A hundred years ago this past July, Chester Gillette took his girlfriend, Grace Brown, for a boat trip on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks. Grace, who was 20 years old and a beauty, drowned, and, when it was learned that she had been pregnant and that Gillette, who was 22, had been seeing a much wealthier young woman on the sly, he was charged with murder, tried, convicted, and executed.

This story became the basis for Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy. Certainly, the death of Grace, whom Dreiser renamed Roberta Alden, was a tragedy in the journalistic sense of the term, but Dreiser made it clear that his book was talking instead about a classical tragedy, one that centered on the fall of a great man. The great man in this case was Clyde Griffiths, the name that Dreiser gave to the Gillette character.

Gillette was not, of course, great at all in any standard meaning of the term. But to Dreiser, it was the “Americanness” of the tragedy that accounted both for Griffiths’s greatness and for the putatively “tragic” nature of his crime.

The arrival of Dreiser’s hero on the cultural scene marked a fundamental change in the idea of heroism itself.

America, in Dreiser’s view, was implicated in the murder; America—and the hope that it represented to so many—was what had turned the story into a tragedy.

Dreiser’s use of the epithet “American” was not merely idiosyncratic. Clearly, it has resonated with generations of readers. The anniversary of Grace Brown’s drowning last summer was marked by a kind of celebratory folk festival, including the unveiling of a plaque at Big Moose Lake commemorating the fatal boat ride, reenactments of the murder and the trial, and readings of Grace’s letters to the faithless Chester, as well as a three-day scholarly conference.

The arrival of Dreiser’s hero on the cultural scene marked a fundamental change in the idea of heroism itself. The traditional hero, master of people and events, had taken such a beating for his role in the random and murderous trench warfare of World War I that even today he has not yet managed to pick himself up off the canvas. The hero’s successor, the anti-hero, is not the master but the victim of his world. Like Chester Gillette or Clyde Griffiths, he flails helplessly in the grip of forces he is powerless to control: forces variously identified as God, fate, or the “system”—that is, the capitalist system. In Dreiser’s case, the prime force is America itself which, with its promises of wealth and the freedom that wealth brings, helped lure Clyde Griffiths to his destruction.

Jim Cullen, author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, claims that the expression “the American Dream” made its first literary appearance in 1931 in The Epic of America by James Truslow Adams. But the main idea behind the phrase, of an ever-receding hope from which somebody has been unfairly excluded, was pioneered by Dreiser. The title “An American Tragedy” implied that the lustrous immigrant’s dream that America held out to the world somehow impelled Chester to murder Grace, or Clyde to murder Roberta. In other words, even before the American Dream had been formulated as a concept—though not, of course, before there were lots of American and would-be American dreamers—its negative meaning as a cruel delusion was ready and waiting for it. When the Metropolitan Opera last year was promoting the debut of Tobias Picker’s opera based on the Dreiser book, its publicist used the headline, “The American Dream on Trial.”

There is a similar subtext to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which came out in the same year as Dreiser’s book and which Fitzgerald once wanted to title “Under the Red, White, and Blue.” As in An American Tragedy, the fatal attraction of wealth and social advancement for Americans, particularly those who were or wanted to be upwardly socially mobile, is rendered in tragic terms. Both Clyde Griffiths and Jay Gatsby—his titular “Great” is ironic and marks him from the start as an anti-hero—are meant to suggest an American Prometheus, destroyed by the envious gods of money and class they aspire to join. Already, before the term was even coined, the American Dream carried with it overtones of tragedy.

Although Gatsby was not a success in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, it is now regarded by many as the greatest of American novels, one of the most assigned books for reading in high school and college. It has been adapted for stage and screen and turned into an opera by John Harbison. Iconic, ironic Gatsby has earned Americans’ affection on two contradictory levels. We are proud of Gatsby for the illusion he manages to maintain—for his self-invention—and at the same time are happy to look down on him. We see ourselves, by comparison, as wiser. We understand that Gatsby’s dream was an illusion, and we can be bitter about it on his behalf. Gatsby’s greatness lies in his ability to turn the bitterness of those who see the American Dream as a false promise into pathos, a process that has by now become a journalistic cliché.

