Let America Be America Again

“Let America Be America Again” is a stirring, patriotic poem that draws on the celebration of America in the poetry of Walt Whitman as well as popular songs such as “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” but it also contains a stern critique of the nation it praises.

The first quatrain, with its call for the renewal of America, presents a positive view of the country, alluding to the American dream. However, it also contains a hint that at the time Hughes is writing the poem, all is not quite as it should be: “Let it be the dream it used to be” (Line 2). Something was present in the past that is now absent. Even this hint does not really prepare the reader for the blunt force of Line 5, standing as a single line on the page: “(America never was America to me).” The poet thus takes the reader from the “used to be” of Line 2 to the “never was” in Line 5. (The same pattern is presented in Lines 6-10, with greater specificity, highlighting the lack of equality and freedom.)

These opening lines might suggest that at this point, the poet, being African American, is presenting an African American speaker who is referring to the absence of racial justice in America. This, however, is only part of the poem. As the speaker states beginning in Line 19, the “me” and the “I” of the poem refer to far more than either one individual or one race. The failure of America to live up to its ideals affects a large swath of the population.

At this point, Hughes draws on the style of Whitman. Whitman’s voice can be heard in the question the speaker asks, “Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?” (Line 11), and even more so in the fourfold repetition of the short phrase “I am” at the beginning of Lines 13-16, which is repeated in Lines 25-28, with other occurrences of the phrase at the beginning of Lines 19 and 31, making 10 in all. Whitman used this kind of repetition frequently (a technique known as anaphora), and it was also his common practice to expand the identity of the self in his poems—especially in his long poem “Song of Myself”—to embrace a wide variety of people: “In all people I see myself” (Section 20), and this expanded self merges others in their distress: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there” (Section 33). Thus, following Whitman’s lead, Hughes’s speaker takes on multiple identities, across different races and occupations. “I am the poor white” (Line 19), and “I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars” (Line 20), (compare Whitman’s “I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs” [“Song of Myself” Section 33, Line 838]). Hughes’s speaker is also the Indigenous American and the immigrant, and now he ratches up the criticism of American society, sounding a note of anger and frustration, especially for the immigrant, who comes to America full of hope but finds “only the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak” (Lines 23-24). The twofold focus of the poem—America’s ideals and its failure to live up to them—shifts firmly at this point to the negative side of the scale.

The next lines (Lines 25-30) contain the speaker’s criticism of America’s capitalist economic system, a system that emphasizes an “ancient chain / Of profit, power, gain” (Lines 26-27), in which the workers are exploited by the rich, who underpay them or do not pay them at all, and all wealth is taken into private hands through sheer greed (Lines 29-30). Here, Hughes’s speaker shows his implicit advocacy of socialism or communism, understood as a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources among the people as a whole.

The speaker then extends his “I am” identity to farmers, to industrial workers who are “slaves” to machines, to African Americans, and finally, to the universal image of “I am the people” (Line 34), who are “Hungry yet today despite the dream” (Line 35). The word “hungry” occurs also in Line 34. The poet likely had contemporary conditions during the Great Depression in mind, in which many people did indeed go hungry as unemployment soared and the federal government scrambled to set up relief programs.

Another vision of the immigrants who sailed with great hopes to America only to find that their hopes were not fulfilled follows in Lines 39-50. Again, the speaker extends his identity to include them: “Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream / In the Old World” (Lines 39-40). It is this stanza, which records disappointment that the “‘homeland of the free’” (Line 50) did not fully materialize, that prompts the speaker to an extended lament (Lines 52-61) for the large gap in America between high-flown words and the realities on the ground. The “millions on relief today” (Line 53) likely refers to Depression-era relief programs such as the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) of 1933. The “millions shot down when we strike” (Line 54) is an example of hyperbole (exaggeration). There were indeed many strikes during the Great Depression involving millions of workers, and there were many examples of violence when employers tried to break the strikes, but the notion that millions were shot is not factual. The “millions who have nothing for our pay” (Line 55) may be a reference to high unemployment levels during the Depression or simply a complaint against very low wages.

The poem takes a turn beginning at Line 62. The speaker’s call for the renewal of the American dream returns as the first line is repeated almost word for word: “O, let America be America again.” When the poem was first published in Esquire, it included only the first 50 lines, and Hughes was angered by the omission of about 40% of the text, since it upset the balance of the poem. The stanza beginning with Line 62 conveys the feeling that the speaker is not just imploring that the dream be revived but that he believes it must be so. There is some kind of historical inevitability to it. The dream “that’s almost dead today” (Line 61) still has power to inspire people to fulfill it:

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be (Lines 62-64).

It remains “our mighty dream” (Line 69) that is waiting to be reanimated.

The speaker realizes that he can expect some backlash for his uncompromising presentation of how America has fallen short of its dream (“Sure, call me any ugly name you choose” [Line 70]), and he has his villains too, “those who live like leeches on the people’s lives” (Line 72). He is determined, however, to bring the poem to a rousing conclusion. Full-fledged optimism reigns as the poem’s twofold focus swings back to the positive side of the scale: “And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!” (Lines 78-79). The poem ends on a note of vigorous patriotism as the speaker, in a nod to the Preamble to the US Constitution, invokes “We, the people” (Line 82) and presents a Whitmanesque celebration of “all the stretch of these great green states” (Line 85).