Kerry pens a preface for Hughes anthology

The Hill ^ | 7/6/04 | Albert Eisele and Jeff Dufour

[Nasty McPhilthy]

Even though Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has been criticized for a dearth of minorities among the top advisers to his presidential campaign, he can point to the fact that his campaign slogan was inspired by the late African-American poet and writer Langston Hughes.

In fact, Kerry wrote the preface to a new collection of Hughes’s poems that will be published by Vintage this month, just in time for the Democratic National Convention. The paperback edition will feature nine Hughes poems “about freedom, brotherhood and the American dream.”

In May, Kerry invoked the first two lines of Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” as his campaign theme: “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be.”

In his preface, Kerry writes that he was inspired by Hughes’s words. “I was drawn to incorporate the words of the poem in my 2004 presidential campaign because it reminds us that America is nation always in the process of becoming, always striving to build ‘a more perfect union.’”

Kerry has taken some heat from some observers on both the left and right for his choice. “Let America Be America” was part of Hughes’s “A New Song,” a pamphlet of often radical poems published by the socialist International Workers Order.

The ironic, critical poem provides a harsh indictment of the American dream.

Hughes concludes: “America never was America to me.”

[Nasty McPhilthy]

That Hughes was, with the exception of Richard Wright, the black writer most identified with the Communist Left during the 1930s is undeniable. Hughes's frequent publication of "revolutionary" poetry in the journals and press of the CPUSA, his activity in Communist-initiated campaigns such as the drive to free the Scottsboro defendants and on behalf of the Spanish Republic, his willingness to lend his name to Communist-led or Communist-influenced organizations (e.g., the John Reed Clubs, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, the National Negro Congress, the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, the League of American Writers), and his public support of the Soviet Union (including his signing of a statement in 1938 supporting the purges of the Old Bolsheviks and others by Stalin) all marked him as an open member of the Communist Left--whether or not he formally joined the CPUSA. As noted in chapter I, Hughes's Left sympathies antedated the Great Depression. But it is unquestionably true that Hughes's participation in the Left increased astronomically during the 1930s and had a marked impact on the form and content (to use a favorite phrase of Left cultural critics of that time) of Hughes's poetry.

[Toespi]

Kerry's campaign slogan is a "NEW AMERICA." We should start asking just what this means.

[OpusatFR]

You mean Kerry's "NEW AMERIKA?"

[AmericanChef]

Deserving of a double-dry heave; when I hear Kerry talking in soft, girlie terms about his love of America, it makes me want to punch him in the nose - not that I would, for the record.

If we "take America back", everybody'd own a musket, we'd be growing and killing our own food, property rights would be respected, and there'd be no taxes for socialite politicians who don't know what America was or is. Communists would be criminals deserving of hanging from a right high place, instead of a politically-corrected minority group.

[Nasty McPhilthy]

We need to burn Kerry a new one with this.

[isthisnickcool]

In fact, Kerry wrote the preface to a new collection of Hughes’s poems that will be published by Vintage this month

He has time to do this but in 30 years he has never writen one piece of legislation. And, in the last 2 years Kerry and the Breck Girl have been mostly AOL from their jobs in the US Senate.

Kerry and Edwards are the rich elite. Smarmy, self-centered, seld-absorbed egotistical punks who got rich doing very little.

[Bahbah]

It's no secret what Hughes was or where his sympathies lay, so what is the message Kerry is trying to send? Is he getting out the word to the Communists and their sympathizers that he is one of them?

[DustyMoment]

The ironic, critical poem provides a harsh indictment of the American dream.

Hughes concludes: “America never was America to me.”

There's no irony, there. America never was America to Kerry, either. It's never been a communist tyranny with a ruling elite.