Requiem for the American Dream: A nation in search of its past, with fragile hopes for its future

The first thing you notice is the eyes, the uncertainty, the exhaustion. The next thing you notice is the history, the way every past holds layers. Nothing is new, but everything looks unsettled. Earlier this year, with the country’s 250th anniversary in mind, Tribune photojournalist E. Jason Wambsgans set out to take the collective temperature. He roamed every corner of Illinois and returned with a portrait of a state, and a nation, at a crossroads. Poignant images of people and places across Illinois that illustrate a vibe, a feeling, that up-in-the-air quality not so different from what national polls are reporting.

The mood of the United States of America before the midterm elections next month is sour, grim, uneasy, dyspeptic, distrustful, anxious, unsettled. Take your pick. A solid year of polling is saying, pretty consistently, that you and everyone you know, for the most part, are uncertain about this country. In fact, you are so doubtful and tentative about the future, the only thing you agree on, generally, is being a United States in name only.

A majority of us believe the best years of the country “are behind us” (Pew Research). A majority feel the American Dream was once achievable decades ago but no longer is (AP-NORC). A majority say the state of the union is not strong (NPR/PBS News/Marist), and, according to another national survey (North Carolina’s Elon University), more than two thirds of Americans believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be disappointed by how their descendants are managing democracy 250 years later.

Still, as ugly as it sounds, glimmers of light persist, here and there, in these same polls: A majority of us feel proud to be American, and most hold a sliver of hope for the future. Sounds like a paradox. Except, polling doesn’t show you individuals and it doesn’t tell their stories and it can’t explain circumstances. By design, a poll is a statistical snapshot of a feeling. It doesn’t account for decades of local history, or how a landscape itself can inform feelings. All of that, though, is glimpsed in these photos, a fragility seated alongside a resilience.

There are a lot of ghosts here, but they’re the kinds of hauntings that we live with, day by day. They’re the ghosts who remind us the past really is prologue. But the future is unwritten.