Let America Be America Again

Hughes’s references to the dream run like a leitmotif (a recurring idea) through the poem. It is announced in Line 2, about America: “Let it be the dream it used to be.” This is echoed in Line 6: “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.” Many of the dreamers were immigrants who “dreamt our basic dream” (Line 39) while still in the Old World and were inspired to come to America, the new land that was being built (and dreamed). The emphasis of the dream is the hope for freedom and prosperity; it is a “mighty dream” (Line 69) that lives on in the nation’s psyche and must be revived.

Although Hughes does not actually put the two words directly together, he is referring to the American dream. This is a term that only came into common usage in 1931, after it appeared in the work of an American historian named James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America. However, the American dream can really be traced back to the nation’s founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, in which humankind’s “unalienable rights” are declared to be “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the dream of America as a land of freedom and opportunity in which anyone who works hard can prosper and gain upward social mobility. The American dream is sometimes contrasted with a country such as Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, with its rigid class structure, in which most people were restricted to the social and economic class into which they were born.