“Let America Be America Again” is a poem by Langston Hughes written to show the inconsistency between the “American Dream” and the reality that the immigrants who come to this state face. The author of this poem lived between 1901-1967, which means that he has witnessed the Great Depression, which might have become an inspiration for this work. The speaker contends that the United States has failed to realize its promised goal of liberty and equality for everyone. The economic devastation caused by this catastrophe generated a crisis in American cultural identity because the people had been promised the opportunity to gain enough wealth to rise from the poor to the middle-class ranks. However, the economic crisis made this impossible.
When I first read the novel, I was surprised by the way the author calls for America to become “a dream,” which he does several times throughout the poem. In other words, the speaker suggests that America has lost its path and begs it to return to its previous greatness. Moreover, the author includes all the social classes and ethnicities in his work, which allows the reader to recall that at that time, the Black was still enslaved. In general, the poem prompted me to feel compassion towards the people who were promised “a dream” but instead had to face the harsh reality and unstable economic position. Moreover, it appears that Hughes counteracts the idea that America was a great state where a person could achieve their dream. In reality, the speaker refutes the notion that America was ever the “America” that it has long been depicted as, instead of maintaining that the American Dream was never realized in the past.