America Already Is America
The Stalinist roots of John Kerry's new slogan.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, June 1, 2004, at 2:41 PM PT

In the June 1 New York Times, David M. Halbfinger reports that the Kerry campaign thinks it's found a winning slogan in "Let America be America again." They couldn't be more wrong.

Start with its provenance. The line is the title of a poem published in 1938 by Langston Hughes, the celebrated black poet of the Harlem Renaissance. The Times notes, in passing, that when Kerry first used the poem (in a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education), he skipped the following "bitter aside on racism":

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

But to call this a "bitter aside" is willfully to misread the poem. Anyone who takes the time to read "Let America Be America Again" will quickly understand that its entire thrust is that nostalgia for a golden age of American freedom is a crock. In the poem, idealized paeans to "the dream [America] used to be" alternate with parenthetical responses exposing the harsher reality ("America never was America to me"). Who is this angry dissenter? Hughes answers in a voice that echoes Walt Whitman's:

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 so on. Rather than pretend America ever was the land of the free (remember, this was written by a black man in the Jim Crow era), Hughes urges his heterogeneous countrymen to fulfill for the first time America's promise of freedom:

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Fair enough. Yet kind of irrelevant.

First of all, what Mr. Noah calls the "entire thrust" of the poem is only half the thrust…da boyz would accuse him of short stroking. The point of the poem is that America has not been what it has promised to be, but could—and should—be. Noah can perhaps be forgiven for his misunderstanding; he is, after all, a pundit not a poet. One can not forgive him for dealing with the poem as if it were the slogan and vice versa.

But let's look at what the slogan says, and what it implies.

There's a whole lot of people who feel America isn't what it was, to them. It was the opportunity for growth, wealth and community. All that still exists on one side of the chasm that separates the haves from the have-nots. And there are a lot of people to whom, yes, America never fulfilled its promise at all

Who?

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

America has the wealth and power to be what it professes to be, for all its citizens. And America will never be what it professes to be, until it is such for all its citizens.

Setting that theme is just a first step. There's a walk to be walked, which the Kerry camp acknowledges. The Bushistas just want to pretend we've arrived.