THE URGE FOR INDEPENDENCE: BUT WHAT IF THE DREAM COMES TRUE?

March 2009
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In our innocence, we Americans have long cherished the illusion that success and happiness are the same, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the American Dream, once attained, often fails to bring contentment and peace of mind. But the social upheavals of recent years, the Vietnam War and Watergate, have sobered us all, forcing us to embark on a national orgy of self-scrutiny and criticism. We celebrated our two hundredth birthday painfully aware of our own limitations, willing to admit our failings along with our accomplishments, willing even to examine our simplistic devotion to the ethic of achievement and competition.

It was in this spirit of self-reflection that a CBS television documentary entitled But What if the Dream Comes True? dramatized our national malaise several years ago. An engrossing portrayal of the paradoxes of success, this documentary featured Sam Greenawalt, age forty-one, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant whose dedication to hard work and getting ahead had won him the senior vice presidency of a Detroit bank.

A former football player and an ex-Marine, Greenawalt commutes to work from the affluent suburb of Birmingham, Michigan. Most of the men who live there, we are told, have climbed the corporate ladder and are fighting to stay there. Automobile and advertising executives, engineers and bankers, they are all American success stories.

Greenawalt also started at the bottom of the ladder, trusted in the system, and climbed to the top. “But when you listen to him you detect the first faint shudder of discontent,” says the documentary’s narrator. Shown racing through the door to his office, where he works ten to twelve hours a day, Greenawalt says: “I was trained to be extremely competitive. . . . You want to get the best you can out of yourself, and you have to push in order to get it and you have to hurt yourself to get it.

His sumptuous lifestyle bristles with contradiction. Greenawalt moved to Birmingham seeking safety for his family, but the problems of the outside world—crime, drugs, and dropouts—are pushing into the suburb, increasing the possibility that his children will reject what he worked so hard to achieve. And his wife, having discovered that “she cannot share her husband’s world,” is trying to make her own by attending sensitivity sessions.

The family rushes to escape the “hassle” of their regular routine by driving four hours every weekend to their second home, an isolated retreat called “the cottage.” And we learn at the documentary’s end that the Grecnawalts are moving to the still more opulent suburb of Bloom field Hills, where all the executives are at the very top. “It’s like the camel driver going to the next oasis,” says Sam.0

The documentary concludes by suggesting that the dream is destructive: “The American dream grants you your wishes, and then cuts you into pieces. You struggle to reach Birmingham, but once there, you find life fragmented, family life threatened, the pressures as high as the taxes. So you look for something better, and that, in the American tradition, means an even bigger house in an even better neighborhood. . . . The new house is the new dream.”7

This judgment is too harsh. Though this documentary quite rightly questions our middle-class values, it fails to acknowledge the ability of middle-class, middle-aged men to re-evaluate or change them.

Interviewed five months later, Sam Greehawalt insisted, “There is a large measure of discontent, but they didn’t show the balance.” They didn’t show the things in his life that he found stimulating and satisfying. Even more important, they didn’t show that he himself was asking the same questions that the documentary raised. Sam Greenawalt is too smart to confuse something better with a new house. Asked to describe his feelings about what he has achieved, and what he still wants, he said:

When the film was being made I was still struggling—still scratching. Frightened every minute. Just putting out as hard as I could every day. You have to do that. This is a real, real competitive existence. Everybody depends on you. You have to produce. Every minute!

AH I wanted then was to be a darned good banker. And I wanted to produce for the good of the organization. But I didn’t want the organization to have that pervading influence on everything I do in my life. And I fight that all the time.

I was raised in a quite structured family. My father was very much the boss of the family, and he wanted things done just so. And he expected a great deal from us as youngsters, and thank God we produced for him. He was a stockbroker, and I worked with him for three years. I didn’t like the brokerage business, and T saw what his life was like. Rigid and boring. He’s always been the corporate man, but he doesn’t know any different. Because of him I’m more sensitive, probably more introspective—more desirous of breaking a pattern.

I feel trapped right at the moment, you know? I can’t go anywhere. Shoot … I get phone calls on my vacation. I went off to Sun Valley and I had three or four phone calls out there before I even hit there. And as it goes on, I can see the trap getting bigger and bigger and bigger—and all the more consuming. You sec, what I am now is a paid gun. And I’d better shoot straight, and fast, and often.

I think to myself that now I’m doing this for a reason.

I’m doing it because I want to give substance to my children’s existence. I want them to be proud of the fact that I am producing, and I would like to see them get at their goals in life. At the moment I’m a banker, but in eight or nine years I might not be.

I know where I am now, and I know that I’m looking for something other than what I’m doning. I’ve made a good deal of money in the last two years, and damnit, if I want to retire now, I could. But I know that’s not right for me. I don’t want to continue on being the corporate man forever, and then they release me at sixty-Ove and I’m all burned out. Then what do I do? You sit down and wonder what happened to your life.

Okay. So where do I want to be? I want to be in a position where I’m the owner of a company, where I can skim off if I want to, or take a salary out of it. And I figure if I can inject the money with some of the skills that I have, and put it together with a group of guys, we might be successful.

I’ll tell you, the second half of my life might be entirely different from the first half. I want to have more time to myself when 1 want it. To have more time to enjoy my wife, you know, and my family. But I have to do it for myself.

Contrary to the documentary’s suggestion that the new house is the “new dream,” Sam Greenawalt is concerned with more complex issues. Struggling to redefine success, he is trying to disentangle himself from the corporate web. And, having lived out the American Dream in a conventional sense, he is now trying to structure a personal, more mature, dream for himself—one that will enable him to work on his own terms. And become his own man.

*50\93\2*

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