Think Progress:

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) announced that he will begin fundraising for a presidential run using the campaign slogan “Fighting to make America America again.” This eloquent turn of phrase, however, was not invented by Santorum. It is borrowed from the title of a pro-union, pro-racial justice, and pro-immigrant poem written by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes—“Let America Be America Again.”

Langston Hughes was also a homo. And Hughes, unlike an idiot social conservative I could name/rename, wasn't longing for a lost America. Hughes wasn't trafficking in cheap and/or racist nostalgia for some supposed golden age. He was angry about America's broken promises, by America's failure to live up to its own land-of-the-free hype:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME.



At the end of 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston—after four days of vicious anti-gay rhetoric—the band played "The Best of Times is Now" as George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle waved at a sea of GOP delegates, delegates who were waving "Family Values Forever, Gay Rights Never" signs back at them. "The Best of Times Is Now" is a rousing number from La Cage au Folles, a hit Broadway musical about... a gay family. You can watch it here—then try to picture it coming after Pat Buchanan delivered a speech condemning gay people, amongst other people, and calling for a culture war. (Buchanan's speech "probably sounded better in the original German," said Molly Ivans.) Santorum's appropriation of Hughes' poem kinda reminds me the 1992 GOP convention.

Anyway, full text of Hughes' poem after the jump.

O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—