Langston Hughes, Nationalism & the Internationalist Horizon: Viewing America at 250

Juan J. Rodríguez Barrera

Langston Hughes (c. 1925) by Winold Reiss, on display in the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC BU-SA4.0

THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY of the United States will be marked by grand festivities nationwide, especially in Washington, D.C. Speeches will be made. Fireworks will burst. Marching bands will blare down Constitution Avenue.

Yet coming amid a new, deeply unpopular war with Iran, reactionary assaults on democratic institutions, and declining living standards for U.S. workers, all this pageantry will no doubt strike many Americans as profoundly tone deaf.

Many others, of course, will welcome the celebrations, reassured in the belief that the nation remains fundamentally good despite its flaws. Among such people, nationalist sentiment will perform its customary ideological role, obscuring class antagonisms and postponing critical reflection on the centuries-old contradiction between America as ideal and America as lived reality.

The nation’s anniversary thus offers a fitting occasion to pause and examine the workings and limits of U.S. nationalism. Langston Hughes (1901-1967) is a revealing figure in this regard, for throughout his literary career he engaged certain forms of Americanism while also emerging as a trenchant critic of the country’s socioeconomic order and its failure to live up to its professed ideals.

Celebrated as a poet yet also accomplished in fiction, drama, translation and other genres, Hughes may well be — as Robin D. G. Kelley puts it — “the best-known American poet after Robert Frost or Walt Whitman.”(1) Although a lifelong class-conscious antiracist, he was particularly drawn to leftist radicalism during the 1930s, when he gravitated ideologically toward the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) without ever formally joining it.

Hughes avidly endorsed the Party’s emphases on international proletarian solidarity and militant antiracism, both central features of the organization’s line and practice during the so-called Third Period (1928-1935).(2) Such endorsement was readily apparent in his pro-Communist poetry, which the late English professor Robert Shulman aptly described as an admixture of “the vernacular language and forms of the African American oral tradition” and “the language and commitments of the radical left.”(3)

Hughes’ “red poetry” made him the premier revolutionary poet of the Great Depression era. To be sure, because his politics were strongly influenced by the CPUSA, the pro-Soviet Communism he championed at times encouraged him to advance an idealized view of the U.S.S.R.

Yet this political orientation was also the dominant form of Communism in the United States, attracting numerous Black writers, artists, and intellectuals — even as others embraced alternative currents of radical thought, including independent communism, Trotskyism, and other heterodox traditions.

Against this political backdrop, I turn to one of Hughes’s best-known red poems, “Let America Be America Again” (1936), to reflect on his conception of the nation’s past, present, and possible future.

I maintain that this poem offers a lens through which to grasp not only Hughes’s critical engagement with America’s founding and the nationalist politics of his day, but also the enduring necessity of thinking about working-class liberation in the U.S. in broadly internationalist terms.(4)

Hughes’s radical poetry ultimately matters because it represents a sustained effort to probe the aspirations, contradictions, and challenges of proletarian struggle. The persistence in the present of many of the social ills he denounced further underscores the value of returning to this work, not just as a matter of literary homage, but as a way of assessing the achievements and limits of earlier working-class movements.

The America That Never Was

First published in Esquire — a magazine that, under leftist editor and cofounder Arnold Gingrich, featured writers like Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald — “Let America Be America Again” highlights the enduring tension between the nation’s cherished ideals and the realities of economic exploitation and racial oppression.(5)

The poem places itself in conversation with Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence — a text that, despite its ringing language of liberty and equality, represses the paradoxical reality of Black bondage in the colonies.

It is well known that the final draft of this document omits a lengthy passage in which the Founding Father — himself a wealthy slaveowner — condemns slavery as a violation of humanity’s “most sacred rights of life and liberty.” For all his seeming disgust with the “execrable commerce” of the slave trade, however, Jefferson cannot bring himself to acknowledge his own complicity in it. He instead blames King George III for forcing slavery upon the colonies and for inciting the slaves to “rise in arms.”(6)

Congress revised the Declaration to placate slaveholding Southerners — the cause of liberty, after all, demanded national unity. In this way, the sectional compromise expunged any mention of Africans and their descendants from America’s principal founding document. The deletion dramatically illustrates Toni Morrison’s contention that for “excellent reasons of state … the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony” in the early United States.(7)

“Let America Be America Again” interrogates this “American coherence” by bringing out of the shadows the historically marginalized communities whom the Declaration effaces. The poem features multiple speakers — most prominently an ultra-patriotic white member of the ruling class, a Black worker, an American Communist, a poor white, and a Native American.

