Interpretations of the American Dream

In Cullen's The American Dream, he writes,
        "And like other American Dreams, the power of this one lay in a sense of collective ownership: anyone can get ahead.  An assertion of universal enfranchisement is routinely reaffirmed by this dream's boosters (the obsessive quality of their reaffirmations never quite leading them to raise troubling questions about the ongoing need for regular reassurance).  Occasionally it has been roundly condemned as an opiate of the people, usually by critics of American society who are dismissed as disgruntled, foreign, or both.  Only rarely have the contours of this dream been seriously explored and tested in a sympathetic, but probing, way.  But that could not happen until those contours had clearly emerged.  It took a couple hundred years for the realities of American life to shape the Dream of Upward Mobility" (Cullen 60).
           "Anyone can get ahead." That is what the job market and basically all of America is founded upon.  People try to get ahead of others by any means possible.  What I interpret to be the basic idea of Cullen's writings of the American Dream is that America gives people the possibility to get ahead -- the possibility to succeed and make a life for oneself if they so choose to.  People who achieve this dream feel as though they are on top of the world -- to me, the American Dream is equivalent to the Pursuit of Happiness, and if someone fulfills their pursuit of happiness, they have fulfilled their American Dream.