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Unfreedom

Central to the dream of America is the ideal of freedom, which the speaker punctures with numerous examples of unfreedom. Indeed, examples and invocations of unfreedom ring throughout the poem, starting with the parenthetical lines of critique the speaker inserts among the opening stanzas (lines 5, 10, and 15–16, respectively):

     (America never was America to me.)

     (It never was America to me.)

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

In addition to these parenthetical statements, the speaker poses a series of rhetorical questions that, taken together, make a similar critique of the ideal of American freedom: “The free? / Who said the free? Not me?” (lines 51–52). For the first two-thirds of the poem, the speaker largely makes indirect statements about the profound unfreedom of America. Even when stated in pointed language, the speaker’s use of parentheses and rhetorical questions makes these critiques seem less direct. By contrast, the speaker advances a very direct and cogent thesis at the beginning of the poem’s third section (lines 62–65):

     O, let America be America again—
     The land that never has been yet—
     And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

Here, the speaker makes the straightforward claim that America has not yet fulfilled its promise as “the land where every man is free.” It is, in other words, a country where unfreedom continues to reign.

Dreams

The word dream appears thirteen times throughout “Let America Be America Again.” This is almost as many times as the most central keyword, America, which appears fifteen times. The frequent use of both words creates a powerful link between them, such that the very concept of America is framed as a dream of sorts. The speaker introduces the idea of America as a dream in the opening stanza, where they declare, “Let [America] be the dream it used to be” (line 2). They push this declaration further in the following stanza: “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed” (line 6). The threefold repetition of dream here makes it plain that America is, more than anything, an ideal that exists in the imagination. However, because America exists primarily as a dream, it has not yet manifested as a true reality. Indeed, the vast majority of Americans remain “hungry yet today despite the dream” (line 35). In the spirit of transforming dream into reality, the speaker attempts to awaken in the reader an ethos of collective action. Only through such action will “We, the people” be able to “bring back our mighty dream again” (lines 82 and 69, respectively).

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