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Tuesday – July 4
After the Supreme Court’s latest attacks on African Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, impoverished college students, and clean water—not to mention its reassertion of control over women’s bodies a year ago— Langston Hughes’s “Let America be America Again” seems the best July 4th poem for 2023. Much of what he says about America’s failure to live up to its original promise is only too timely.
By stacking the court with radical Catholics and by having billionaires shower them with gifts so that they remain in the far right bubble, the right has found a way to roll back the progress we were making towards all having equal access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nor is it only the Supreme Court that is acting up. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the foremost authorities on authoritarianism points out, the GOP generally has been transformed by “cult dynamics” that
dictate how party elites behave and what kinds of individuals find a foothold there. Day after day, we witness one of the largest political parties in the world remake itself as an autocratic entity, discarding the values, norms, and rituals of democracy.
Analyzing Donald Trump’s continuing hold on the party, Ben-Ghiat observes,
Authoritarians don’t just hollow out democratic institutions, but also debase the meaning and the practice of politics, reducing it to lies, leader worship, and violence against enemies. That’s why authoritarian parties become havens for a toxic mix of craven opportunists, racist bullies, and amoral individuals who are attracted by partnering with a leader who has no limits or restraints.
Hughes points out what should be obvious–that we were never supposed to be a country where “kings connive [or] tyrants scheme/ That any man be crushed by one above.” The goal, rather, has been to be a nation where “opportunity is real, and life is free,/ Equality is in the air we breathe.” The question he asks could be easily be directed at our rightwing justices:
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
To be sure, Hughes would not be surprised at the justices’ behavior. As a Black man in America, he had few illusions about the country he was living in. “There’s never been equality for me,” he laments, “Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’”
But because of that, his call to action resonates all the more:
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America…
In 1787 Benjamin Franklin, asked whether America had just set itself up for a monarchy or a republic, famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Hughes’s dream is our republic living up to the vision expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Few poets have understood the urgency of such dreaming better than Hughes.
Let America Be America Again
By Langston Hughes
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.(America never was America to me.)
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.(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
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!I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.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 every man 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!