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“America Will Be!”
Posted on Tue., June 30, 2026 by and
The Huntington’s new exhibition balances difficult histories with the powerful ideals of the United States.
In October 1935, Langston Hughes penned “Let America Be America Again” while on a train ride from New York to visit his ailing mother in Oberlin, Ohio—a dark moment for him personally as well as for the nation, which was in the midst of the Great Depression. Observing the shifting terrain through the window, Hughes soaked in the beauty and the bleakness of the landscape. Using two “voices” in his poem—one reflecting the ideals of the nation and another responding through the perspective of the downtrodden—Hughes proclaims, “Let it be the dream it used to be,” but then counters with “(America never was America to me).” His words are filled with urgency and disillusionment as he speaks for the injustices experienced not only by African Americans but also by the poor, Native Americans, and immigrants.
As the curators of the special exhibition "This Land Is …," we consistently encountered a tension akin to the one that crystallizes in Hughes’s poem. The project explores the expansive topic of land across time and across The Huntington's collections, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We found that the same tract of land could represent opportunity and dispossession, ownership and exclusion, nourishment and loss. The documents, artworks, and artifacts featured in the exhibition represent one side or the other of these dichotomies, or both at once, revealing that the territory of the United States has nearly always been both common and contested ground.
Two pieces in the show that embody this ambivalence—as well as California’s place in the national narrative—are a 1935 typescript of Hughes’s poem, which he mailed to two friends living in a bohemian estate near Los Gatos; and an 1860 lithograph of giant sequoias, featuring a millennium-old tree sawed down with tourists exploring its stump. Both artifacts, along with dozens of other materials in the exhibition, offer glimmers of possibility amid what Hughes calls “rack and ruin.”
The Mammoth Tree Grove, Calaveras County, California, 1860 Lithograph, 20 1/4 × 26 in Jay T. Last Collection of Views Prints and Ephemera. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
The lithograph, The Mammoth Tree Grove, presents a grove of giant sequoias in vivid colors—a beautiful but disturbed landscape in Calaveras County, California. One giant sequoia has been cut down, and another is shorn of its bark and encased in scaffolding. On July 4, 1853, a group of revelers celebrated Independence Day with a band and 32 dancers atop the stump of the central 1,200-year-old giant sequoia, known as the Discovery Tree or Mammoth Tree. A group of five men had worked for 20 days, drilling holes and using wedges and saws to cut through the 30-foot-wide trunk. Entrepreneurs shipped a slice of the fallen tree to display in San Francisco and New York; others stripped the neighboring tree, called the Mother of the Forest, and sent its bark to London, where it attracted crowds at the Crystal Palace.
Some Americans, including John Muir, expressed horror that “vandals” would destroy “nature’s forest masterpiece.” The naturalist’s great affection for the majesty of these trees and their persistence through the centuries inspired his conservation efforts. In 1864—less than a year after Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address and reclaimed the Declaration’s proposition that all men are created equal—the president signed the Yosemite Valley Grant Act. This law protected Yosemite’s iconic valley and another sequoia grove, the Mariposa, for “public use, resort, and recreation.” This act became a precedent for the first national park, Yellowstone, established in 1872. Yosemite itself became a national park in 1890, and the Calaveras Big Trees from the lithograph are preserved in a state park, where the Mother of the Forest still stands as a “snag”—a standing but dead tree. From the destruction of ancient trees for spectacle a new form of public land, treasured by millions, was born.
Reflecting on these “great green States” over six decades later, Langston Hughes mailed the above copy of “Let America Be America Again” from Cleveland, Ohio, on November 16, 1935, inscribing it “to those two grand Americans,” the social reformers Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Sara Bard Field. He later published part of it in the July 1936 issue of Esquire magazine, but only the first 50 lines. It was not until 1938 that the full poem was published in A New Song, among other writings about the struggles of the working class. Like an alternative national anthem, the poem was set to music and sung from stages starting in 1941. The poem critiques the American dream and ideals of liberty and equality that run counter to Hughes’s own lived experience. He writes bitterly:
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.
Many leaders and communities have since turned to the strength and prescience expressed in “Let America Be America Again” to resist oppression. In April 1967, right before Hughes’s death, Martin Luther King Jr. quoted this poem in a controversial speech at Riverside Church in New York City, in which he first publicly opposed the Vietnam War. In 1992, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was former classmates with Hughes at Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania, read it to the American Bar Association. Lines from the poem have been used for political campaign slogans, and it was evoked during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Hughes ends the poem with a new promise that “America will be!” underlining the word “will” in the manuscript to emphasize his belief in a better future. For Hughes, it was not too late for “We, the people” to redeem the land. Resonating as much in the twenty-first century as it did in the 1930s, its message of fracture intermingled with hope endures.
C. F. Martin & Co., Model OOO-18 guitar owned and inscribed by Woody Guthrie, spruce, mahogany, celluloid, ebony, mother of pearl, 1936. Photo by Nathaniel Willson, courtesy of the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle.
Visitors will doubtless find their own connections among the exhibition’s 175 objects, often juxtaposed in unconventional ways—like the Mammoth Grove and Hughes poem here. Our approach seeks to provoke and inspire new ways of thinking about the United States on this important anniversary, from the vantage of Southern California.
In one section, documents and imagery about the Revolutionary Era present counterpoints to an array of notebooks, lyrics, and drawings from the Woody Guthrie Archives. A unique, annotated copy of the Declaration of Independence sits alongside Woody Guthrie’s 1936 Martin guitar from the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle, its backside bearing an etched phrase announcing, “This machine kills fascists,” which Guthrie would inscribe on several of his guitars.
Elsewhere, the exhibition portrays the many-layered American story through materials related to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, such as a map made after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo highlighting “disputed territory.” Walt Whitman’s manuscript revisions to Leaves of Grass join tiny artworks on fruit seeds enclosed in a letter to a Civil War soldier. Documents and publications about American imperialism sit near panoramic twenty-first-century artworks by muralist Noni Olabisi and photographer Cara Romero.
The exhibition’s title echoes Woody Guthrie’s famous anthem, “This Land Is Your Land,” written five years after Hughes’s poem. We intentionally used the ellipsis in “This Land Is …” to signal the always-fluctuating meaning of American land. Throughout, we have attempted to follow the balance that Hughes perfected, between clear-eyed views of an often-tragic history and poignant moments and a hope that “America will be.”
Portions of this text are adapted from the companion volume This Land Is… : Field Notes on American Ground. The Huntington exhibition ”This Land Is …“ runs through January 11, 2027.
Josh Garrett-Davis is the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History at The Huntington.
Linde B. Lehtinen is the Philip D. Nathanson Senior Curator of Photography at The Huntington.