The American ideal that through hard-work and persistence a person should be able to thrive and attain a state of well-being is an important motif in the book. It is both praised and challenged by Shipler. On the one hand, the ideal has the advantage of setting a “demanding standard, both for the nation and every resident” (5), leading to the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty. The American Dream has lead Latin American migrant agricultural workers to the United States so that they might better provide for their families, as it is also present in the career ambitions of young students from deprived backgrounds. When the Dream of rising from poverty and oppression is realized through the examples of Peaches and Leary Brock, it is a means of integrating outcasts into the mainstream. As soon as Peaches begins to earn a sufficient wage, she “let herself dream a little," entering into the national ethos of visualizing aspirations:"I can go to New York and see it if I want to” (261).

However, the American dream also wrongly “provides a means of laying blame. In the Puritan legacy, hard work is not merely practical but also moral; its absence suggests an ethical lapse” (5).