Celebrations of the US’s 250th anniversary have been somewhat muted by the parlous condition of American democracy in 2026 and the clownishly undignified characters at its helm. But the topic of the US’s founding has been inevitably ambient and recently prompted me to return to a celebrated, if uncharacteristic, poem by Langston Hughes. Long heralded as the “poet laureate of Black America”, Hughes has often been noted for poems that celebrate, interrogate, and reveal Blackness in novel ways. In 1925’s The Weary Blues, Hughes demonstrated that the song and speech of Black Americans were as suited for poetic expression as any other vernacular. Such blues poems are an archetype of what cultural theorist Houston Baker would call Black artists’ “deformation of mastery”.1 Hughes’s expressions of Blackness in verse, most notably in 1921’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers2, became a foundational text of the Négritude movement and helped set the tone of Black literary expression and philosophical enquiry through much of the century. Finally, Hughes’s interrogation of American democratic failure in 1951’s Montage posed a question that helped to define mid-twentieth century civil rights and Black Power struggles: “what happens to a dream deferred?” Hughes prophetically anticipated that it would “explode”, as cities around the nation did repeatedly in 1965, 1967, and 1968.
Yet, ironically, the other of Hughes’s most celebrated poems, Let America Be America Again (1935), was composed in a portion of his career that has often been treated with some embarrassment by Hughes’s champions. The poem is also an outlier in his oeuvre for the somewhat raceless voice of its speaker. In ideological content, too, Let America Be America Again is unusual. Here, Hughes appropriated and probed US-nationalist claims in ways that signalled some fealty to the “exceptional” project of American democracy. This rhetorical feature has ensured the poem’s prominence in the canon of civil rights literature, wherein Black demands for freedom in the United States are articulated as an immanent critique of Americanism. The tradition of Black immanent critique would find its greatest practitioner in Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose speeches, especially in the early 1960s, forged a narrative of Black unfreedom that remains dominant. This narrative varnishes US nationalism by claiming that a noble democracy was formed in 1776, which nevertheless fell short of its founding ideals thanks to institutions like slavery and later Jim Crow. But the nation achieved a redemptive correction when it accepted moral lessons taught by the nonviolent civil disobedience of self-sacrificing Christians, epitomised by the angelic King.
For all Hughes’s rhetorical proximity to a liberal civil rights politics that affirms Americanism, however, Let America Be America Again was composed at the height of Hughes’s commitment to Communism. Beginning around 1931, Hughes’s creative efforts began to be directed toward works of self-consciously proletarian poetry. His poetic accent through this time was more Whitmanesque American everyman than Ma Rainey-style blues songster. Hughes’s decision to leave aside blues forms and de-emphasise the investigation of Black identity to instead join a Communist Party-led effort to create a literature of interracial class struggle was, for a long time, critically regarded as a misjudgement. Hughes’s proletarian poetry and the wider cultural movement of which he was a part have nevertheless been subject to extensive recoveries since the 1990s by scholars such as James Smethurst, Barbara Foley, Robin Kelley, and Brian Dolinar.3 On the occasion of the US’s 250th anniversary, the poem appears once again to be politically resonant, posing to contemporary readers a still divisive question about how communists ought to relate to US nationalism.
In many regards, Hughes’s answer in Let America Be America Again feels unfashionable and perhaps dated. The early portion of the poem is structured by two clashing voices, the first of which asserts in lofty tones the potency and appeal of the democratic project where “opportunity is real, and life is free”, while a second, parenthetical voice, speaking from a lowly first-person perspective, insists “there’s never been equality for me”. Eventually, this “mumbl[er] in the dark” is invited to speak from the spotlight. The speaker is identified as the “the poor white”, “the Negro”, “the red man”, “the immigrant”, “the farmer”, “the worker”, and “the people”. With one voice, the speaker asserts that America is “mine” and that, while “America never was America to me”, nevertheless “America will be!” The final lines of the poem retool the Declaration of Independence as an assertion of popular sovereignty, common property, and revolutionary possibility, against tyranny, privatisation, and destruction:
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!
The poem’s fame is due to the effectiveness of Hughes’s rhetorical manoeuvres and its heartfelt emotionality. Hughes combined two different kinds of broadly nationalist appeal: first, a love of country, or a patriotism in the authentic sense, including a notable concern for American ecology; second, fealty to the Founders’ purported project of building a nation that would act as a beacon of liberty to the world. Hughes attached these familiar nationalist passions to an expansive view of the US’s dispossessed population, whose voices he harmonised into a chorus of socialist insurgency. Composed in 1935, the poem’s rhetorical approach matched the Communist International’s hurried re-sizing of Communist politics to fit nationalist garb during the Popular Front period. Yet Hughes’s poem was more an anticipation than an echo of the new anti-fascist Americanism.
