GREAT EXPECTATIONS

By John Powers, Globe Staff

SUNDAY, March 12, 1995

Columbus was the first to be disillusioned about America. He thought he had landed in Japan and was counting on dinner with the Grand Khan. Ponce de Leon went to Florida looking for the Fountain of Youth. He left with an arrow in his chest. The Pilgrims, bound for Virginia, ended up freezing and hungry on a Cape Cod beach. European immigrants, who had heard that the streets of New York were paved with gold, found themselves living in slums and working in sweatshops.

Now, millions of Americans are complaining that their lives aren't turning out the way they expected. They're working longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits. Their families are stressed out. Their neighborhoods aren't as safe as they used to be, and their schools aren't as good. They have more education than their parents did, yet they aren't doing as well. And they're afraid that their children will fare even worse.

Only five years from the end of what was heralded as the ''American century,'' the citizenry is fretful and disappointed. People expected more from their government in Washington, more from their employers, more from life. To paraphrase Gloria Vanderbilt, they thought they'd be both richer and thinner. ''Disillusionment is always linked to optimism,'' says Christopher Jencks, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. ''If you never thought things were going to be good, you're not as disillusioned.''

How did Americans come to expect so much? And why are we feeling let down? Most likely it is because the expectations are rooted in centuries-old immigrant fantasies of a land with unlimited frontiers, where anything is possible. And because those expectations have evolved from the spiritual to the materialistic, Americans now measure success in economic terms. The American Dream began as a shimmering vision of freedom and democracy, a vision not so much about coming here as leaving somewhere else. The immigrants were leaving famine and conflict, poverty and pogroms. Just to have a job, a full pantry, the freedom to speak, to gather, to worship, was a blessing. America promised those things in its Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

By the middle of the 19th century, freedom came to mean free education and free land. The New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the '60s created entitlements, government benefits that have come to be seen as an American birthright. But the most basic entitlement has been the unspoken one -- the assumption that Americans will always live better than their parents have.

By traditional standards, Americans should be reasonably happy these days. The country is at peace. The threat of nuclear destruction is less than it has been in half a century. The economy is healthy again, unemployment is at its lowest point in four years, and inflation is under control. Though most Americans consider their streets unsafe, violent-crime rates are actually dropping.

Yet radio talk shows are filled with angry and frustrated voices. When they went to the polls in November, Americans voted overwhelmingly for candidates who promised radical change and a return to the values of the '50s, when fathers worked at stable jobs with good wages and mothers stayed home with the children.

''People are absolutely stone-cold certain that it was better then -- period,'' says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan think tank in New York. ''We show focus groups a picture of a Wonder Bread family at the beach. They know it was a different era, and they know they don't want to go back to some of the old gender roles. Yet they have an unreconstructed fondness for a time when families were stronger and neighborhoods were better.''

The '50s were a time when Americans could buy a home, a car, and a color TV on one blue-collar salary. By then, the American Dream had become irrevocably linked to prosperity. When the economy stalled in the mid-1970s and living standards began their slow but steady descent, millions of Americans -- particularly the baby boomers who'd grown up amid affluence -- felt confused and deflated. ''They said, 'I'm now at the age that Dad was when he bought this nice place in Levittown, and all I can afford is this condo,' '' says Paul Krugman, a professor of economics at Stanford University, in California, whose book The Age of Diminished Expectations was published in 1990.

Nearly two-thirds of those polled in a recent Roper Starch survey said that the American Dream is harder to achieve today than it was in the past -- and will be harder still in the future. And more than half of those polled last year by U.S. News & World Report believed that the American Dream was out of reach entirely for most families. ''More and more people have a feeling they're on the 'Down' escalator as opposed to the 'Up' escalator,'' says Kevin Phillips, a GOP analyst who publishes the American Political Report.

That sinking feeling resembles the national malaise that former president Jimmy Carter spoke of in 1979, when inflation was running at double digits, the economy was stagnant, and Americans were getting into fistfights in gasoline lines. The malaise, Carter said, grew out of a consumer culture where buying had come to be more valued than being.

