Let America Be America Again

Hughes was one of the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of creativity in literature, art, and music that took place in Harlem, a New York City neighborhood, in the 1920s. By the mid-1930s, however, the Harlem Renaissance was in sharp decline, as the Great Depression took its toll. Harlem was afflicted by impoverishment, unemployment, racism, and uncertainty about the future. Indeed, the United States in the early to mid-1930s was hardly a place where a cultural renaissance, or the American dream, could flourish anywhere. It was a difficult time, to use Hughes’s terms, for America to be America.

The Great Depression began with the stock market crash of October 1929. Within three months, the market had lost 40% of its value. As the Depression took hold over the following months and years, unemployment reached 25%. Thousands of banks failed. Wages paid to workers declined 40% between 1929-1932. An estimated two million men, jobless and mostly penniless, took to wandering around the country, so great was their desperation and despair.

Amidst much pressure for change, Franklin D. Roosevelt became US president in 1933. He enacted the New Deal, creating new federal programs, agencies, and laws designed to help the poor and the unemployed, repair the nation’s economy, and reform the financial system. These measures, although soundly conceived, took a while to take effect, and in the poem “Ballad of Roosevelt” (1934), Hughes caught the mood of the millions of people who were still struggling. The poem’s speaker is a child who announces that in their home, “The pot was empty, / The cupboard was bare” (Lines 1-2). He asks his father what is happening, and the father, who cannot get a job and is hungry, replies:

I’m waitin’ on Roosevelt, son,

Roosevelt, Roosevelt,

Waitin’ on Roosevelt, son (Lines 5-7).

The refrain of waiting on Roosevelt, with variations, occurs in all eight stanzas of the poem.

During this immensely difficult period, there was much industrial strife. In 1934 alone, there were around 2,000 strikes involving a million and a half workers, many of whom were taking advantage of New Deal legislation that gave them the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Many employers responded with intimidation and violence against the workers. One of the most serious strikes took place on the West Coast in 1934, when over 30,000 longshoremen in all the West Coast ports walked out. When the shipping companies tried to bring in non-union labor, there were months of clashes between picketing strikers and police. Five workers were killed. In San Francisco in July, there was a four-day general strike of all workers in support of the dockers.

While all this was going on, Hughes was in Carmel, only a little over a hundred miles south of San Francisco. The labor unrest had led to fears of communist subversion and infiltration, and Carmel was in turmoil over it. Hughes, as a known communist sympathizer as well as a Black man, was informed that he would likely become the target of vigilante action. In order to preserve his safety, in July he left Carmel for San Francisco.

The longshoreman strike ended at the end of July, but the unrest may have left a strong impression on Hughes and perhaps found its way into “Let America Be America Again” in the line “The millions shot down when we strike?” (Line 54). This is one of the ironic answers he gives to the question he posed a few lines earlier, “Who said the free?” (Line 52), about America. He was exaggerating, of course, but the hyperbole hints at the shock he must have felt at the industrial conflict in California that had happened just 15-18 months previously.