As it turns out, the progressive website Think Progress saw this slogan and grasped that it came from Langston Hughes's (1902-1967) "Let America Be America Again," a pro-union, pro-immigrant, pro-equality--progressive!--poem he published in 1935, during the era of the Great Depression. Hughes, as I need not tell anyone, was black, and gay, and a committed leftist. He was a cosmpolitan and an internationalist, a strong advocate of black consciousness and of Diasporism. He was the grandson of the abolitionist Charles Langston and a nephew of abolitionist and educator John Mercer Langston. He was even a correspondent for and member of Communist organizations, etc. All of this is searchable on Google, as is the slogan Santorum selected, which was, for those of us with even the slightest memory, already in the political air as Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry had not just sampled, but recited a selection of it in 2004. (How could anyone forget a Presidential candidate being able to quote a poem, especially one by Hughes?)
Nevertheless, Santorum went with the slogan. Until a Think Progress reporter, Lee Fang, asked him about the words and their background. This is how Gawker reported it:
"No I had nothing to do with that," he said. "I didn't know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that."
When he was later asked what it means to him, Santorum replied: "Well, I'm not too sure that's my campaign slogan, I think it's on a web site."
But he also used it in the official press release announcing his exploratory committee earlier this week....
Et cetera. Santorum isn't getting anywhere the White House, the Senate, or the Pennsylvania State House for that matter, but the flap did provoke the following question: can he read? Because if or his minions did even pass a cursory eye over the following poem, it would be evident what Hughes was arguing here. Some poems are admittedly difficult to grasp. I have written a few of those myself. Hughes has as well. But some do not, as Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem "Man Carrying Thing," "resist the intelligence / Almost successfully." Some are quite straightforward and evident even to the dullest of minds. A category that, as his past record would attest, includes Santorum.
Here is Hughes's poem in full, easy to grasp, and quite beautiful and moving, in my humble opinion. It shakes me up a bit every time I read it. More of our politicians need to read it, and recite it to themselves as they cut deals with plutocrats and carve what remains of our government and society up, what remains of our threadbare social safety net, for their friends and patrons.
LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
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
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.
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