''We're one of the first generations to expect that material goods will make us happy,'' says Lendol Calder, an assistant professor of history at Colby-Sawyer College, in New London, New Hampshire, whose specialty is American consumer culture. ''Then they don't, and we're surprised. Freedom has come to be defined in economic terms: freedom to buy. At one time, freedom was thought to mean freedom to live an independent life.''

Much of America's freedom originally was freedom from something -- from religious persecution, from unreasonable searches and seizures, from cruel and unusual punishment, from excessive bail, from self-incrimination. The earliest settlers expected little more than that. Even though more than half of the Pilgrims died within months of arrival, none of the survivors accepted the offer to return home on the Mayflower in the spring.

Americans long have been the world's most optimistic people, perhaps because they live in a relatively young nation. ''America has always been viewed as an adolescent country,'' says Blankenhorn. ''People here have a particular belief that you can create your own identity, define who you are. It's sort of a naive faith.''

That faith spurred Americans to defy King George III. It helped them patch their country together after the Civil War and gave them the grit and ingenuity to get through the Depression. The American experiment, as it once was called, was deemed worth preserving. ''This is the only country that's based on an idea, not on ethnicity or language,'' Blankenhorn says. ''In Japan, you have to be Japanese. Here, you can be off the boat, speaking any language, and you just have to say: 'I believe in the American idea,' and you're an American.''

The American idea has worked for generations of immigrants. They climbed out of steerage, penniless and disheveled, at Ellis Island and went on to build businesses, buy homes, and prosper. Their children went to Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford on scholarships, became doctors and lawyers and corporate chieftains, and moved to manicured suburbs.

Thus did life emulate myth. Andrew Carnegie had begun as a messenger boy. Thomas Edison sold newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railway. Henry Ford was a machinist's apprentice. Anyone could grow up to be president in America. Abe Lincoln was a ferryman on the Ohio River, Harry Truman a Kansas City haberdasher, Ronald Reagan an actor. ''Jimmy Carter's a little peanut farmer from Georgia,'' says Blankenhorn. ''Bam -- he's president.''

Everything was possible in America: power, fame, riches. ''Come make a life from thin air -- the American Dream,'' sings the Engineer, the sleazy Eurasian pimp in the play Miss Saigon. ''Come and get more than your share -- the American Dream.''

America became more than the land of the free, it became the land of the freebie. Freed slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule. Herbert Hoover offered a chicken in every pot. Huey Long said he'd make every man a king in Louisiana. In America, a free lunch -- and free land -- came with the citizenship papers. The Homestead Act in 1862 offered 160 acres of Midwestern land to anyone who would settle on them.

In Oklahoma, they fired a pistol in 1889 and let settlers stake their claim to whatever land they could grab. When the winds came in the '30s and blew the topsoil away, the dispossessed farmers and ranchers crammed their belongings into jalopies and headed for their next Eden. ''I hope things is all right in California,'' Ma Joad says to son Tom in The Grapes of Wrath. ''What makes you think they ain't?'' Tom replies.

The Okies ended up living in shacks in California, picking fruit for pennies a bushel. Black folks left the Dixie cotton fields to work in Northern factories and ended up in big-city ghettos. When Rust Belt steel mills and manufacturing plants began shutting down, laid-off workers went to Texas just in time for the oil bust.

Disillusionment has always been part of the dream, particularly if the expectations were unrealistic. Americans in 1920 believed they could make 50 percent profit on their money in 45 days by giving it to Charles Ponzi, who'd told them a can't-miss tale about European exchange rates. They believed that the stock market had no ceiling to it, that a shoeshine boy could become a millionaire buying Anaconda Copper on margin. ''Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge,'' President Roosevelt reminded the populace in 1936, when the effects of the stock market crash were still being felt. ''Nine crazy years at the ticker, and three long years in the bread lines.''

The Depression, with its soup kitchens and Hoovervilles, reminded Americans how ephemeral their prosperity could be, how their banks could go bust, their jobs disappear, their farms be foreclosed on, their children go hungry. It wasn't enough, Roosevelt declared, to promise people the pursuit of happiness. You had to provide them with the means.

