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The Wolfords of Arkansas were dirt-poor. Three generations on, they're oil-rich. Theirs is a story that will warm the heart of every freedom-loving (and TV watching) US citizen this Fourth of July. It's a story they need to believe. It's the story of the American dream.
This evening, buoyed by a morning of patriotic processions, exhausted by an afternoon's baseball and sated with chicken and ribs from their barbecues, Americans will flop down in front of their outsize television sets for a few hours of rest and recreation. But they could be in for a surprise. In place of the variegated mindlessness that passes for so much televised entertainment, they may alight on the Discovery Channel and a stirring five-hour epic that is all about themselves. It is the story of the American dream, through the lives of some who dreamed.
American Stories: The American Dream is the saga of 10 families over three generations who believe in the possibility of a better future. Some are born American - to wealth or poverty; some become American - by immigration and naturalisation; and some have America virtually thrust upon them (as descendants of slaves or refugees). The American Dream is what they have in common.
Among them are the Manoffs. The grandfather, Kalman, was one of the million Russians who left their homeland in 1905 and arrived penniless at Ellis Island. He delivers fresh food on a horse and cart around Manhattan and sets up some of the first delicatessens. His son, Dick, by now thoroughly Americanised and an all-out enthusiast for the New World, goes to college and into business for himself.
Dick Manoff unerringly catches each new trend, overcoming post-war anti- semitism to succeed in the embryonic advertising industry, and he grows rich. His son, Gregg, realises his father's ambitions for him and makes it to Harvard. The glittering prizes await.
Of the other families, the majority "make it" in America. There is Jae- Yul Kim, whose long-standing ambition is to enjoy the beneficence of the United States, the land of cowboy movies. He arrives after the end of the Korean war and starts as a janitor in New York, living "like a dog" in his basement. After scrimping for five years, he moves to California.
Eventually, he has saved enough to rent his own apartment and bring over his wife and children. They have exchanged letters and forlorn, love-sick drawings for almost a decade. A failed machine-shop project almost convinces them to give up and go home, but a farewell trip to the Grand Canyon - where else? - inspires them to persist. Soon, they are prospering with a supermarket of their own in South Central Los Angeles, their own house, and weekend golf.
Then there is Alfredo Vea, a Mexican born into an immigrants' transit camp in Arizona, who is drafted to serve in Vietnam and benefits from the GI Bill to become a successful lawyer serving the Hispanic community in San Francisco. General Baker snr (General is his first name), the eighth child of Georgian share-croppers, grandchild of slaves, leaves the South to prosper on the car assembly lines of boom-town Detroit. His son goes to college and joins the civil rights movement.
And Gerald Wolford of Arkansas, whose parents lose everything in the dustbowl of the Thirties and move to an inhospitable California. Gerald, though, becomes a truck-driver and mechanic, who prospers in the American oil boom of the Seventies, when he can earn the fabulous sum of $200,000 a year.
The well-born also flourish. Endicott "Chub" Peabody, born into one of the oldest families of New England, is the embodiment of Old World privilege implanted into the New. At once inspired and weighed down by the responsibilities of high birth, he rises inexorably through school, college sports, marriage (to the daughter of the Governor of Bermuda) and Wall Street, to become Democratic Governor of Massachusetts and a member of Lyndon Johnson's presidential team.
John Gage, son of the pioneer of America's aerospace industry, almost makes the national swimming team, before drifting through Vietnam protests, unfinished degrees and casual jobs. He then leaps, by dint of contacts, personal enterprise and vision, into the beginnings of Silicon Valley.
It is here, after a couple of hours of solemn and high-flown commentary, that American viewers might expect the epic to conclude, fading out in a fanfare of triumph. The tale, that anyone - high-born, low-born, man or woman, black, white or yellow - can realise the "American dream", would have been told. The point would be proved. Over to you, the voiceover would shout; be all that you can be, and God bless America!
American Stories: The American Dream, however, is a documentary with a difference. It was conceived and produced by a British company, Atlantic Productions, with a track-record of making documentaries about America. There is that slight critical distance, the tendency to pause for the phrase beyond the ready American cliche, that marks it as the work of outsiders; sympathetic outsiders, to be sure, but observers rather than believers. And there is a message that emerges: the American Dream is not everything it is cracked up to be. Not everyone "makes it" in America, not everyone prospers. In some ways, the dream is as effective an opiate of the people as religion ever was.
