"Howl" was published in 1955, at the height of American power and prosperity, in which many white Americans seemed to be achieving the American dream of material progress and well-being. The American dream in that period was expressed through owning a house in the suburbs, having a car, and working in a stable job.

"Howl" critiques the American dream by equating it with "Moloch," an idol in the Bible to whom children were sacrificed. In the poem, for example, Ginsberg attacks features of American life many in that period celebrated, such as skyscrapers ("granite cocks"), booming industries, state-of-the-art mental hospitals, and a powerful military complex, as empty and leading to destruction:

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

Ginsberg shows the failure of the American dream by highlighting all of those who were destroyed by it, shining a light on the marginalized in that period: drug addicts, homosexuals, Black Americans—artistic people or "best minds" ground up by an inability to conform to a hollow, materialistic culture. His poem speaks both of the poverty of spirit and the still existing material poverty in America, such as the "cold-water flats" that flew in the face of the 1950s boosterism about American prosperity:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.