American Dream: The Time Is Right

By the early eighties, that contract had begun to fray. No longer family-run, Hormel was increasingly beholden to its shareholders. In 1984, despite posting nearly $30 million in profits, management announced a painful wage cut for meat-packers—from $10.69 an hour to $8.25. For workers whose bodies bore the marks of years spent inside the slaughterhouse, it felt like a betrayal.

Kopple’s camera takes us inside the plant to show precisely what labor that wage buys. Hogs are stunned, hoisted, disassembled. Their carcasses are carved into portions that will later appear shrink‑wrapped and cheerful in grocery aisles. The work is brutal, repetitive, and dangerous. We can see the physical toll and guess at the psychic cost. Harlan County similarly showed the bodily impact of coal mining. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t ignore it.

The first main figure we meet is Jim Guyette, president of Local P‑9, the union representing Austin’s meat-packers. He’s a third‑generation Hormel employee in his thirties. Local P-9’s members voted him into leadership for his willingness to fight, in contrast to prior leaders who were more conciliatory with management. The film begins as the calendar is running out on P-9’s previous contract. Guyette feels he needs more leverage to face Hormel’s hardball negotiators, so he recruits the New York–based labor consultant Ray Rogers, who earned a name for himself working on the late-seventies textile-workers campaign dramatized in the film Norma Rae. Rogers uses confrontational tactics and media events in an effort to win popular support for unions. He devises a strategy for union supporters to hold demonstrations outside the headquarters of a key Hormel stockholder, First Bank of Minnesota.

Throughout this process, Kopple captures the mood swings within the P-9 community. Hormel workers hadn’t been on strike since 1933. During meetings at the union hall, we witness diverging opinions. Some members are fired up. Others are skeptical about whether Rogers’s approach is working. The film skillfully interweaves a range of voices that foreshadows greater tensions ahead.

The dynamics grow more fraught when the film reveals that Guyette and Rogers face another source of friction from within the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union—Local P-9’s parent organization. We meet Lewie Anderson, the chain-smoking UFCW negotiator who represents tens of thousands of meat-packers nationwide, including members at plants making far less than Hormel’s workers. Anderson believes it’s the wrong time for hardball tactics. He’s convinced that Local P-9’s tactics are counterproductive and will further weaken the already fragile position of the union’s members throughout the country.

Kopple’s access to these men is extraordinary. She captures meetings thick with tension, where strategy collides with ego and adrenaline. Each figure is granted dimension, dignity, and contradiction. I couldn’t help wondering whether she’d held her own judgments about them or any of their strategies. “No, I was drawn to all of them,” she told me. “I felt so unbelievably lucky that I was able to tell their stories.”

Time itself becomes a central character in the film, wearing down resolve and exposing fault lines. We see the majority of the P-9 membership vote to go on strike in August 1985, against the advice of the UCFW. As the strike drags on, Kopple shows us how the jubilance and camaraderie of the union members give way to the grinding realities of winter on the picket line and households that have to be sustained without a Hormel paycheck, along with doubts about whether they can outlast management. The company shifts production elsewhere, then eventually reopens the plant with replacement workers. One of the film’s most poignant story lines follows two brothers, R.J. and Ron Bergstrom, both Local P-9 members, who find themselves in different camps and, ultimately, on opposite sides of the picket line. R.J. remains loyal to Local P‑9, while Ron loses faith in Guyette’s approach. Ron belongs to a splinter group of Hormel workers who wish Local P-9 had followed the advice of Anderson instead of Rogers. Kopple sits down with several of these members to hear their perspectives. Late in the strike, one normally stoic man breaks into tears as he describes the shame he feels at not being able to provide for his family. But emotions run high on both sides. At one point, R.J. tells a TV reporter of Ron, “He won’t be my brother if he crosses the line.”

Peter Gilbert, Kopple’s main cinematographer on American Dream, told me, “That was such an education, how Barbara treated everybody with this beautiful grace and dignity, no matter if she believed your side or not. I learned from her that the real importance of documentary is not which side you’re on. It’s more about presenting a gray area somewhere in the film, where people who are on opposing sides can connect and have a conversation.”

Today I sense a growing curiosity from a younger generation about organized labor. Maybe it coincides with the popularity of Bernie Sanders. Maybe it’s the strength in numbers that people feel in grassroots movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or Debt Collective. Maybe it’s the inspiration of organizing Amazon workers, as captured in the 2024 documentary Union. Whatever the source, I wasn’t feeling that same zeal among young liberals of my generation when American Dream came out. Unions felt parochial, unglamorous, even vaguely regressive. On college campuses in those days, you were more likely to find solidarity groups for distant causes—the anti‑apartheid movement in South Africa, revolutionary struggles in Central America—than for working‑class communities closer to home.

When I recently shared that impression with Kopple, she disagreed. “Labor has always been out there,” she told me. “Your father worked in a union, or your grandmother or somebody else. It’s always of interest to people.” I think Kopple is expressing a parallel truth. As we can clearly see in American Dream, she was engaged with a full-fledged movement of demonstrations, news coverage, and high-profile advocates like Jesse Jackson. But perhaps none of that was reaching my generation, many of whom grew up taking middle-class gains for granted.

Kopple didn’t approach the Hormel strike as an allegory or a case study. She went to Middle America and stayed there. She filmed people whose politics were mixed, whose values were contradictory, whose grievances were rooted in economic survival rather than ideology. In doing so, she asked her audience to sit with individuals they might otherwise dismiss or overlook. In the decades since, she has continued to apply these filmmaking practices, rooted in her social consciousness and talent for patient observation, spanning topics that include transgender expression, the experiences of war refugees, and voter activation. Two highlights of her later work for me are Shut Up & Sing (2006), about the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks as they mount a comeback from controversy, and Miss Sharon Jones! (2015), about the soul singer as she mounts a comeback from cancer.

It makes sense that one of the people who immediately grasped the importance of American Dream was Studs Terkel, the legendary Chicago oral historian and author of Working. Terkel devoted his career to amplifying the voices of ordinary Americans. He hosted Kopple on his radio show for the film’s release. “It has Greek-tragic aspects to it. Only it’s not the gods that did it. Here, it’s a company and a union‑busting climate,” he said. “For me it’s the film—feature or documentary—of the past ten years I’ve seen. And I’ll remember this long after I’ve forgotten every extravaganza.”