Politics & Power Quote by Archibald MacLeish

MacLeish pulls off a neat rhetorical feint: he concedes the cynic's premise only to flip it into a national creed. The first move - "They are right" - sounds like surrender. Then the trapdoor opens: freedom as "nothing but a dream" becomes not a weakness but the point, because the American Dream is precisely an aspiration that stays just out of reach, useful because it never resolves into a finished product. The line works by treating "dream" as a double agent: a taunt in the mouths of skeptics, a moral engine in the hands of believers.

As a poet steeped in the 20th century's hard lessons, MacLeish isn't peddling naive optimism. He's writing in the shadow of ideologies that promised liberation and delivered coercion, and in a country that sold itself as freedom's home while practicing segregation, labor exploitation, and periodic repression. The subtext is a warning: if you demand proof of emancipation before you act, you'll end up defending the status quo. Dreams are not evidence; they're leverage.

There's also a sly reframing of patriotism here. He doesn't define America by borders, ethnicity, or even prosperity. He defines it by a perpetually unfinished argument - "the freedom of man and mind" - and dares the reader to accept that national identity is a verb, not a noun. In MacLeish's hands, idealism isn't denial; it's a deliberate refusal to let cynicism have the last word.