In the poem’s first movement, the patriotic white capitalist rhapsodizes about liberty and equality, evoking the idealism of Jeffersonian Republicanism:

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.(8)

The speaker, however, is interrupted by dissenting voices in a series of parenthetical intrusions. “(There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free’),” one voice interjects, disrupting the white capitalist’s jingoistic élan.

In the transition to the poem’s second movement, the intrusions prompt the American Communist to ask, “Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?” — to which the voices respond:

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.

Hughes queries the faux universalism of the Declaration’s “We” (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) — a “We” that unmistakably signified propertied white men — by introducing a speaking “I” that, in classic Whitmanian mode, contains multitudes.

Each constituency proceeds to explain how it has helped to build America through hard labor and sacrifice: “I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. / I am the worker sold to the machine. / I am the Negro, servant to you all.”(9)

Through this composite proletarian speaker, Hughes does not dissolve differences among groups; rather, as Bronx Community College English professor Jonathan Scott notes in his outstanding reading of the poem, he allows the many voices to remain in tension with one another, “refusing to integrate [them] into an easy plurality.”(10)

The poem’s third and final movement alludes to the harsh realities of the Great Depression while positing what Hughes described, in a letter to his literary agent Maxim Lieber, as “the dialectic solution” to the vicissitudes and grievances of the U.S. working class.(11)

“Who said the free? Not me?” declares the composite proletarian speaker. “Surely not me? The millions on relief today?” Then, sounding a more defiant note, the speaker concludes:

From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!…
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!(12)

Hughes reengages the discourse of American universalism. Yet this time he merges the dissenting constituencies into a radically transformed “We”: a pluralistic and multicultural voice that redefines the exclusionary “We” of the U.S. Constitution’s opening line, which he astutely invokes.

Moreover, the poem’s reference to the reclamation of “land,” “mines,” “plants,” and “rivers” signals a working-class populism that undermines the specious class-collaborationist message of the patriotic bourgeois speaker who opens the poem. A sprawling lyrical challenge to monolithic constructions of American identity, “Let America Be America Again” confronts the nation’s past in order to imagine a new — and more capacious — nationalist articulation of e pluribus unum.

It is little wonder that the poem has often been read as an affirmation of the perfectibility of the American project.(13)

Nationalism, Then and Now

As much as the poem engages the nation’s past, it also reflects the specific political and cultural conjuncture of the mid-1930s. In 1935, the CPUSA transitioned to its Popular Front strategy (1935-1939/1942-1945), deferring the Third Period call for proletarian revolution and significantly deescalating antiracist activity nationwide.

The fascist menace in Europe and growing reaction at home, the rationale went, required national unity, which the Party believed could be achieved by appealing to a broad segment of the political mainstream.(14) The Communists, of course, had always been antifascists; this time, though, they shifted from combating fascism through anti-capitalist revolt to defending liberal-democratic capitalism as the primary bulwark against it.

The new strategy centrally entailed the promotion of U.S. nationalism, including the celebration of the nation’s founding ideals and democratic traditions. In 1936, for example, the Party famously — some might say infamously — announced: “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism. The Communist Party continues the traditions of 1776, of the birth of our country, [and] of the revolutionary Lincoln, who led the historic struggle that preserved our nation.”(15)

While the slogan “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism,” coined by then-CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder, was quietly withdrawn in 1938 following a message from Moscow that it was ideologically incorrect, nationalist doctrine nevertheless continued to permeate the political culture of U.S. Communism.

In a confounding twist, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were now imagined to share the same ideological space as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. The Party even named some Popular Front-era workers’ schools after them, most notably the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York City and the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago.(16)

In the previously mentioned letter to Lieber, Hughes explicitly described “Let America Be America Again” as a reflection of the CPUSA’s “new line.”(17) Though he did not elaborate, he was likely referring to the poem’s substitution of a U.S. nationalism premised on “the people” — that perennial Popular Front byword — for the sweeping proletarian internationalism that had characterized both Communist politics and his own work earlier in the decade.

It is not difficult to see, however, how the poem’s ironic subversion of America’s founding mythology actually placed it at odds with the CPUSA’s idealization of “the traditions of 1776.” Hughes never commented on this apparent contradiction. Perhaps he was unaware of it; or perhaps, as I am more inclined to think, he conceived of his reimagining of “the people” not as an outright repudiation but as a necessary revision — and thus renewal — of Americanist doctrine.

Either way, this would not have been the first instance in which Hughes subjected Communist policy to idiosyncratic appropriation. As I’ve commented elsewhere, in his red poetry of the early 1930s, Hughes largely avoided the Third Period notion that African Americans constituted a “nation within a nation” requiring self-determination in the U.S. South.