What Franklin D. Roosevelt had seen in the '30s -- ''One-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished'' -- convinced him that the means had to come from Washington. That was a revolutionary idea to a people who historically had been wary of the federal government and had deliberately kept it as small as possible. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, there were only 75,000 federal workers. After seven years of the New Deal, there were 166,000.

Roosevelt's ''Four Freedoms'' speech, given in the middle of World War II and later illustrated by a famous series of Norman Rockwell magazine covers, marked a symbolic evolution in what Americans had come to expect as their birthright. The Bill of Rights now came with a safety net.

If your bank failed, the government would give you your money back. If you lost your job, the government would pay unemployment benefits. If you had no pension, the government offered Social Security. Veterans returning from the war went to the nation's finest colleges for free on the GI Bill. They bought their first homes with federally guaranteed mortgages. Their children got cheap college loans from Washington.

As the country boomed after the war, Americans assumed that prosperity was their natural state and that happiness -- not merely its pursuit -- was guaranteed by Washington. In the '60s, Lyndon Johnson conjured up his Great Society, which sought to wipe out poverty and spread the wealth by providing jobs, housing, education, food, and medical care. ''We have enough to do it all,'' Johnson insisted to biographer Doris Kearns, even as he was spending billions on the war in Vietnam. ''We're the wealthiest nation in the world.''

The postwar joyride ended with the oil shock and soaring inflation of the mid-'70s. Yet the federal benefits kept growing, and tens of millions of Americans were eligible -- the poor, the elderly, single mothers, farmers, veterans, the unemployed. By last year, three-quarters of all Washington entitlement spending went for four entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and federal pensions.

''We had come to believe that everyone had everything, just based on the fact of wanting it,'' says Blankenhorn. ''And why not? That was the experience. You have a psychology of affluence and a stagnant economy? So charge it.''

For a decade, Americans resisted the economic reality and kept buying on credit. They pumped cash into mutual funds and real estate and ignored warnings that the boom was fueled by speculation, leverage, and debt. They made celebrities of corporate raiders and cable-TV hucksters and turned a book called Wealth Without Risk into a best seller. ''For years in the '80s, there was denial that bad things were even happening,'' says Lawrence Mishel, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, in Washington, D.C.

The public had a choice between Jimmy Carter's malaise warnings and Ronald Reagan's morning in America and chose the latter. ''After Carter gave that speech, where he said we're looking for happiness in all the wrong places, his popularity fell off the table,'' says Lendol Calder. ''That was a sobering speech, and no president since has tried to give one like it.''

Americans had become accustomed to having it all -- entitlements without taxes. Last year, they bounced the Democrats -- who'd provided 40 years of liberal benefits -- for Republicans who promised tax cuts without touching Social Security, the biggest entitlement program of all. ''The Contract with America is like the gold standard,'' says Alan Wolfe, a professor of sociology at Boston University. ''It's a simple pill. It's an illusion.''

The Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform was supposed to rein in those budget-busters last year, but it couldn't get enough members of Congress to agree on any changes. Chairman Bob Kerrey, the senator from Nebraska, observed that it was a ''third rail'' commission: Touch Americans' entitlements, and you died.

What Americans feel entitled to depends largely upon when they were born. The so-called GI generation, which grew up during the Depression and survived World War II, expected relatively little and received much. ''That generation still can't comprehend its good fortune,'' says Wolfe. ''My parents can't believe their luck.''

The baby boomers took the affluence of their youth for granted. By the time they reached adulthood in the '70s, the postwar economy had gone stagnant. The boomers bought their homes at the peak of the market, they work for companies that are shrinking and restructuring, they're facing six-figure tabs to send their children to private colleges, and they're worried that Social Security won't be solvent when their turn comes. ''Expectations have been lowered by the practical experience of the past decade,'' says Jerome Rosow, president of the Work in America Institute, in Scarsdale, New York. ''There isn't a lot of optimism in the land in general about the future.''

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