” Even more urgently, the poor and those in debt need
assistance. To plant a colony, explains Cotton, is to settle a commonwealth, which he
makes clear means wealth in common. Adventurers (what the Puritans called the
investors in the mercantile joint stock company that would settle the Bay Colony)
and merchants must channel their entrepreneurial spirit for the common good.
Reigning in the profit motive is even more pronounced in the sermon delivered by
John Winthrop aboard the Arbella just prior to landing. “A Model of Christian
Charity” posits at the outset the divinely sanctioned condition of mankind, that there
will always be rich and poor amongst us. Upon this divine hierarchy Winthrop
constructs a foundation of communitarian logic. We are born condemned to love
only of self. In this fallen state, we are conditioned to “lay up for posterity.” In the
civil and ecclesiastical organization about to be established, and amidst the harsh
conditions the Puritans are about to encounter, these fallen instincts will doom the
community. In some dire instances, the poor, the indebted, and the hungry will
require the beneficence of the well housed, well clad, and well fed. Thus, the
scriptural command to love thy neighbor is not sufficient. Those fortunate enough to
have acquired resources must have mercy, forgive debt, and contribute to the
general welfare. “The care of the public must oversway all private respects . . . we
must bear one another’s burdens.” Anticipating the rapacious instincts of the
merchants and investors in pursuit of profit, Winthrop’s sermon attempts to place
wealth in the service of the community. In his often misunderstood peroration, he
imagines the congregation as a city upon a hill, not to signal a burgeoning American
exceptionalism, but to shame its citizens, and cause God to withdraw divine
assistance, should their fallen nature, their selfish pursuit of worldly treasures, run
rampant.
Ben Franklin represents a decided break with several foundational aspect of Puritan
culture. The notion of original sin, from which only a select few sinners may be
redeemed by the grace of God, Franklin replaces by the less mysterious notion of

4. human mistakes (or “errata”). He breaks the Puritan habit of attending at sermons
because ministers fail to preach about moral principles, “their Aim seeming to be
rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens.” Franklin even gives up a
favorite occupation of debating doctrinal fine points, because it encourages
aggressive verbal sparring as opposed to genial social conversation. The
fundamental nature of God itself comes under scrutiny, as Franklin confesses
“Revelation had indeed no weight with me.” A new conception of virtue and vice,
based not on God’s commandments but on utilitarian and social principles, is the
philosophical fulcrum on which he balances moral deliberation. This hard earned
conclusion leads to one of the most remarkable sentences in the Autobiography:
“And this Persuasion, with the kind hand of Providence, or some guardian Angel, or
accidental favourable Circumstances & Situations, or all together, preserved me.” It
is quite daring to claim that a philosophical realignment of the notion of virtue can
provide the armor to protect youthful inexperience apart from the guidance of one’s
father and traditional faith. It is potentially damning to eviscerate the power of
Providence by gradually replacing it with equal metaphysical forces of guardian
angels and accidents.
But Franklin is careful not to jettison the communal vision of Puritanism. Cotton
Mather’s Bonifacius (or Essays to do Good) is as central to his early readings as
Defoe’s Essay on Projects. Franklin mentions several municipal projects in the
Autobiography, including paved streets, the fire department, property tax, and street
sweeping, but his favorite is the subscription library. The magnitude of the
achievement of the library, which ends part one of the Autobiography, can be
measured by the distance Franklin has traveled from his initial project. As a child he
showed “an early projecting public spirit,” proposing to pave a quagmire at the edge
of a pond. He organized his friends into a gang of paving stone thieves and
constructed a wharf. His father, having discovered the theft, taught him an early
lesson, that nothing is useful that is not honest. Morality and business for the first
time become linked in Franklin’s mind.
The library at the end of part one mirrors the foiled childhood project at the onset.
