John Kerry Let America Be America Again Slogan
Kerry'south Touch on Of The Poet
Past David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Master Political Writer
Speaking before the Rainbow/Push Coalition Conference on Tuesday, Sen. John Kerry recited several lines from the Langston Hughes' verse form, "Let America Be America Again."
"Let information technology be the dream it used to be," the presumed Autonomous presidential nominee said, "for those whose sweat and claret, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain must bring dorsum our mighty dream once more."
In his own words, Kerry added: "In 2004, we have to bring dorsum our mighty dream over again. We have to make America all that it can go."
Kerry seems to have found his slogan. He first quoted Hughes last month in Topeka, Kansas, on the 50th ceremony of the U.Southward. Supreme Court's historic Brown 5. Board of Education ruling. Since then, he'southward used the lines in stump spoken language later stump oral communication, usually sticking to the poem's championship, though at times adding the words, "Allow it be the dream information technology used to be."
For the African American poet Hughes, the dream of America never was more than that, a dream. Written in 1938, "Allow America Be America Once more" is one of Hughes most famous and almost embittered poems.
"It was an canticle that Hughes wrote for the Depression, when he felt very much abused for various reasons, not least of which was the economical poverty plaguing the country, merely as well racism," explained Arnold Rampersad, author of the definitive 2-book biography, "The Life of Langston Hughes."
"I think it was out of that sense of personal and national suffering that he wrote that verse form," said Rampersad, the Cognizant Dean for the Humanities at Stanford University. "It'southward not for me say whether it's appropriate today."
Kerry, apparently, thinks information technology is appropriate. And to unseat an incumbent president, he volition accept to convince enough voters that America today is not the America they want.
In that location is no poll statistic political campaigns watch more than closely than whether or not the nation is going in the right direction. And a clear majority of voters continue to say the country has gone seriously off track.
In the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, fully 57 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the incorrect management. President Bush's campaign knows that number must diminish for Mr. Bush-league to earn 4 more years in office.
But Kerry also cannot announced to be a pessimist. And so he will likely refrain from the more bitter lines of Hughes' poem, which limited the poet's resentment at an American dream he saw as more far more platonic than attainable. In Hughes' America, of form, it was specially unattainable for African Americans.
"In the darkest days of the Civil Rights Motility, one would have seen the connexion [between Hughes' words and the reality of American life] very clearly," Rampersad said. "Whether it is appropriate right now depends on i view of what is going on around the earth. Information technology would depend on one's sense of whether the American regime is serving the American people to the appropriate extent at this time."
The verse form itself reads as a moral call to artillery, a gut bank check for Americans. Information technology is both a condemnation of the state and an affirmation of ideals for which information technology stands.
Hughes felt disenfranchised from his country, a theme that runs through his poetry. Considered one of the greatest American poets, Hughes achieved fame at the height of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance for his compelling writing on black America, both its pain and its perseverance.
In the poem, he declares himself the "poor white," "the Negro," the "carmine human being driven from the land" and "the immigrant clutching" to hope. Virtually the poem's stop, Hughes writes bitterly, "America never was America to me." But he closes on an optimistic note: "And still I swear this oath – America will be!"
For Rampersad, the themes are timeless. "America was founded on certain ideals – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, there's a constitution and so on," he said. "The question always is: 'Is the American regime, and to some extent the American people who are the haves, are they living up to the ethics?'"
Whether Kerry can benefit in this campaign from a theme that describes a country lost unto itself depends on the state of the nation come up October. Nevertheless for Americans to come to a conclusion, it may accept more to do with events in Iraq than the subtle themes of Kerry'southward campaign.
"Let America Exist America Once more." Well, Hughes' point is that it never was. It'southward up to presidential candidates to convince voters that they are the best person to bring the nation closer to that ideal.
"The respond always will be," says Rampersad, that those in power "alive upward to those ideals merely partially."
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Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kerrys-touch-of-the-poet/
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