Let America Be America Again: Analysis of the Speaker

We don’t have any concrete information about the speaker of “Let America Be America Again.” That is, we don’t know anything specific about their age, class, race, or gender identity. It would be tempting to associate the speaker with Hughes himself at the time he wrote the poem, and hence to think of the speaker as a Black male in his thirties. But there’s no direct evidence in the poem itself that necessitates such an interpretation. What we do know is that the speaker is an American and that they identify with the underprivileged majority, for whom the American dream of freedom and equality have failed. The speaker is thus deeply critical of America. Yet they also long for the original dream of America to be realized. In this regard, the speaker exists in a state of tension; their skepticism about American ideals coexists with their earnest desire for those ideals to be realized. Ultimately, the speaker attempts to resolve this tension by invoking the power of the people to come together in solidarity. Facing down the minority ruling class, the collective of underprivileged can, in theory, “make America again” (line 86).

A major distinguishing feature of the speaker is what we might call their polyvocality—that is, their ability to speak in many voices. The speaker is polyvocal in the way already mentioned above—that is, regarding their simultaneous skepticism and earnestness. At times, the speaker actively modulates between these two attitudes as if speaking in different voices. The clearest example of this phenomenon appears in the sonnet that opens the poem. There, the speaker interweaves idealistic visions of America with critical counterpoints in which they insist that America has never felt like America to them. But the speaker is also polyvocal in the way they actively adopt the voices and perspectives of America’s different underprivileged communities. The speaker does this on a couple occasions in the poem’s middle section. For just one example, consider lines 31–35:

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.

By claiming to be “the farmer,” “the worker,” “the Negro,” and indeed all “the people,” the speaker approximates the polyvocality of an entire social collective. It is this collective the speaker hopes to bring together in solidarity so as to redeem America.