For the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” we reached out to a range of esteemed authors to write short essays that respond to Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.”
America is America: it’s a tautology. But it’s also a falsehood: America is not and never was the “America” that the best part of our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our traditions, our ideologies, our junior high school civics classes say it should be. We can get closer to, or further away from, that America: we get closer, or further, or both (since America has more than two dimensions) every year. “America” promises justice as well as mercy and opportunity, enough space for all souls to flourish, for all traditions (including those that long predate European arrivals) to breathe free. America, alas, cannot be that yet, can never be that, fully, cannot be wholly just, or wholly free.
And that’s what Hughes’s ringing poem admits: it belongs in the great tradition of “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Of all American oratory whose disappointment and denunciation serve as a platform for future hope.
Nor does it end there. “And make America again!” That’s one adjective away from an infamous slogan printed, and sold at a nutball markup, on hundreds of thousands of hats.
What’s different? Not just the faith or the sense of justice or the sense of history in Hughes’s accumulating rhetoric. Not only the sense that America has never yet kept its promises, never yet been what its own ideals—our own ideals, my own ideals—say it should be.
Not just the sense, either, that America is in some sense those unrealized ideals, which we can bring, partially, slowly, unevenly, into being. Hypocrisy is the promise that vice makes to virtue, and if American self-knowledge, brought to us by historians and by many of our grandparents, includes the knowledge that we’ve done so much wrong, it’s also the knowledge that our goals matter, that we have collectively improved, sometimes, under pressure: the eight-hour day and the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act and even the Affordable Care Act aren’t enough, but they ain’t nothing. Voters and demonstrations and activists made them happen. So did elected officials. We need an outside and an inside game. We can do it again.
It’s not just the history. So much history in this poem. Frustration, “the same old stupid plan,” and dispossession, “the red man driven from the land,” but also the hope that things can be different, and better: “O Pioneers!” said Whitman and then Cather (wistfully) and then Hughes (with an irony that goes beyond irony, full circle into meaning it again).
It’s not just the particular rhetorical extremes of the 1930s: Hughes’s poem comes from his Popular Front period, and it’s hardly an exemplar of subtlety. It’s oratory, with asides (“America never was America to me”). It’s best heard aloud, and it sensibly avoids the rhetoric of direct and immediate “revolution”: the “gangster death” of consolidated capital requires that we resist it and displace it and weaken it in ways that do not involve charging into buildings with guns. (I am showing my hand here, but I have also been watching the Jan. 6 hearings. Jan. 6 is my birthday. I want it back.)
Hughes wrote tremendously supple, flexible, personal, elusive poems, when he wanted to do that, but here he wanted a megaphone, and he got one: he wants us to Do Something, to Support the Left as he saw it, the left that would make American opportunity and equality a thing for everyone, as it had never been, has never been. (It’s a poem equally adaptable to radical and to incrementalist rhetoric and to the idea that all great change comes by halves.)
But it’s not just that aspiration that distinguishes Hughes’s pentameter-packed, broad-shouldered, confidently oratorical, startlingly memorable poem, not just the concessive and ironic aspects (America never was itself: can it be?), not just those aspects that set it beside other monuments of American verse oratory and popular lyric.
It is, as well, that final, crunching, hypometrical line, with its imperative verb: “And make America again!” America, like Americanness, isn’t something we have or are or receive or accept: it’s something we make and do. And it is never done. We have to make do; we do it over and over, every time a public school opens its doors (or gets its roof fixed), every time a candidate concedes (especially if we voted for them), every time there’s a union election (especially if the union wins), every time we drag ourselves out in public to show up for the public good.
It’s not just that change has to come in this piecemeal way. But it’s how we make America. Again.
For more from the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” you can purchase the issue here.