In addition, its importance to Franklin is magnified by his placing it after that most
natural of closure devises, the marriage. Correcting one of his great errata,
abandoning Miss Read, he finally secures his “good and faithful helpmate.” Literary
tradition demands that the narrative stop here, but Franklin pushes forth to
describe what to him was an even greater achievement. But the very project that
forms the narrative climax of part one of the Autobiography is threatened by
resentment, the most anti-social of emotions. Franklin encounters a barrage of
objections and rejections to his appeals for subscriptions. He soon discovered the
impropriety of presenting oneself as the proposer of any useful project. Projecting
the resentment that lay behind the lack of enthusiasm for the library, he put himself
as much as he could out of sight. From that point on, he claims much later in part
three, he avoided “as much as I could, according to my usual Rule, the presenting
myself to the Publick as the Author of any Scheme for their Benefit.”

5. The triumph of the first major project – the subscription library – lies in its public
use. The pragmatic use of the library is to improve civic conversation and to make
common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as European gentlemen. Franklin
even makes the grand claim that the library “perhaps contributed in some degree to
the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defense of their Privileges.”
There is a bit of utopian wish fulfillment, or unearned optimism, in Franklin’s
commitment to the coexistence of upward mobility and republican virtue. His plan
for the Party of Virtue of course never emerged in the legislative chambers of the
colonies, and Yankee merchants and entrepreneurs were already heavily weighting
their moral portfolio with what Dickens, observing American mercantile habits,
called “the stern utilitarian joys of trade.” Frances Trollope likewise was appalled by
the divorce of American business from all other social, intellectual, and moral
pursuits: “every bee in the hive is actively employed in search of that honey of
Hybla, vulgarly called money; neither art, science, learning, nor pleasure can seduce
them from its pursuit. This unity of purpose, backed by the spirit of enterprise, and
joined with an acuteness and total absence of probity, where interest is concerned,
which might set canny Yorkshire at defiance, may well go far towards obtaining its
purpose.”
Franklin had not yet been disillusioned by the rampant pursuit of profit at the
expense of public projects and private moral development. Although he more than
any American may have focused attention on the pragmatic way to wealth, it was
the thirteen virtues that underwrote business success. His virtues built upon each
other – mastering the first virtue, temperance, allowed for the concentration and
meditation in the practice of the second, silence, which had the added benefit of
shifting his mode of communication from self-aggrandizing arguments, puns, and
prattling to a more humble mode of conversation. Thus did his mastery of rhetoric
and logic underwrite the development of business and moral virtues, which in turn
were ultimately put at the service of the republic. It is a political unified field theory
in which business success is held in solution with personal moral development as
well as civic improvement.
For Franklin, then, consumerism and the accumulation of wealth are not
gravitational forces from which admonitory sermons must divert eager merchants.
Nor do the fields of ethics and business enterprise simply overlap. The way to
wealth is paved with the habits of Franklin’s thirteen virtues, and the road leads to
engaged citizenship. There is another strain of American common sense philosophy,
however, that easily drives a wedge between the realms of civic virtue and material
success. And Yankee merchants can easily be forgiven for seeing Franklin himself as
providing the pragmatist tools to set the entrepreneur free to pursue profit for its
own sake. On the one hand, Franklin prepares himself for success as a printer with
hard work, avoiding drink, and good accounting. He locates himself entirely in the
world of profit. On the other, he charmingly relates how he continuously falls short
of achieving any particular virtue (they are asymptotic for him, never quite
achievable in our fallen state of continuous temptation). And the list of virtues in

6. part two of the Autobiography are surrounded by the story of his wife splurging on a
china bowl and silver spoon, thus defying the household laws against luxury, and the
anecdote of the speckled ax, in which a good enough grinding replaces the initial
drive toward perfection.
Poe best understands the law of entropy in which Franklin’s energy, the tenuous
force that inflates utopian hopes of a virtuous republic supported by civic-minded
businessmen, rapidly dissipates. The hero of his tale “The Businessman,” Peter
Profitt, proves that there is no necessary connection between business and ethics.
