Books About the American Dream Let America Be America Again

Langston Hughes signs autographs following a lecture at Howard University in 1957 (Washington Area Spark/Flickr)

Following Donald Trump's election, a poem past Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in police custody, the poem has found new urgency. Perhaps it was the give-and-take again that first drew people'southward attention. Decades before Trump used the word in his 2016 entrada slogan to "Brand America Great Over again," Hughes published a poem called "Let America Exist America Again."

Sometimes referred to as the "poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was built-in in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. Afterward living in Mexico for a yr, he arrived in New York in 1921 to written report engineering at Columbia University. Drawn to the literary life, he joined other voices at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, writers such as Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Arna Bontemps. Hughes's outset poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in 1921, addressed the Black experience in America: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Hughes left Columbia and traveled to the west coast of Africa, Rotterdam, Paris, and northern Italy, returning to the United States in 1924. In 1926, he published his first volume of poems, The Weary Dejection. Influenced by poets such as Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced free poesy. His collection included the poem "I, Too," which opens "I, too, sing America," and closes "I, too, am America." ("I hear America singing," his spiritual mentor Whitman had written.)

In 1929, Hughes graduated from Lincoln Academy, the nation's showtime caste-granting historically Blackness college. He continued to travel widely and, through the 1930s, wrote poems, plays, short stories, and a novel. He was sympathetic to radical causes, and his work beyond the decade displayed a socialist rhetoric mutual to the era. But he never joined the Communist Party, as many of his friends may accept.

Hughes published "Let America Be America Once again" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its final course two years subsequently in A New Song, a collection issued past the International Workers Order. The work addresses the meaning of America and offers both a critique and an affirmation of the American ideal.

Lamenting the conditions of the Depression, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the free."

It begins "Let America be America again / Let it be the dream it used to be," then continues, "Permit America be the dream the dreamers dreamed." It'due south a dream of freedom, equality, opportunity, and freedom—the ethics that form the boulder of the nation. Yet a parenthetic vocalism adds, "(America never was America to me)."

If yous know Hughes's work, it is tempting to read the parenthetic "me" as a victim of the long history of racial segregation and oppression. The poem anticipates this assumption, and a new vox asks, "Say, who are you lot that mumbles in the dark?" What follows is a list of everyday Americans: "the poor white," "the Negro," "the red human being," "the immigrant," "the farmer," "the worker." All are carrying hope for a meliorate future, and all have fallen victim to "the same quondam stupid programme / Of domestic dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak." America is not America to any of them.

Given Hughes's radical sympathies, the class assay is not surprising. The poem laments the conditions of the Depression, with millions unemployed and on relief, and asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the free," where and then many have zero left now "except the dream that'south almost dead today."

Almost dead, yet unvanquished.

For Hughes, the United States was an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable ideal. Information technology was a land that "never has been yet— / And nevertheless must be," a dreamland unlike whatsoever other state. But the nation'southward failure time and again to live upwardly to its aspirations is a profound part of the story. Whatever its struggles, the United States has always identified itself by its dreams. Dreams inspired past abstractions like republic, justice, and rights. Dreams blithe by those seeking freedom and equality. Dreams stirred by those making a new home in America and pursuing a amend life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his verse form ends non with despair, merely with an urgent plea:

We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless evidently—
All, all the stretch of these groovy green states—
And make America again!

Hughes would continue to remember about America, asking, "What happens to a dream deferred?" in a 1951 poem titled "Harlem." Martin Luther King Jr. had also been contemplating dreams, long earlier his "I Accept a Dream" spoken communication at the Lincoln Memorial. Rex and Hughes were friends: in 1956, Male monarch recited a Hughes poem, "Female parent to Son," from the pulpit. Considering of the poet'south suspected Communist sympathies (Hughes had testified before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), however, Rex publicly kept his distance. Even and so, in 1967, seven months after Hughes died, he declared that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I even so have a dream."

Male monarch must have appreciated the closing of "Let America Exist America Again," where the people are summoned to redeem the state. In a sermon first delivered in 1954, he alleged that "instead of making history, we are made by history."

The line is easily misunderstood. King was not offering an argument for why history matters; rather, he was decrying passivity and insisting on empowerment. It was a call to activity. The preacher was telling his congregation that the time for waiting on dreams was over—the time for making dreams come truthful had begun.

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 is Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. This essay is adapted from his new volume,The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America.

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Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/let-america-be-america-again/