Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement born in the economic slump and unemployment that followed WWI. The economic downturn increased tensions between Black and White people, encouraged by the ruling class who sought to divide the working class. Following the war, a series of racist riots broke out across America, where hundreds of Black people were lynched and Black communities were burned to the ground. In this environment many considered the American working class to be eternally reactionary and wrote off the prospect of any unity between the workers.
But for Claude McKay, an immigrant from Jamaica who came from a peasant background, the barbarism happening around him was not everlasting, but rather a reflection of a dying social system primed for revolutionary change. McKay (as well as others in the Harlem Renaissance) was greatly impacted by the Russian revolution and the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky. McKay became an organized communist and spoke at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International about racial issues in the United States. He exchanged letters with Trotsky about organizing the Black masses of America and advocated for unity between all workers. His poetic work stands as a steadfast advocate for the American working class, confident in its capacity for change.
McKay’s poem America, published in Liberator, the literary magazine of the Communist Party in the U.S.A., paints a picture of the strength and resistance that exists in American society, despite the hate that so many within that society are subject to. He sees resistance growing from within America herself. A power which is capable of toppling the American empire and recognizing the greatness of the American people.
The poem makes reference to Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, a poem about the hubris of Pharaoh Ramses II, who believed his power and domination over Egypt was everlasting, but whose kingdom crumbled into sand. McKay imagines a similar fate for the American empire if capitalist barbarism is allowed to continue. He is confident that the domination of the American ruling class is temporary and that America belongs not to the capitalists, but to the people who create all wealth in society: The working class.
America (1919)
By Claude McKay
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