The movie “‘Little Miss Sunshine,’” writes Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, is “a tale about genuine faith and manufactured glory that unwinds in the American Southwest, but more rightly takes place at the terminus of the American dream, where families are one bad break away from bankruptcy.” Foreigners like Jim Fish of the BBC are particularly fond of this negative version of the dream. Comparing race relations in Britain and France with the USA recently, he said: “And in the most renowned melting pot society of all, the United States, Hurricane Katrina exposed the grim reality that far too many black people remain at the bottom of the pile, too often ignored and cut off from the American Dream.”

New York Times critic Stephen Holden is similarly negative, characterizing President Bush’s America as “an arrogant empire drunk on power and angry at the failure of the American dream to bring utopia.” Utopia? Wasn’t that the Soviet dream? But Utopia—“no place” in Greek—was also not there in America, and its not-thereness was remarked upon much more often in this country than in the Soviet Union.

Certainly, the utopian dimension of the American Dream has been very helpful in feeding the cultural and political appetite for the romance of disillusion, which took on such importance between the wars. If you make the impossible your goal, you guarantee a future of picturesque disappointment. This was the point of the films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, one of which was an adaptation of Dreiser’s American Tragedy called “A Place in the Sun” (1951). Hollywood had to make a few changes in Dreiser’s story. Montgomery Clift’s George Eastman—yet another name given to the man who started out as Chester Gillette—can’t bring himself to kill Grace/Roberta, now re-named Alice Tripp.

As Robert Samuelson notices, 'Americans’ very optimism breeds stress and insecurity, because it invites disappointment.'

Instead, her death is depicted as an accident, but Eastman accepts his fate as deserved because he had intended to kill her. It is not too much to say that he comes off as a saintly figure, consoled in his last hours by a radiant Elizabeth Taylor in the role of the rich girl whose love is undimmed by his actions. “A Place in the Sun” offered another way to skin the cat, but the point was the same as An American Tragedy. The humble fellow of no birth, wealth, or distinction who only wanted to get ahead in the world was struck down by the gods or the fates or the powers-that-be for his ambition. He took on the stature and the nobility of the ancient heroes who were not afraid to stand against impossible odds, or to take on the tyrants of heaven or earth. Such a scenario became common for the film noir, as in “Double Indemnity” (1944) or “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946), except that in those films there was less squeamishness than in “A Place in the Sun” about making the victim-hero into an unabashed murderer—and a thief to boot.

The heroes of these films were just little guys who were trying to score big for once in their lives. The Hays Code, which decreed that criminals could not be depicted in the movies as profiting from their crimes, or getting away with them unpunished, helped to create this plotline—perhaps the chief among many examples of how what would now be called “censorship” actually made the movies better, for there was an undeniable emotional power in the American tragedies of men like Chester Gillette, who dared to look for a place for themselves above the miserable station in life to which they were born.

These figures were crushed for their presumption with such inevitability that the malign powers at work to frustrate them could only have suggested to the largely left-wing screenwriters of the era the force that they would have called “capitalism.” Like “America” as imagined by Dreiser and Fitzgerald, this Marxist concept could be conceived of as God or fate or the state, but in whatever guise it appeared, it shared with “capitalism,” as understood by the left, the qualities of cruelty and indifference to human aspiration.

The political motivations of the screenwriters of the noir era, moreover, were in tune with the natural tendency to disappointment that comes from human expectation. As economic columnist Robert Samuelson notices, “Americans’ very optimism breeds stress and insecurity, because it invites disappointment. For proof, look at the monthly survey of consumer confidence done at the University of Michigan. One question is: Are you and your family ‘better off or worse off financially than you were a year ago?’ Despite steadily rising living standards—measured by new gadgets, larger homes, better cars—it’s rare for more than 50 percent of Americans ever to say ‘yes.’” In other words, hope recedes because we want more. This is still as true as ever.