The narrator’s name, with its pun on prophet-profit, points to the illusory
commingling of the material and the spiritual. He has failed even as a pedestrian
merchant (selling goods but devoid of Franklin’s social vision). Nods to soap making,
street cleaning, and the post office in Poe’s story keep Franklin in mind. But Peter
Profitt seems intent upon devolving from one of Franklin’s childhood heroes, the
Defoe who wrote “An Essay on Projects,” to Franklin’s nightmare, a Yankee whose
pursuit of wealth involves the coercive transfer of coins from a victim’s pockets to
his own. Reducing himself to a walking advertisement, threatening to muddy the
shoes of those daring to cross unpaved streets, creating a cacophony only to ask for
payment to stop, and chopping off tails to falsely signify the reduction of the cat
population are a few of his enterprises. Business has become entirely driven by
fraud, non-productive services, pseudo-legal rationalizations, and self-interest. For
Mr. Profitt, there is no God and Mammon is his son.
Howells’ eponymous hero, Silas Lapham, tries uncomfortably to re-join ethics and
business. It might be more accurate to claim that he cannot successfully separate
them. Capitalism and its displaced sense of personal liability is still a latent
philosophical and economic foundation in the Civil War era family business
environment of The Rise of Silas Lapham. The trouble comes when Silas must access
the world of capital. Once he takes a partner (whose sole contribution is a capital
infusion), he becomes mired in a material-spiritual confusion signified by Howells’
central pun in the novel – “obligation.” In the corporate context there is contractual
obligation, but Lapham never quite escapes the guilt attendant upon the notion of
moral obligation. When he dismisses his partner, it is due to his prediction that
Rogers’ deficit of energy and vision will precipitate an irreversible decline in his
paint business. He fulfills his obligation to his partner by buying him out at a
generous return on equity. His wife, assuming that the paint business was already
soaring when her husband ended the partnership, levels pious injunctions about his
perfidy and profit motive. Whether husband or wife has a sharper grasp of the facts
of the case and a more sensitive moral response, what is clear is that obligation
continues to hold both meanings in solution, and our business hero cannot separate
moral guilt from prescient business practice.
The Reverend Sewell may be correct in the final interview with Lapham that the
guilt (however justified) intensified his ethical sensitivity and prepared him for the
even greater moral dilemma of selling, or refusing to sell, worthless land to naïve
English buyers to save his fortune. But putting on moral armor, as Lapham

7. ultimately realizes, does not necessarily signify an initial moral lapse. If there was an
original sin in the novel, it was the nature of capitalism itself. The need for debt,
which Franklin recognized but ambivalently tried to avoid, is the driver of the plot.
But success avoids being defined by the trappings of wealth, so lavishly described in
the architectural detail and furnishings of the new Lapham home. It ultimately
resides in Lapham’s clear conscience. If the notion of heroism, discussed in some
detail at the Corey’s lavish dinner party, hovers between Civil War soldiers who
sacrificed their lives and civil servants, it ultimately rests with Lapham’s sacrifice of
his wealth on behalf of the ethical treatment of strangers.
One way to locate the difference between American realism and naturalism is
precisely in the association between ethics and business. If moral obligation and the
accumulation of wealth are uneasily joined in Howells, there is no such discomfort
in Dreiser’s financial heroes. If there is some residue of ethics in the social attitudes
of Gilded Age aristocrats, it does not attach itself to The Financier’s hero, Frank
Cowperwood. Ethical conundrums are easily brushed aside when they attempt to
subdue financial or sexual animal spirits. That phrase, which in Keynes meant an
emotional response to the market and in Austen meant social ebullience, Dreiser
reduces to mean the Darwinian drive for survival and prospering. When the married
Cowperwood desires a young mistress, he anonymously rents an apartment for his
sexual assignations. When he wants to become the majority shareholder of a
Philadelphia streetcar corporation, he illegitimately “borrows” municipal funds and
hypothecates already heavily margined stocks. Dreiser occasionally decries immoral
transactions, but much more often places his hero on a Nietzschean pedestal.
