Let America Be America Again, By Langston Hughes

Close to twelve million immigrants came into the United States between the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. During the 1870s and 1880s, the vast majority of these immigrants arrived in America from Western Europe including Ireland, England, and Germany. Between 1849 and 1882, the United States saw a large number of Chinese immigrants arrive, largely because of the California gold rush. All these people were lured by America’s promise of prosperity, many fleeing the economic hardships of their country. In his poem “Let America be America Again,” Langston Hughes speaks of the American dream that could never be reached by the lower-class and social minorities and speaks on the equality and freedom that every immigrant hoped for but never were able

The first stanza starts the poem off with a proclamation, one that invokes a sense of nostalgia for a better version of America that never truly came to be. The reader is immediately introduced to the fact that the author fails to believe that America has lived up to its full potential as he utilizes the word “again.” Hughes appears to want for America to once again be the kind of nation which is defined by a sense of opportunity and freedom for all peoples and for the country to once again embody the ideal of the American dream itself. Furthermore, line 5 of the poem reads “America was never America,” this voices what many people may feel, that America's ideals of equality, liberty, and freedom don’t seem to hold true. In lines 11-12 the Hughes references the Statue of Liberty, asking for it to be crowned “with no false patriotic wealth” (Hughes 12). The Statue of Liberty was a welcoming site for immigrant people coming into America, therefore, it is a symbol of America, an object that holds hope of what America represents. This goes to show that the speaker wishes for a true patriotic America, which holds no false promises. America does not seem to hold the values of equality and freedom as it used to and as it has promised all

The tone is a resentful and angry one. Hughes essentially says that there is an economic disparity between people as the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. He claims this is because there is unequal opportunity within the country. In lines 15-16 we see an insight into the writer’s real thoughts as the lines read “There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.” This message reiterates what is said in lines 5 and 10, that equality doesn't exist for him. People who came to America in search of better opportunities were given broken promises of a broken America. The central message here is essentially one of ambition and greed. Essentially, money is at the center of what America has become. Hughes observes that owning property and “power gain” is the focus of American values. However though, towards the end of the poem there is a sense of hopefulness as Hughes states “And yet I wear this oath- / America will be!” (Hughes 78-79). This demonstrates a hope that America can potentially live up to its ideals of equality and