"Let America Be America Again" - A Stalinist Slogan?

[liberalpragmatist]

Personally, I take the line for what it is and think it's okay. It's wistful and intriguing, although personally it sounds a little bit overly-nostalgic. America can't exactly go back to pre-9/11 days and a Kerry presidency is not going to look like a Clinton administration - he'll be operating in a completely different set of circumstances.

However, a more serious objection to the poem has been raised by some right-wingers and by Slate's Timothy Noah: http://www.slate.com/id/2104295/

Hughes was, rather, an enthusiastic cheerleader for the Soviet Union at the time he wrote "Let America Be America Again," which explains the poem's agitprop tone. "I am the young man, full of strength and hope," Hughes writes in the poem:

Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold!
Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

Toil good, private ownership bad, etc. Hughes ends his poem on a more hopeful note ("America never was America to me/ And yet I swear this oath—/ America will be!"), but the future Hughes imagined for America when he wrote those words probably looked a lot like Stalinist Russia.

Chatterbox brings all this up not to bash Hughes—who was hardly the only serious artist who swooned over the Soviet experiment during the 1930s and who resumed writing memorable poetry after his fever broke—but to warn Kerry that this particular Hughes poem comes with baggage he would best do without. But like an overeager bellhop, Kerry has grabbed that suitcase with both hands and charged heedlessly up the grand staircase. He has written (or allowed to be written under his name) the preface to a thin volume titled Let America Be America Again, which includes that poem along with eight other (much better) Hughes poems. The book, which will be published Aug. 10, is packaged like the little collection of W.H. Auden poems published a few years back as a tie-in with the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral (which made dramatic use of Auden's "Funeral Blues"). The Hughes volume is, in effect, a tie-in with the Kerry campaign.

Could this hurt us? If he wraps this line up in his acceptance speech, will the RNC bash him with this? Personally, I can't see most Americans caring - they'll likely focus on the line, not the historical context for it. But it does raise interesting questions - should we be wary of the line, "Let America Be America Again"?

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. They can try.

They will not succeed. Full stop.

[JohnKleeb]

2. I love the line

Langston Hughes is one of the greatest poets and a personal favorite of mine. I love that he's quoting a great poet and man.

[shraby]

4. The line has nothing to do

with going back to pre-9/11 days. It has very much to do with the curtailing of our constitution, torture, lack of health insurance, people not making enough money to live on, outsourcing jobs, etc. We WERE a prosperous country before Bush. People had a lot more than they do now. Let America be America again says it all.

[Wickerman]

3. Huges superficially embraced socialism

He explored it and ultimately, rejected it. He did so in the early years of of labor unions, etc.

This should be no big deal, but some folks will try to make it so. The particular poem in question was not from his "socialistic" period and is more representative of his body of work. The sociistic work was rather mediocre and unispired stuff he toyed with briefly. Most lit scholars long ago discarded the myth that he was a big socialist - too bad those seeking political gain can't.

[wildeyed]

5. I read the poem.

Here is a link to the complete text http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1473.

I am no english major, but I thought it lovely.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

If this is communism, then sign me up. The gops will bash Kerry no matter what. If all they can hit him with is Langston Hughes and an old poem, then great.

[ugarte]

6. Who cares?

Only right-wing bluehairs still live in fear of Communism.