Let America Be America Again: Symbols

America

America is the central symbol of Hughes’s poem, and it represents a stark duality between ideal and reality. In this regard, America functions as a twofold symbol in the poem. Or, put differently, there are two distinct Americas at stake. The speaker implies as much in the poem’s opening line, “Let America Be America again.” Here, they repeat the word “America” as if to suggest that there are two Americas, and they don’t quite coincide with one another. The speaker compares these two Americas in the poem’s opening sonnet. The quatrains of that sonnet paint a picture of a dream America in which love for fellow humans conquers all and no person stands above another (lines 6–9):

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.

In counterpoint with this idealistic vision, the speaker inserts parenthetical lines that insist on an alternative America—the real America—where freedom and equality have not prevailed. They drive this critique home in the sonnet’s culminating couplet (lines 15–16):

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

The two Americas live in tension with one another throughout the poem. Only in the poem’s final section does the speaker envision a way to unify them into a single nation, and hence “make America again” (line 86).

Land

Land is a key symbol that appears throughout the poem, and which the speaker links to the ideals of freedom and equality. The speaker announces this link early in the poem, when they declare, “O, let my land be a land where Liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath” (lines 11–12). Generally speaking, land represents the source of all life and wealth. Without access to land, people don’t have conditions to maintain a stable livelihood. If they don’t own any land, they can’t farm or eke out a living by processing and selling natural products, like timber. Likewise, if people don’t have any property of their own, they must live according to the whims of landowners, whom the speaker depicts as greedy and cruel. Indeed, landowners are little more than lords “of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!” (line 27). It’s precisely because all the land has been grabbed up by the ruling classes that the speaker advocates collective action to take it back (lines 82–86):

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!

Taking the land back from the wealthy is the radical act that’s necessary to ensure universal freedom and equality. Significantly, such an act would also “redeem / The land” directly.

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