But compare the banality of such success with the nobility of the old, politically inspired failures. If McCarthyism never quite succeeded in purging Hollywood of its communist tendencies, the demise of the Hays Code in the 1960s removed the external constraint on moviemakers to depict their American dreamers as tragic figures. The result, particularly in the last 10 or 15 years, has been a spate of movies that we might call prison fantasies—that is, instead of the hero’s hope of one big score leading to his destruction, the hope now comes true, and the hero escapes to some sun-drenched tropical paradise to enjoy the fruits of his ill-gotten gains.

That the American Dream has now become the American Fantasy is also suggested by its current political use.

You only have to compare the original, Rat-Pack version of “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960) with the remake of 2001. In the original, a criminal conspiracy to rob several Las Vegas casinos—no one was going to shed any tears over those losses—succeeds brilliantly, only for the money to be accidentally incinerated. Frank and Dino and Sammy and the rest emerge philosophically into the bright sunlight just the same as they were before. At the end of the re-make, the crooks, led by George Clooney in the Sinatra role, get away with the clearly fantastical sum of $160 million—though later, in order to set up the sequel (“Ocean’s Twelve”) three years on, they had to steal that amount again somewhere else in order to pay back the original owner.

That the American Dream has now become the American Fantasy is also suggested by its current political use. At about the same time that the Dreiserians were celebrating at Moose Lake, the Democratic Leadership Council was launching something called the “American Dream Initiative.” Developed by Sens. Hillary Clinton and Tom Carper and Gov. Tom Vilsack, it promised on behalf of the Democrats to “offer a new opportunity agenda that secures the pillars of the American Dream.” The initiative claims to be necessary because “over the last five years we’ve taken a different direction, one that offered the greatest help to those with the most wealth.” Here are some of the specifics of the DLC’s American Dream Initiative:

Every American should have the opportunity and responsibility to go to college and earn a degree, or to get the lifelong training they need.

Every worker should have the opportunity and responsibility to save for a secure retirement.

Every business should have the opportunity to grow and prosper in the strongest private economy on Earth, and the responsibility to equip workers with the same tools of success as management.…

And so on. Here is a good illustration of the way in which political rhetoric has ceased to be the art of saying something and has instead become the art of saying nothing. The elusiveness of the dream, in this new rhetorical use, is a platform not for tragic disappointment, but rather for open-ended political maneuvering. Looked at critically, these “pillars” of the American Dream are nonsense. All of these “opportunities” already exist, and pairing them with “responsibility” in each case not only raises unanswered questions about the methods of coercion to be employed to make sure that people live up to their “responsibilities” but actually diminishes or abolishes the opportunities.

Mrs. Clinton’s husband, the former president, thought in similar terms when he paid tribute to the late Ann Richards by saying, “She really believed that we could make a world in which everyone was a winner.” The context suggested that he meant this as a compliment, but of course if everyone is a winner then no one is a winner. What he, if not Governor Richards, envisaged is a world in which winning and losing have ceased to exist and everybody has what he needs and wants without aspiring to anything higher.

In short: Utopia. No place.

What’s remarkable is that Bill Clinton himself was and is such a striver, such a winner, that you might almost think his success had made him feel guilty. During the last year of the Clinton presidency, David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post that “more than any of our presidents, Bill Clinton is Jay Gatsby,” partly because “he’s still becoming, still aspiring, still seeking validation for what he’s done and who he is.”

But Gatsby is also a memento mori, a reminder that, in the end, even winners can become losers. The utopian tendency that seeks to make us forget this reality—that approaches the happiest outcomes for education, retirement, etc., as phantom rights—has the same political purpose that Dreiser had in An American Tragedy. Once again, failure is regarded as a reproach to aspiration rather than a spur to it and a prelude to achievement. Once again, anything less than perfection is seen as redounding to the discredit of those in power rather than an as an inevitable concomitant of the human condition. Artistically speaking, at any rate, the American Dream has always been a fantasy. It’s just that politics in our time has finally become equally fantastical.

James Bowman, a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former American editor of The Times Literary Supplement of London, is the author of “Honor: A History” (Encounter).

Photographs from Bettmann/Corbis.