Role of Money and Power in American Poetry

For the first module in my Topics in American Literature course, I focused on applying lessons learned from Richard Gray's A History of American Literature to writings from Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglass, and Anne Bradstreet.

A brief reading of Early European-American literature suggests that the quest for power, particularly through material gain, has long plagued America. From the first Europeans’ search for the Garden of Eden and the Seven Cities to John Smith’s “fellow colonizers who were expecting the easy pickings promised by a city of gold” to those who would enslave others for material gain, the quest for money as a means of power permeates American literature. The Puritans claimed to “live only for…the “spirit” but in actuality “material gain, the accumulation of power and property” was their goal. Even way back when, America kept its eye focused on money.

To that end, the lack of material wealth as indicative of powerlessness or perhaps the cause of powerlessness is clearly seen in Langston Hughes’ poem “Let American Be America Again”. A plea for equality for all, as idealized in the myth of America, this poem directly identifies those Americans who are without power: the poor whites, those of color, immigrants, the young, the farmers, and “workers sold to the machine”. The common thread holding these people together is their lack of monetary wealth and hence their position in society as subordinate and powerless. 

Frederick Douglass, in “An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage”, highlights the role of money in issues of power: “The South fought for perfect and permanent control over the Southern laborer. It was a war of the rich against the poor. They who waged it had no objection to the government while they could use it as a means of confirming their power over the laborer”.Douglass’s claim that the Civil War was fought in an effort to retain control over workers as a method of maintaining and/or accumulating more wealth and hence more power shows the strange circular nature of money and power. One begets the other in a Ouroborean cycle.

Anne Bradstreet’s poetry reveals a markedly different look at wealth and power. While Hughes and Douglass are lobbying for more power, Bradstreet is almost denying her desire for or right to such power, at least in the form of material wealth. In “Verses upon the Burning of our House”, she writes:

There’s wealth enough [in Heaven]; I need no more.
Farewell, my pelf; farewell, my store.
The world no longer let me love;
My hope and Treasure lies above.

Her gender certainly influences her claims. As a female writer, Bradstreet had to reconcile her skill, her desires/beliefs, and her gender. According to Gray, she did so in part through deference, revealing tensions in her writing between “submission to and rebellion against her lot as a woman in a patriarchal society” (39-40). Not only does Bradstreet’s gender require a disregard for materiality but so does her religion. Hence, in the poem she places her faith in a future Heaven, diminishing her loss of wealth and, at least familial, power. Gray believes that while this poem “may end by seeking the conventional consolation”, the focus of the poem is “devoted to the terrible experience of seeing ‘pleasant things in ashes lie’” indicating a deeper sense of loss than the culminating lines suggest. Her words seem forced, an attempt to say what she should rather than what she would. What is interesting to note here though is that unlike Hughes and Douglas, Bradstreet’s true feelings must remain hidden, or at the least be subtly expressed, a distinct counter to Douglas’s and Hughes’s outspoken, direct, and vehement entreaties.

The continued connection between money and power in American society cannot be denied, and I think a discussion of power derived through monetary gain is incomplete without a bit of a warning. One of the downfalls of this quest for wealth and power is illustrated by Gray when discussing the failure of Bradford’s Pilgrims: “The communitarian spirit of the first generation of immigrants…slowly vanishes. The next generation moves off in search of better land and further prosperity” (30). This leads Bradford to conclude that “material success leads somehow and ineluctably to spiritual failure” (30), but it is also indicative that material success leads to a cutting of communal and familial ties, separation of the individual from society both in the physical and the emotional sense.

I found it so strange to see so many contemporary characteristics and concerns reflected in these works. We've seen the pitfalls of materialism for over 100 years, and yet we make no changes. Us humans are odd ducks.