Nothing, including pedestrian, bourgeois morality, should stand in the way of brute
passion and the drive for economic empire. The fraudulent partner in Howells,
whose financial shenanigans Silas Lapham soundly rejects, in effect becomes the
protagonist of Dreiser’s novel. If Howells finds it difficult to locate the boundaries of
ethics and business, or where obligation resides, Dreiser never settles on the moral
judgment of his financier. The various enterprises in which the hero engages trace
the progress from Franklin to Poe to Howells. The young Frank sells soap and moves
quickly to work for merchants and brokers. He then enters deeper and deeper into
new territory in the American business novel, the world of speculation, which
morphs into manipulation (bulling securities and creating bear traps), which
ultimately morphs into stealing taxpayer funds for his private interest in civic
projects. American business has come a long way from Franklin and his library. Civic
virtue has been replaced by Frank’s motto, “I satisfy myself.”
The naturalistic novel, then, unmoors ethics from business, or the spiritual from the
pursuit of the material. The strands of the American dream have become unraveled.
Consumerism, signaled by the rise, story by story, of the Cowperwood senior family
home and the lavish Victorian furnishings of Cowperwood junior, is free to run
rampant. Thus we can trace the long descent of goods for sale as well as for survival
and charity in early Puritan sermons to the conspicuous consumption of The
Financier. The enormous entrepreneurial spirit of the Puritans, held in check by
Puritan statesmen and ministers, is transformed in the capitalist enterprise into

8. brute force, passion, and will. The emotional virtue of sympathy, which in Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments allows for insight, however incomplete, into the
tribulations of other human beings and the development of moral instinct,
degenerates in Dreiser to the capacity to detect weakness or mutual attraction.
Frank notes the seismic shift in the nature of virtue as he rationalizes his move from
older wife to younger, robust mistress. “Sympathy and affection were great things,
but desire and charm must endure or one was compelled to be sadly conscious of
their loss. So often now he saw young girls who were quite in his mood, and who
were exceedingly robust and joyous. It was fine, advisable, practical, to adhere to the
virtues as laid down in the current social lexicon . . . .”
In The Financier, Franklin’s virtues of temperance and humility are replaced by
“subtlety,” or a keen intelligence that can sense the opportune moment for financial
manipulation. Emersonian self-reliance has become the egotistical sublime, the
meretricious focus on money for its own sake. Romantic pursuit in Howells has
degenerated into raw sexual pursuit and adulterous vitality. Common sense, once
the philosophical position from which we intuit proper moral or political behavior,
is now the ability to determine when stocks will drop. And civic projects, from being
the end of republican virtue, have become a public bank account from which the
savvy speculator can make illicit private withdrawals. The American dream no
longer has even the illusion of being buoyed by a spiritual or social vision. It
measures success solely in monetary increments.
For a brief moment in American history, Theodore Roosevelt put wealth in political
perspective that harkened back to colonial ideas. Property rights, he said, not as
President but as a Progressive Party candidate, had to be carefully safeguarded.
Large fortunes could be legally amassed. But when property rights come into
conflict with human rights, “human rights must have the upper hand, for property
belongs to man and not man to property.” Roosevelt admired efficiency and
industrial progress, he told audiences. But bankers and industrial giants must
“direct the efficiency into channels for the public good.” The mature commercial
republic relied on the self-reliant individual that Emerson defined, but Roosevelt
wanted individuals to be oriented toward social duties. Harkening back to Franklin’s
vision of social improvement, he admired the pursuit of wealth only if it underwrote
social responsibility.
It would take only a few years for the lofty sentiment in Roosevelt’s speeches to
collapse into a culture of consumerism. Sinclair Lewis’ eponymous hero George
Babbitt personifies the middle class American whose identity is almost entirely
defined by the contents of his pockets. A fountain pen, a silver pencil, a gold pen-
knife, a silver cigar-cutter, a watch – these are the markers of his social ascent. A
notebook filled with forgotten connections and money orders is a bathetic reminder
of Franklin’s calendar in which he marks how nearly he’s reached one of his thirteen
virtues. It mocks even Gatsby’s notebook, which sketched a rigid daily schedule and
listed Franklinesque maxims. Babbitt so obviously lacks the imagination and drive
of his fictional contemporary, and his pursuit of wealth is part of the effort to blend

9. into social norms, but his bathetic drive toward conformity and consumption help
define the American dream for the rest of the century.