Gregg Manoff, the son of the super-successful New York advertising director, invents a psychiatric problem to avoid the draft and becomes a hippie. He breaks with his father and "hangs out" in the back streets of lower Manhattan, where his grandfather first started out in America. His father's lifestyle is a source almost of disgust: "There was a sense of a great emptiness at the core of that life," he says. "I knew enough not to buy into that."
The Kims lose everything in the Los Angeles riots of 1992. No one told them, they say with pathos, of the bubbling resentment of blacks in South- Central LA. They "start over" with debts that will burden them into their eighties. Gerald Wolford fails to foresee the end of the oil boom. He loses his trucks, his cars, and the spacious log house that epitomised his dream. He is back in the trailer park where he began: he moved 150 feet in 37 years, he says ruefully.
General Baker jnr has also come full circle. After spells of unemployment, he went back to the assembly line where his father worked. Now, his step- daughter, Jackie, a college-graduate, works there. Then, he says sanguinely, it looked like the worst of options. Now it looks like the best. Jackie, for her part, is now a single mother. The father of her three -year-old daughter, Jasmine, was stabbed to death: another victim of black gangland. As she says of her predicament: "My American dream has altered. It's more that Jasmine gets what she deserves - food in her stomach, a roof over her head."
Alfredo Vea may look as though he has made it. But he is scarred forever by Vietnam. In a shocking sequence that jerks the attention, he gazes into an idyllic Californian sunset and muses about giving the order to a B-52 to rain bombs on the nearby city of Oakland. He just wants people to see what it was like.
This is another view of the American Dream altogether, and one that introduces a note of dissonance into the patriotic complacency of the Fourth of July. For it poses awkward questions that many Americans have hardly begun to address, starting with the most basic: can everyone succeed in America?
There are, to be sure, the spectacular successes like Dick Manoff, who is a model for the immigrant's dream of America. His son has now returned as far into the mainstream as he is ever likely to get, working as a rural doctor amid the natural splendour of New Mexico. He has married a Southern Baptist, adopted a son who is Bengali and fathered another son. Grandfather Dick is delighted with his all-American family.
John Gage, too, has found his metier. He is happily married to a successful television journalist, and is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in America as a director of Sun Microsystems. For him, the Internet is "the ultimate expression of the American dream" that is now "the global dream". "Chub" Peabody lost a race for the Senate, but hardly lives less comfortably as a result. The inescapable impression is that even in America the rule is: to those who have is given, while from those who have not is taken even what they have.
There are common delights - the first car, the new children's toys, the first television set, the first house, the first kiss - but these shared experiences pale into insignificance beside the sharp and seemingly inevitable reversals of fortune suffered by the have-nots, especially - it seems - by the black families.
There is a bitterness here that is rarely heard publicly in America and would probably not have been communicated to a white American interviewer. General Baker snr dismiss the whole idea of the American Dream. "I never believed in it," he says and adds that of the great American "cake": "I don't want my goddam crumb, I want my equal slice, like the white guys gets."
If there were no blacks, he asks, "would the white people have another group they would be treating this way? Do they have to have someone to look down to? I don't know."
For Americans, who tend to look ever forward, not back to the past or sideways (except in charity) to their contemporaries in other walks of life, this kaleidoscope of mixed fortunes, separation and social division may come as a shock. It calls into question some of the most basic tenets of America. Is it a classless society? Is it open to everyone?
"You see so many problems and glass ceilings," says the executive producer, Anthony Geffen. While recognising that the "dream" has provided Americans with "an inbuilt starter-motor" that seems "almost to sustain them from generation to generation", he would dearly like to encourage them to take a closer look - "to look back and see what happened when they all started out with that idea... so that there's a genuine melting pot and they don't fake it."
So long as a poor boy from a broken home in Hope, Arkansas, can rise to become President, the American dream - however insubstantial - will live on. The more sceptical, meanwhile, should perhaps ponder the question that Geffen put rhetorically to me: "If these people had come to Britain, would they be where they are now?"
Copyright (c) Mary Dejevsky, 1998
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