The central conceit of McKay's poem involves the personification of America as a woman, an important national tradition at the time McKay was writing. Most people today are familiar with "Uncle Sam," the personification of the United States government as a man with long white hair, a swallow-tailed coat, top hat, and striped pants. Also well-known is the personification "Lady Liberty," embodied by the Statue of Liberty and famously described as "a mighty woman with a torch" and "mother of exiles" in Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus." Yet from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century there was also another female personification meant to represent not just the government but the nation as a whole: Columbia. Common in America until about the 1920s, Columbia represented the nation in the same way that "Britannia" did Britain and "Marianne" did France, and the District of Columbia, Columbia Pictures, and Columbia University all take their names from this famous figure. While the meanings and iconography of Columbia were never entirely fixed, Columbia was typically pictured as a young or middle-aged woman wearing classically-draped clothing (often in red, white, and blue). Columbia appeared prominently in World War I propaganda, and artists often depicted her standing up for immigrants, welcoming foreigners into the country, and serving to defend American liberty as a martial figure.
Although McKay's sonnet never mentions Lady Liberty or Columbia directly, we can see how "America" takes up some of these aspects of America's self-conception. The poem's early invocation of a "youth" being fed by a female figure undoubtedly evokes the idea of a "mother country," but here McKay depicts not a Columbia-like figure welcoming and defending immigrants but a ruthless animal attacking the speaker and "stealing" his life away. This image of a "tiger" in particular replaces Columbia's stars and stripes with the stripes of an "exotic," foreign animal, implying that in her violent oppression of minorities America herself becomes the true "Other." Furthermore, while the personifications of Columbia and Lady Liberty both centered around ideas of freedom and advocating for the innocent, McKay's compares his America to "a king in state" and mentions her "walls," indicating a very different conception. The poem's pointed remark about America's "bigness" and its later allusion to Ozymandias could also have been used to suggest "The New Colossus," but again McKay refuses the link, his speaker prophesying that America's fate will be more like the Colossus of Rhodes, destroyed long ago. Ultimately, these and other references only emphasize how much McKay's personification of "America" differs from the standard depictions of McKay's time, and understanding this history can thus help us to better understand some of the ideas and images in McKay's important poem.