Underlying the poem is an interpretation of the founding of the American republic which much of the Left now straightforwardly rejects. Works such as Gerald Horne’s The Counter-revolution of 1776 have re-educated large portions of the transatlantic Left to see the founding of the United States as a defence of slavery against the apparent threat of British abolitionism, and a war to protect settler “liberty” to encroach on Indigenous lands. Meanwhile, an ever-growing quantity of historical research has chronicled the galling hypocrisy of freedom-loving slaveowners such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In popular culture, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multiracial retelling of the independence story, Hamilton, became a staple of Obama-era liberalism, which the Left has defined itself against. The contemporary Left’s relationship to the US’s achievement of independence therefore feels markedly more cynical than even Hughes’s sharply critical poem permits.
Yet historical debates and academic fashions have a life cycle. The recent emphasis on the Patriots’ slave-owning and settler violence will likely, at some stage, give way to a renewed appreciation of American independence as a moment of transatlantic revolutionism that ricocheted through France (the revolution of 1789-93), Britain (republican, abolitionist, and Chartist movements), and Haiti (the revolution and war of independence, 1791-1804). Moreover, historiography is not an adequate basis for a political strategy, let alone a source for effective rhetoric in the 2020s. While many feel rightly reserved about historical narratives that gloss over the founders of the American republic as historical “comrades” in a struggle shared by today’s multiracial Left, the symbolic place of the American Revolution in the Left’s imaginary is perhaps due a recovery.
Yet what is most striking to the contemporary reader in Hughes’s poem is his effort to express the desires of the poor white, the Jim-Crowed “Negro”, the colonised “red man”, the labouring “immigrant”, and the struggling farmer with a single voice. This optimistic envisioning of a singular revolutionary subject is evidence of a political moment in which Indigenous demands for sovereignty were not widely heard, and the prevailing emphasis in Black civil rights struggles was on shared class interests, as workers across racial divides built more inclusive industrial unions via the CIO. Hughes’s poem – precisely because it is a poem – can voice revolutionary subjectivity without having to attend to the political messiness of building an oppositional social bloc. Multiple and recurrent sectional conflicts, as well as state repression and political misleadership, have left Hughes’s putative revolutionary subject unrealised in the century since he wrote. What’s more, such a coherence of popular forces remains remote in the contemporary United States, though its possibility flashed back into collective consciousness as recently as 2020 thanks to the Black Lives Matter uprising of that year.
While Hughes’s attachment to “America” might be jarring in this year of Stars-and-Stripes-branded war crimes and Trumpian impositions on Venezuela, Cuba, and the fucking World Cup, his poem still has much to tell us. The basis for American violence in the world – from Palestine to Iran – remains a pervasive state and corporate violence against its own people. A great deal more work remains to be done in the United States to forge adequate organisational forms and programmatic formulae to slow or stop the war machine. But, for everybody living under the American empire, it can only be good news if the empire’s domestic subjects still feel a responsibility to “let America be America again”. If, by reading a patriotic poem of this kind, Americans are stirred to nationalist fervour (which admittedly seems less likely given the farcical celebrations on the White House lawn), the anti-imperialist Left should make forgiveness for the indulgence conditional: that any patriotic passions for “America” be directed against the imperial beast that the United States has become.
To live “in the monster”, Cuban nationalist revolutionary José Martí wrote in his final letter, is to “know its entrails”, and to truly love “our América” is to redeem it “from its greatest failings”. Martí exemplified a distinct tradition of “Americanism” that encountered the United States primarily as an unwelcome opponent of patriotic struggles from Cuba to Argentina. In many ways, when Hughes dreamed of salvaging the dream of America from the US’s bathetic and violent reality, he was joining the populace of the United States to Martí’s América, lending energy to the multiracial “republic that struggles against the colony”. Such an América is still worth making. Again… and again… and again…
- Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 15. ↩︎
- Written at the tender age of 17, the same age at which Nas later reinvented American poetics with Illmatic. ↩︎
- See Smethurst, The New Red Negro; Foley, Radical Representations; Kelley, Race Rebels; Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front. ↩︎
