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Donald Trump “has proven Jeremiah Wright correct about a lot of things”, said Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter and deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama and still a close aide to the ex-president.
“If you look at the things that Jeremiah Wright was kind of canceled for, it was saying America was a nation founded on racism. Well, it’s a fairly common view these days. 9/11 was the chickens coming home to roost? I make versions of that argument every time I write for the New York Times: that American foreign policy has blowback.”
Rhodes was discussing Wright because the Chicago pastor was at the center of a fraught episode in Obama’s rise to power, which forms a key chapter in his new book, All We Say – The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches.
During the 2008 Democratic primary, footage emerged of Wright featuring lines like “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human” and calling Obama, to whom he ministered, “a Black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people”. To Rhodes, progressives like “Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar would say those things today, and in the post-George Floyd moment, everybody was talking like Jeremiah Wright.”
In the 2008 moment, though, the media and Obama’s opponents demanded to know: did he hate America as Wright supposedly did?
On 18 March, in Philadelphia, Obama responded with a speech, A More Perfect Union, that he mostly wrote himself. Rhodes recalls watching from the candidate’s headquarters in Chicago as Obama gave what the campaign called the “race speech”, setting out to tell Americans his story as the Black son of a white mother in a country sharply divided.
It worked, but it was not the Obama speech Rhodes originally chose for All We Say. He “wrote an entire chapter about the speech Obama gave in Selma in 2015 [on the 50th anniversary of the great civil rights march], because I knew first of all that’s his favorite speech but also, more importantly, it’s the most pure Obama distillation of history. If Obama represents a story of progressive exceptionalism, that speech is all about that. It’s kind of a victory speech.”
Rhodes smiled ruefully. All We Say is not a history of progressive exceptionalism. It ends with Trump, avatar of reactionary backlash.
Obama spotted something that would become terribly clear under Trump. Rereading A More Perfect Union, Rhodes “was struck by Obama’s description of the white working class not feeling particularly privileged by their race, and it’s the white working-class people that have to bus their kids to places, and it feels like they’re losing something through affirmative action, it feels like their concerns about crime are dismissed as racism. All of that felt pretty relevant, in the same way that his description of this structural inequality of Black people obviously felt relevant.”
All We Say starts at the beginning, 250 years ago, with speeches by Benjamin Franklin, a founder from Pennsylvania, and Sagoyewatha or Red Jacket, a Seneca chief from New York state. Franklin advocated compromise, to keep America together. Red Jacket knew white Americans would not play fair.
Great speeches by great figures follow: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, John F Kennedy. Reactionary voices placed in relief include Alexander H Stephens, the Confederate vice-president, Ronald Reagan and Trump, in his second inaugural address.
There are also chapters on Maria Stewart and Anna Dickinson, lesser-known 19th-century campaigners, and on Dolores Huerta, the great champion of Hispanic workers, now 96.
“It was shockingly hard to find speeches by women, particularly before world war two,” Rhodes said. “It made me wonder, like, were these speeches almost forgotten intentionally? Maybe we don’t want to read Anna Dickinson because it’s uncomfortable, because what she says is still relevant.”
Dickinson was a Pennsylvania Quaker who rose to fame in the civil war era as a young voice for abolition. The speech Rhodes analyzes was delivered in Chicago on 20 February 1868. Titled Idiots and Women, it’s a startling examination of the fact that “people 21 years of age could vote if they were not criminals, paupers, idiots, or women”.
“I loved how contemporary her speech was,” Rhodes said. “It wasn’t just ‘women deserve the right to vote’, it was basically excoriating the entire patriarchy, the idea that men know better, the ways in which women get taken advantage of because they don’t have political power.”
Dickinson lost the spotlight. After she was institutionalized by her own family, her life, Rhodes said, “became eerily a validation of her speech: women should shut up, and if you don’t, you’re an idiot, in the clinical sense. In writing the book, you see who is forgotten. Dickinson is forgotten in part because she’s a woman, but also because the women’s movement, as represented by Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, didn’t like her, because she didn’t play by their rules. They kind of deliberately excised her from the roll of honor, because she didn’t fit their narrative of that movement.”
A similar fate befell Mary Elizabeth Lease, a gilded age populist who drew huge crowds and whose speech Wall Street Owns This Country Rhodes compares in style and substance to Bernie Sanders – if the senator spoke with a heavy side order of racism. Norms and attitudes change. In 1915, in Boston, the progressive lawyer Louis Brandeis delivered the speech True Americanism, an inspiring message of inclusion … for white Europeans only. Sixty years later, Dolores Huerta worked with Cesar Chavez. Rhodes finished his book before recent revelations about Chavez’s sexual abuse, including raping Huerta.
“None of these people are perfect,” Rhodes said. “Even Lincoln, some of these white supremacist quotes that he gave. Red Jacket was pretty controversial too. When I went to the Seneca Nation, and I met this guy who helped run their museum, he said, ‘Our people think Red Jacket was a sellout.’”
On Douglass, the central figure in the book, Rhodes focuses on Composite Nation, delivered in 1869. The great campaigner against slavery had a Black mother and a white father – in all likelihood, his enslaver. His speech was a plea for mixed-race democracy, a century ahead of its time.
He was flawed too, “pretty difficult on his first wife, Anna”. Nonetheless, the great orator’s brief White House meeting with Lincoln in 1865, after Lincoln’s second inaugural address, is to Rhodes one moment where the elusive Composite Nation briefly swam into view.
“If Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is the most radical articulation of what America could be if it stops compromising [over slavery], and says, ‘We say we’re for these things, we have to be for them, even if it carries a huge cost,’ then I loved Douglass’s Composite Nation speech because that’s him saying the same thing: ‘If I support multiracial democracy, if I believe in universal principles, it’s not just about the rights of Black people. I have to stand up and defend Chinese people at a time when that is wildly unpopular.’
“It’s analogous to someone standing up today and saying, ‘We need to legalize every immigrant in the United States.’ It’s essentially holding us accountable to what we say. If everybody can be American, if we are a multiracial democracy, why would that not be available to a Chinese person in 1867, in the same way it should be available to a Somali immigrant in Minnesota today?”
All We Say is out now. Rhodes is also the author of The World As It Is (2018), a memoir of the Obama White House, and After the Fall (2021).
