Opinion: Obama and the Puritan dream

Nicolaus Mills, professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of "Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower."

This holiday season we will, as always, hear a variety of Christmas stories. But the one that has the most relevance has fallen out of fashion lately. It's the Christmas story that opens Louisa May Alcott's 19th-century classic, "Little Women."

For the March girls - Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy - Christmas hasn't brought with it the usual joys. Their father is away from home, serving as a chaplain for the Union army in the Civil War, and the family is so low on cash (a condition the Alcotts constantly faced, as Susan Cheever points out in her new biography of Louisa May) that the sisters cannot afford to buy presents for one another.

Their solution, after much complaining, is not to buy presents for each other but to surprise their mother with gifts. The opening of "Little Women" concludes with the sisters' Christmas reward: a letter from their father that their mother reads to them after dinner.

A century and a half later, our wartime suffering doesn't equal that which the country faced as a result of the Civil War, which took an estimated 620,000 lives. But the example the March sisters and their mother set in coping with the terror of war and the fear of being unable to pay their bills reminds us that for much of our history, the American dream has been bound up with a culture of modesty and sacrifice.

Equally important, there has been a political side to this egalitarian American dream. Its earliest version can be seen in the speech John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts made, to his fellow Puritans in 1629 as they were leaving for the New World. The speech is best remembered for Winthrop's insistence that the colony he and his fellow voyagers established will be viewed as a city upon a hill, but what is crucial about the speech is Winthrop's definition of the example the Puritans must offer the outside world.

"We must entertain each other in brotherly affection," Winthrop insisted. "We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities." Nowhere in the speech is there talk of personal success that leaves others behind, let alone talk of individual wealth. For Winthrop the measure of the Puritans' success was what they accomplished together. Anathema to him was the kind of partisan divisiveness that characterizes today's Washington.

A century later, a similar linking of the American dream with a culture of modesty may be seen in the thinking of the founding fathers. For a period, the founders debated calling George Washington "Excellency," "Elective Highness" even "Highness."

Finally, they settled on the republican title, "President of the United States," but their choice was more than a matter of style. Particularly among Thomas Jefferson and his supporters, there was the belief that the nation should not let itself get divided into rich and poor. The worst thing the new nation could do was perpetuate the class divisions of old Europe.

Jefferson's egalitarian ethos did not extend to America's slaves, but with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, that racial limit on the American dream changed dramatically. As he made clear in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln saw himself extending the work of Jefferson and the "proposition that all men are created equal."

Even before that famous speech, Lincoln defined the goal of government as one of putting all citizens on equal footing. The "leading object" of government, Lincoln told Congress in a July 4, 1861, speech is "to elevate the condition of men - to lift artificial weights from all shoulders - to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all - to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life."

Lincoln's repeated use of the word "all" is hard to miss, and when in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt faced the task of finding jobs for the 25 percent of the workforce that was unemployed, the egalitarian vision of the dream and its relevance for all was once again put to the test.

The New Deal programs, from Social Security to unemployment insurance, that we now take for granted became law after Roosevelt - unlike Barack Obama - increased his congressional majority in his first midterm election. But consistent from the start was Roosevelt's belief in the role government should play in making sure the prosperity of those at the top of society did not come at the expense of those at the bottom.

In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt emphasized the country's need to "sacrifice" for the common good. And three years later as he campaigned for a second term, he put that belief in religious terms, telling voters, "Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side."

For Roosevelt, as for John Winthrop, making sure society did not split into haves and have-nots was crucial. As FDR observed in his second inaugural, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Are these versions of the American dream the kind that President Obama will choose to put forward in 2011? He is certainly aware of them. "For those who had already known poverty, life has become that much harder. This recession has also compounded the burdens America's families have been dealing with for decades," he declared in his 2010 State of the Union Address.

But in the wake of the midterm losses Democrats experienced, the president has gone on the defensive to such a degree that he is now willing to support tax breaks for families making over $250,000 a year - despite his belief that such breaks are unfair and unduly increase our national debt.

It's a tough spot for Obama to be in, given the views he expressed when he came to Washington. If he is to overcome the charge that in his first two years in office he took the country on an un-American, radical ride as he sought to reform health care and regulate the banks, the president will have to remind voters just how traditional his vision of the American dream has been on key issues.

The president's bad luck is that the political equivalents of Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy aren't around to help him.