Watch, Read, Listen

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.”