How embarrassing for Rick Santorum! It turns out that his official campaign slogan is a line from a poem by Langston Hughes:
On Thursday, the left-wing website ThinkProgress noticed the connection between Santorum’s slogan and Hughes’ poem. They caught up with Santorum at a New Hampshire event Thursday. Reporter Lee Fang asked Santorum about his use of the phrase:
FANG: Today, you unveiled your new campaign slogan, “Fighting to make America America again.” But was it intentional that this line was borrowed from the pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes?
SANTORUM: No, because I had nothing to do with that so …
FANG: Oh, alright thanks. Wait, did you have a clarification there? Was it just a coincidence?
SANTORUM: I didn’t know that. The folks who worked on that slogan for me didn’t inform me that that’s where it came from, if in fact it came from that.
I’m usually skeptical when politicians declare that they “didn’t know” about some embarrassment that comes to light about their careers or their private lives, but in this case I believe Santorum when he says he didn’t know that the line came from a Langston Hughes poem. That line has been bandied about by Republican leaders and right-wingers in general, or close versions of it, pretty much throughout Obama’s entire presidency so far. I had no idea it came from a Langston Hughes poem, either. I’ve read some of Hughes’s poems, and I’ve read a fair amount about his life, but I hadn’t seen this particular poem before.
And I think that line is going to be history in short order. How embarrassing for Santorum! I can only imagine how beet red his face must have become to be informed by a reporter that his presidential campaign had become inadvertently associated with “an African American Communist who advocated for civil rights and social justice,” who wrote homoerotic poems (among other subjects), who stood up for gay rights, and who himself was either gay or bisexual!
One has to feel just a spot of sympathy for the poor guy.
Here is the poem, which Hughes titled “Let America Be America”:
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.”)
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