Kerry's Stalinist Slogan
Posted on 07/26/2004 1:21:36 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Last month, Chatterbox urged John Kerry to drop the campaign slogan, "Let America be America again." Instead, Kerry has wrapped his arms more tightly around the slogan's regrettable source. ...
He has written (or allowed to be written under his name) the preface to a thin volume titled Let America Be America Again, which includes that poem along with eight other (much better) Hughes poems. ...
Kerry's preface makes it much harder for him to claim that he is ignorant of the circumstances under which Hughes wrote this poem. He notes that it came out of the Great Depression, which brought greater misery to blacks than to whites. He doesn't note that the hardships of the Great Depression drove Hughes and various other writers and artists (even, momentarily, Ronald Reagan!) to belief in Soviet-style communism. Here's Kerry's sanitizing literary analysis:
It was in that climate that Langston Hughes, Black America's unofficial poet laureate, wrote his powerful poetic lament, "Let America Be America Again." While it is the litany of the great promise of opportunity that has drawn so many of the world's disaffected to our shores, the poem is also a call to make that promise real for all Americans—especially for the descendants of slaves.Not unmindful of the duality of meanings, I was drawn to incorporate the words of the poem in my 2004 presidential campaign, because it reminds us that America is a nation always in the process of becoming, always striving to build "a more perfect union." We must not forget that African Americans and women were written out of the Constitution before they were written in.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
from "Let America Be America Again,
Langston Hughes
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!
Must have missed that in history class.
I think he means at most "thousands," even for the entire history of the labor movement, and of course there was plenyt of fault on both sides there.
"We must not forget that African Americans and women were written out of the Constitution before they were written in."
He conveniently leaves out a few points.
1) African Americans were specifically written in, though as 3/5 of a person.
Then, Lincoln, a Republican, freed the slaves. The "Radical Republican" reconstructionists ushered in the right to vote. Resistance was from Democrats in the south.
Lesser known...
The Republicans also finally brought about Womens Suffrage when they finally took back congress from the Democrats, who had stalled legislation for decades. The Republican party supported womens suffrage since the early 1870's. The 19th Amendment was introduced in 1878. Democrats killed it 4 times in the Senate. Republicans took back the senate in 1919 and passed it nearly immediately.
When the Amendment was submitted to the states, 26 of the 36 states that ratified it had Republican legislatures. Of the nine states that voted against ratification, eight were Democratic. Twelve states, all Republican, had given women full suffrage before the federal amendment was ratified.
See http://www.nfrw.org/republicans/women/1.htm for more info
Blacks were not free back then. The major reason the civil rights struggle won was fear the the commies would take over the issue and use it as a cold war weapon against America (as was being done). It is a credit to Black Americans and their goodness that they took that crap and turned the other cheek as a people and did not resort to large scale guerilla warfare as would have been done say in South America.
The other point was that the 3/5ths rule was written to reduce the political power of the slave owners.
Now now - it was a compromise - it increased the power of the slave state's too (by adding some numbers to their role call).
"It's more of an op ed piece than a documentary" Michael Goebbels Moore.
They weren't considered real Americans, just 3/5 Americans when it came to apportioning Representatives in Congress.
Of course it was a political deal because the anti-slavery folks knew they would never be able to defeat the Pro-slavery folks politically if they got to count slaves for apportionment. It's really ludicrous to count slaves for that reason when they can't take part in any other part of society's freedoms. Of course all anyone knows about history is that blacks were considered 3/5 human.
This is news to me. Of course, my family was so poor to begin with that we never even knew there was a depression going on.
Of course, unlike Mr. Hughes, we weren't congenital crybabies and whiners either. My people were poor peasants from southeast Europe. It always looked like America to us. It still does.
don't be so hard on the man - poor whites were not subject to mob lynchings in America - si I can see why he is pissed - the problem is he chose communisim as a solution - which is not a solutoon. Thank god the vast majority of blacks chose Christianity to fight their fight.
word has it that Saddam is writing poetry now...
Maybe he's freelancing for Kerry
Feb 26, larry king interview.
Secondly, I don't believe that, in the end, you advance the, sort of, level of your justice and the system of your civility as a nation -- and many other nations in the world, most of the other nations in the world, have adopted that idea, that the state should not engage in killing.
Don't know if they were "poor" but whites were most definitely lynched and in fact more whites were lycnhed in the late 1800s than blacks.
Not for being white.
Blacks were lynched for a variety of accusations, ranging from murder, and rape (often not true)...lynching is an abhorrant practice but both whites and blacks experienced ir.
In other words, the ABOLITIONISTS themselves proposed and supported the "3/5" clause.
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