American Rust: A Novel

Many writers have explored the myth and tragedy of the American Dream, none more famously than Arthur Miller in his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Death of a Salesman. The myth—that hard work and moral fortitude are the dues for upward mobility—is so ingrained into the national psyche that it has gone largely unquestioned for decades. Only through the work of social critics, activists, and writers such as Miller and Meyer has the myth come under scrutiny. Moreover, rising income inequality and the profit-over-people ethos behind much American capitalism suggest the American Dream is an aspirational slogan with more loopholes than a legal contract. While the dream is still a reality for some, those numbers have been shrinking since the 1980s. In fact, the Economic Policy Institute ranks the United States’ upward mobility as lagging far behind that of other developed countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and even Germany and France (Gould, Elise. “U.S. lags behind peer countries in mobility.” Economic Policy Institute, 2012). However, it wasn’t always this way. Postwar America was home to a thriving middle-class spurred by, among other factors, robust union membership. The 1980s, however, saw a decline in union membership, triggered by a public perception of unions as corrupt, and, with globalization and expanding markets abroad, corporations began to take advantage of cheaper labor costs in other countries. The results of corporate downsizing are rampant in the landscape of American Rust. Isaac’s travels take him past countless shuttered and crumbling factories, rusting equipment half sunk in the mud. The innards of old steel mills are gutted for parts, and the empty husks of once-productive buildings are now homes to the once-productive workers, now cast aside and forgotten.

The psychological toll of these broken dreams is immeasurable. Henry, once a proud steel worker, now sits in his wheelchair, embittered by a completely preventable accident and sometimes wishing the molten steel had taken his life, thinking his family better off with him gone. Poe, with few skills beyond football, has few options other than stocking merchandise at the local hardware store. Americans raised on the idea of the American Dream hit a hard wall of reality when those dreams fail to materialize; and the dark side of the dream is the implication that those who fail to succeed are solely to blame. Self-blame permeates the psyches of nearly every character. Poe blames himself for his incarceration even though he is innocent. Henry blames himself for Isaac’s unhappiness and wanderlust when it’s the economic decay that’s largely at the heart of it. Grace blames herself for her son’s crimes and for her own economic plight. Acknowledging social contexts is somehow not in the American DNA. For the American Dream to have traction, citizens must have individual agency; this means rejecting others’ help and stigmatizing those who accept aid. Witness the scorn directed at welfare recipients, or even the moral panic among some legislators surrounding Roosevelt’s New Deal. American Rust suggests that as long as Americans like Grace Poe and Henry English continue to see their lives in a vacuum rather than as part of a social fabric, the American Dream will exert its mythical hold on the country’s imagination, only exacerbating class divisions.