INTRODUCTION
Modern liberal democracies can be understood as covenants: they persist across time, holding succeeding generations together in shared obligation; they honor the dignity and value of human life, asserting the existence of civil and human rights; they draw together diverse populations with a sense of shared belonging and aspiration.
In his poem “Let America Be America Again,” Langston Hughes (1901-1967), an influential African American writer and social activist, juxtaposes the ideal of America with the brutal reality of poverty during the Great Depression. Written on a train ride in 1935 and published in 1936, the poem contrasts the American dream — of liberty, equality, and opportunity — with the prejudice, low wages, hard labor, and exploitation experienced by workers and the unemployed, whether they come from Ireland, Poland, England, or Africa. This contrast reveals the gap between aspiration and reality. And yet, even though “America never was America to me,” Hughes concludes by affirming the covenant that the America “where everyman is free” must be and will be.
EXCERPT
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where everyman is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!