This paper casts a critical eye over American dreams, views of Douglass and Franklin, and up to what extent their views are similar and different. Mostly in America more than America; it was the silhouette of democracy itself which Douglass reveals, its inclinations, quality, prejudices, and passions. Have you ever marveled why, during this time when America swanks the maximum number of millionaires in its history, there is a common thinking of emptiness infecting persons, families, and society at large? According to Charlie Douglass, true wealth requires more than financial assets alone. True wealth needs balancing financial capital along with the secret of spiritual capital, a precious product in short supply.
How can you complete this impossible task of balancing financial wealth and spiritual health in today’s time-pressured, money-driven world? Due to experience and hard-won wisdom, Charlie Douglas gives you a convenient and appealing answer, so you may grasp the American Dream and enjoy a truly rich life, in all its aspects.
American Dream can be exposed as having the freedom and opportunity that allows all citizens to attain their goals in life via hard work and determination alone. Today, it commonly seems to the idea that one’s prosperity depends upon one’s abilities and hard work, not on a stiff class structure, though the meaning of the expression has changed over America’s history. However, it is the occasion to realize more prosperity than they could in their countries of origin; for others, it is the occasion for their children to grow up with an education and career occasions; for others, it is the occasion to be a person devoid of the constriction imposed by class, race, caste, or ethnicity.
Also “The number of action patterns, assumptions, and beliefs that social experts have labeled the American Dream has constantly been a flimsy agglomeration of
- identical admission to economic profusion,
- individual freedom of choice in life styles,
- the recreation of shared objectives jointly valuable to the individual and society.”
According to Douglass “The American Dream is the autonomy to pursue your dreams as our Creator intended. Or, it is having the freedom to follow those inspired dreams that God entrusted to us-not only for the sake of self-centeredness, but also to support the common good for the collective assistance of others.” Douglass reveals in the present age, “struggle” seems to mean no more than splashing or flailing. When a sportscaster refers to a football team as “struggling,” it is corresponding to describing them as culpably incomplete. To an earlier era struggle was an essential part of progress and the smudge of moral value.
The knotty individuals who are the focus of this cram were selected based on their self-evident negations. Either these have been reduced by their talkative admirers or leaped upon by their enemies amid past and present African American intellectuals. Sometimes Frederick Douglass has been glorified as the “Heroic Slave” who bravely voiced the ambitions of the freedom struggle. But at other times, he has been analyzed as a conscious white supremacist that attacked racial arrogance and deceived his true ideology by marrying a white woman.
Benjamin Franklin’s comments concerning the augment of Mankind are a landmark in the history of modern demography, exactly predicting the relative and absolute rates of growth for America. It is also a landmark in the history of colonization. Franklin called for policies planned to guard and increase the number of English settlers. Franklin was an astonishing social scientist and sometimes expressed himself in racially charged terms.
But the dichotomy underlies this intellectual division of labor between “science” and “prejudice”. By the early eighteenth century, the emerging regulation of political wealth had established that trade and business were the keys to political power, and that leading population was the key to flourishing statecraft. If we are to understand Franklin’s assistance to immigration history, the complex politics of population at the dawn of modern politics, then we must recover this great context of meaning.
Franklin’s American dream has made him a criterion for public leaders and private corporations, radical egalitarians, and economic conservatives, for over two centuries. But his application has not been limited to adults. Children’s literature testify to the complex emotional appeal of Franklin’s life and writings. With the feasible omission of George Washington, none of Franklin’s colleagues has played as significant a role in the moral and political imaginations of Americans. Franklin introduced the phrase “we the middling people”. He argued the rich, who declined to defend the colony, could gladly escape the city.
Franklin proposed that they would read better as:
“Immodest Words admit but this Defense That Want of Modesty is Want of Sense.”
Franklin says with this change, modesty obtains “some apology”. In conformity with Douglass, Franklin implies that virtue is knowledge, and in divergence with Douglass, that knowledge is about how to be friendly and so virtue is friendliness. Friendliness is useful, like religion.
References
Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T.Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey,” Creative Conflict in African American Thought”. Web.
Harvey c. Mansfield, “Liberty and Virtue in the American Founding”. Web.
Charles V. Douglas, “Rich where it counts”. Web.