Instead he highlighted another dimension of the Party’s position on the “Negro question” — i.e. its attention to racial particularity as a potential steppingstone toward multiracial working-class unity and, ultimately, proletarian internationalism.(18) Despite his undeniable affinity for the Communist cause, Party policy tended to orient, rather than dictate, Hughes’s thinking on race, class and nation.

But if “Let America Be America Again” provides a lens through which to view Hughes’ engagement with America’s past and the political currents of his time, it also illuminates the enduring seductions and pitfalls of an uncritical U.S. nationalism in the 21st century.

Since its publication, the poem has been periodically dusted off and reintroduced to the public by liberal politicians — typically around election time — as a convenient reminder of the nation’s latent promise. One thinks, for instance, of Democratic U.S. Senator John Kerry’s unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign, during which he frequently quoted Hughes’s poem at rallies.

Tellingly, in an apparent latter-day effort to organize “American coherence” through the erasure of disaffected communities, Kerry made a practice of citing only the stanzas spoken by the patriotic bourgeois speaker, omitting the oppositional asides of the composite proletarian voice.

At the time, political commentator Kathleen Hall Jamieson keenly observed that the poem’s title, which Kerry sought to adopt as his campaign’s mantra, powerfully “suggests [that] someone’s hijacked the country, without being a frontal attack.”(19)

Indeed, Kerry banked on this capacity of the poem’s central refrain to interpellate his audiences’ inner patriot — a patriot who would gladly go to the polls to reclaim the nation from the alleged hijackers of the George W. Bush administration. That Kerry received fifty-nine million votes to Bush’s sixty-two arguably suggests that his campaign’s selectively mobilized nationalism, dependent upon the very exclusions Hughes’s poem exposes, could nonetheless resonate widely.

For their part, conservative politicians have generally abstained from using “Let America Be America Again” in their campaigns; however, some have employed slogans that strongly echo its key refrain.

In 2011, for example, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, then a Republican presidential candidate, briefly adopted the phrase “Fighting to Make America America Again” as part of his campaign messaging. When informed that the slogan bore a striking resemblance to the title of a poem by the leftist Hughes, Santorum — known for his strong anti-union and anti-gay stances — quickly disavowed the phrase.(20)

Closer to the present, Donald Trump’s notorious slogan “Make America Great Again” has likewise echoed Hughes’s line — albeit unwittingly and from an ideological standpoint that would certainly have made the poet’s stomach turn.

Santorum’s and Trump’s rallying cries — and, for that matter, the title of Hughes’ poem — all draw on a shared rhetorical logic of national renewal, even as they have been mobilized toward vastly divergent political ends.

In each case, the term “again” does substantial ideological work, seeking to conjoin an imaginary past with an idealized future. The point here is not that these nationalist formulations are ultimately equivalent in political content or intent, but that nationalism as such proves exceptionally open to redeployment across political projects: Who has “hijacked” the country, and to what end?

Even Hughes’ ambivalent nationalism did not evade appropriation within a liberal electoral framework. The very plasticity of nationalist discourse thus casts doubt on whether a politics organized around such a signifier can ever be insulated from cooptation by pro-capitalist interests along the political spectrum.

The Internationalist Horizon

In this sense, “Let America Be America Again” brings into focus not only the exclusions embedded in America’s origin story and the poet’s democratic aspirations, but also the need for alternative symbols and concepts through which to articulate working-class struggle and envision collective liberation.

Luckily, Hughes’ broader body of poetry gestures toward ways of navigating — and more crucially, moving beyond — the pitfalls of nationalist thinking. His answer, which I have already alluded to in this piece, is proletarian internationalism: at once remarkably simple in principle and immensely difficult to realize amid a historical conjuncture defined — much like Hughes’s own — by intensifying nationalism and anti-working-class reaction worldwide.

While this political perspective was most pronounced in Hughes’s poetry during the 1930s — the zenith of his ideological investment in the Communist Left — he nevertheless remained a race- and class-conscious internationalist throughout his life.

To assert this is not to deny that he sometimes succumbed to forms of U.S. nationalist dogma more conservative than that animating “Let America Be America Again.”(21) Rather, it is to suggest that he consistently regarded the fate of U.S. workers of all epidermal hues as inextricably bound up with the fate of working people everywhere.

Whether denouncing the super-exploitation of 240,000 South African miners in the 1925 poem “Johannesburg Mines” (“What kind of poem / Would you / Make out of that?”),(22) or linking civil rights protests in the United States to African decolonization movements in the 1961 collection Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hughes’ political poetry often challenges readers to forgo regional and national provincialisms and to embrace interpretive paradigms that encourage totality thinking — that is, the capacity to apprehend local struggles as developments within global racialized capitalism.

