Hughes' America

A heads up: this blog is kind of ALL over the place. no organization at all. sorry.


The poem, "Let America Be America Again", by Langston Hughes, touches on aspects of the American Dream, both the original dream, and what it has evolved into today. He talks about the immigrant who first put everything on the line to come to this new country with endless opportunities. He also talked about what the dream means today, and what he thinks it should mean.

The lines "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," implies that people were disappointed when they reached their destination. they were face with discrimination, bad conditions, disease and hard work. African Americans came to this country, torn from their homes and families, and forced to labor for white masters, later generations, although freed from slavery, were discriminated against, declared unequal, they had to deal with violence and insults. Native Americans were driven from their homelands again and again, they were given unequal opportunities and resources.

He repeats the line "America never was America to me," I think that this means, is he never really felt the effect of the American Dream. He keeps talking about how this country was built on people's dreams, on people's American dreams, but we have lost sight of that. The people living in this country today, aren't the ones who immigrated here, we aren't the ones who risked everything, hanging on to our dreams of a better life for themselves and their families. we don't appreciate and take advantage of what this country, what our freedoms have to offer, because we don't truly understand the hardships that were endured to get us here.
I'm starting to sound really patriotic here, but even if its not an undying love for this country, you have to admit that we've got it pretty good. And I really do believe that that was thanks to the hundreds of people who struggled to come here. They were thinking of future generations, and they did pretty well by me.

"The millions who have nothing for our pay-
Except the dream that's almost dead today"
I know that when I think of the American Dream, I don't think if it in application to myself, I think of it as a thing of the past, of what drew people to this country. If you were to ask me what my American Dream was, I wouldn't be able to answer you. I know that that seems ridiculous, reading The Great Gatsby should have made me think about the American Dream, and its effect on me, but I still don't personally connect to it. does that mean the dream is dead in me? can the dream be dead in me if it was never alive in me?
Or maybe everyone just automatically dreams the American Dream. who doesn't want to be rich and successful? if that's all there is to it, then it seems like sort of a default. so I guess the question is- which dreams qualify to be American dreams?

Some people did manage to garner wealth, like Gatsby, and others in West Egg. but those are a select few,  separate from the masses. I feel like these are the outliers, out of so many people who came here, or worked hard to try to achieve the American Dream, those are the few who succeeded, and they are separate from everyone else. West Egg is filled with new money- people who have acquired their money recently, and yet they are still separate from their former neighbors. what happened to equal? will everyone ever live together, unbias towards each other?

It seems to me, that Hughes thinks that the American dream today is a depraved, skewed version of what it once was. Millions are getting left behind, crushed by the elite few, while the original idea was that no one would be crushing anyone ("Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above" VS "And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak."). People came here and ended up forced to work tirelessly for others just to scrape by.