The term “The American Dream” has come to mean a lot of different things, but when the flesh has been cut through to reveal the bone it really has just one simple meaning: America is a place where all are offered the opportunity to match their level of success with their level of abilities. Clearly, this is not the same thing as everyone has the same opportunity to enjoy the same level of success, but it is that very distinction which made the American Dream seem so real to so many immigrants taking advantage of its existence.
The American Dream is first and foremost—above all else—a rejection of European aristocracy. The point is not that anybody can grow up to become President so much as it that nobody is denied the right up to try to become grow up and become...anything they know how to do. The American Dream is about matching one’s ability to their level of success free from restrictions imposed solely as the result of accidents of birth. The Beautiful and the Damned is to a very great extent an attack upon the corrupting of the American Dream that he saw occurring around him as the result of a situation that had arisen in early 20th century America that the country had never had to deal with before.
Fitzgerald’s attack on the corrupting of the American Dream is precisely directed toward a very specific case of cause-and-effect. The cause of the very foundation of the American Dream coming under potentially destructive pressure was—paradoxically—the unprecedented intensity and breadth of the success of the previous generation or two in realizing it. That success which brought a greater number of Americans far more wealth than any previous generation led to a consequence that was equally unprecedented; something that had never really existed in great enough numbers to ever pose a problem to democracy. That consequence was the creation in Fitzgerald’s generation (roughly) of an entitled class that knew they didn’t have to work in order to enjoy the kind of life previously extended only to a very small fraction of Americans…and a great many Europeans. The offspring that grew out of America’s Gilded Age brought with them something that the country was so sure it would never have to deal with that it had never thought to create protections against it happening.
What Fitzgerald is criticizing in The Beautiful and the Damned is the creation of an American aristocracy. Entitlement and privilege had, of course, existed in American, but it was so localized and specific that it never had the power to threaten. Suddenly in the early decades of the 20th century young men and women like Anthony and Gloria Patch were no longer notable because of their rarity but notable because of their similarity. Fitzgerald’s critique is not against wealth or the wealthy, but specifically against those two figures who are most representative of what the American Dream stands against.
Adam Patch goes off to war and when he comes home he makes millions. The subtle implication here is that the American Dream is available to all, but can only be truly realized by those who understand that it comes with strings attached. Attaining great wealth and success without working for it and enjoying that wealth and success without paying for it is no different than being born into the world of the aristocracy. This is something that Fitzgerald makes quite clear Adam Patch intuitively understands and Anthony Patch absolutely cannot comprehend. Fitzgerald uses the Patch family lineage to reveal how quickly things can become corrupted. It only takes three generations for the family to go from the embodiment of the American Dream to the absolute corruption of everything it stands for.