Importantly, Hughes’s best internationalist poetry seeks to deepen readers’ political understanding without fetishizing the global or discounting the national dimensions of working-class experience. Consider the 1932 poem “Always the Same,” in which the speaker, a Black worker, acknowledges the specifically national forms of racist capitalist violence operating around the world: from “the docks at Sierra Leone” and “the cotton fields of Alabama” to “the diamond mines of Kimberley” and “the coffee hills of Haiti,” and beyond.

For the speaker, however, profitmaking constitutes the underlying logic — the essence — of these variegated expressions of racialized terror:

Black:
Exploited, beaten and robbed,
Shot and killed.
Blood running into
  Dollars
  Pounds
  Francs
  Pesetas
  Lire
For the wealth of the exploiters—
Blood that never comes back to me again.

Hughes suggests that the proliferation of capitalist social relations not only accounts for the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism on a global scale, but also supplies the material basis for working-class solidarity across national and racial lines.

“Better that my blood makes one with the blood / Of all the struggling workers in the world,” the speaker proclaims, transforming “blood” from a symbol of racial oppression into one of unity and, potentially, insurgency.(23) Then, in the final stanza, the speaker culminates this internationalist vision by explicitly calling upon the multiracial “International Proletariat” to “Unite to raise the blood-red flag that / Never will come down.”(24)

Langston Hughes was a poet, novelist, playwright and translator. In 1942, he was captured by photographer Jack Delano discussing his new play, probably “The Sun Do Move” with the Skyloft Players at the Good Shepherd Community Center in Chicago. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

To be sure, “Always the Same” emerged from a Communist milieu whose direct association with the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin some contemporary readers may view askance at best and with outright hostility at worst. Moreover, Hughes’ call for unity may strike others as too programmatic and dewy-eyed, even for a piece as partisan as this one.

Yet the poem’s central insight is no less relevant today: capitalism globalizes exploitation and, in doing so, generates the objective conditions for its own unraveling — that is, for collaboration among workers of all creeds, races, and countries — even if no one can say with certainty that the proletariat will eventually cohere as a “class for itself.”

In this sense, Hughes clearly echoed Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ insistence that working people “have no country,” while also grounding that proposition in the lived realities of racialized exploitation.(25)

In sum, throughout his career — and certainly at the height of his pro-Communist involvements — Hughes treated proletarian internationalism as an aspirational horizon, one where the true “dialectic solution” to national fragmentation and capitalist domination might be glimpsed and, perhaps, realized in a liberated future.

On the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, it is worth recalling the lessons embedded in the work of Langston Hughes, a poet who sang America with the same democratic verve and urgency as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg.

“Let America Be America Again” offers an instructive example of Hughes’ ambivalent attitude toward the land of his birth, bringing into sharp relief the exclusions at the heart of America’s founding, the persistence of economic exploitation and racial oppression, and the need for workers to remake the nation and redeem its democratic traditions. Ninety years after its original publication, the poem remains a captivating, if still unrealized, vision of social democracy in the United States.

At the same time, a critical reading of “Let America Be America Again” — itself a product of the intense U.S. nationalism that suffused the Communist Party’s Popular Front strategy — exposes the limitations of a political outlook confined within the conceptual boundaries of U.S. nationalism.

Such a reading underscores that the answer to right-wing nationalism is not simply the positing of another, left-wing variant of the same ideological form, however enlightened its aspirations. Hughes’ internationalist poetry teaches us that, whether conservative or liberal, reactionary or progressive, nationalism runs the risk of obscuring the globalization of the capitalist regime and therefore the interconnectedness — indeed the interdependence — between U.S. workers and workers in other parts of the world.

His attention to national experience in this body of work affirms the importance of national struggles — in a U.S. context, of making America “The land that never has been yet,” as the proletarian speaker declares in “Let America Be America Again.”(26) However, his insistence on unity across national and racial lines challenges us to view proletarian internationalism as the broader emancipatory horizon against which the success of such struggles must finally be measured.

What is our ultimate objective? Can gains in one country or region ever be secure for long amid capitalist encirclement? How do we advance national working-class struggles without reifying nationalism and by fostering an internationalist consciousness?

If proletarian internationalism proves so resistant to appropriation by ruling elites, it is precisely because it deprives them of one of their most powerful ideological instruments: nationalism itself. As such, at a moment of intensifying inter-imperialist conflict, nationalist isolationism, and rising xenophobia, workers and activists today ignore internationalism at their own peril.

For those who continue to regard social revolution as the key to human emancipation, the unification of a vast and fragmented global working class is undeniably a daunting task — but no less necessary for that. To adapt a famous line from Bertolt Brecht, proletarian internationalism may well be the simple thing that is hardest to achieve.

Notes

July-August 2026, ATC 243

.