Former Obama columnist Ben Rhodes examines America through his 15 most famous speeches | Books

Donald Trump “It’s proven Jeremiah Wright right on a lot of things,” said Ben Rhodes, former speechwriter and deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama and still a close aide to the former president.

“If you look at the things that Jeremiah Wright banned, he says America is a country founded on racism. Well, that’s a popular opinion today. 9/11 did the chickens come home to roost? write in the New York Times: American foreign policy has gone backwards.”

Rhodes was discussing Wright because A pastor from Chicago he was at the center of a critical event in Obama’s rise to power, which forms a key theme in his new book, All We Say – The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches.

During the 2008 Democratic primary, Wright’s paintings appeared displays Lines like “God damn America for treating our citizens like minorities” and calling Obama, who served him, “a black man living in a country and culture controlled by rich white people”. For Rhodes, progressives like “Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar can say this today, and after George Floyd, everyone speaks like Jeremiah Wright.”

However, in 2008, the media and Obama’s critics wanted to know: did he hate America as much as Wright did?

On March 18, in Philadelphia, Obama responded by speaking, The Best Dealthat he mainly wrote himself. Rhodes remembers watching from the headquarters of the candidate in Chicago when Obama gave what the campaign called “race speech”, preparing to tell the American people his story as a black son of a white mother in a very divided country.

It worked, but it wasn’t the Obama speech that Rhodes had originally chosen for All We Say. He “wrote an entire chapter about what Obama said presented in Selma in 2015 (on the 50th anniversary of the great civil rights march), because I knew firsthand that it was his favorite speech and, more importantly, Obama’s historic change. If Obama represents a progressive narrative, the speech is just that. It’s a great word. “

Rhodes smiled impishly. All We Say is not a historical record. It ends with Trump, the avatar of reactionary backlash.

Obama saw something that could be better understood under Trump. Re-reading A More Perfect Union, Rhodes “was struck by Obama’s description of white working-class people who don’t feel privileged because of their race, and it’s white working-class people who have to bus their kids to places, and feel like they’re missing out on something because of acceptance, it seems like their concerns about crime are dismissed as if it’s inconsistency with racism. Apparently black people felt important.”

Everything We Say begins at the beginning, 250 years ago, with speech Benjamin Franklinthe founder of Pennsylvania, is Sagoyewatha or Red Jacket, a Seneca chief from New York state. Franklin encouraged dissent, to keep America together. Red Jacket knew that white Americans did not play fair.

Great speeches by famous people follow: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, John F Kennedy. The words that have been given at the break include Alexander H Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate, Ronald Reagan and Trump, in his speech. the second opening address.

There are also chapters on Maria Stewart and Anna Dickinson, 19th century campaigners, and more. Dolores HuertaSpain’s greatest industrialist, now 96 years old.

“It was very difficult to get women’s speech, especially before World War II,” Rhodes said. “It made me wonder, if these speeches were deliberately forgotten? Maybe we don’t want to read them Anna Dickinson because it doesn’t make sense, because what he says is still important. “

Dickinson was a Quaker from Pennsylvania who rose to prominence during the Civil War as a young abolitionist. Rhodes’s analysis was presented in Chicago on 20 February 1868. Titled Idiots and Women, it is a surprising analysis of the fact that “21-year-olds could vote if they were not criminals, paupers, idiots, or women”.

“I loved how contemporary his speech was,” Rhodes said. “It wasn’t just ‘women should vote’, but it was really about pleasing all the men, the idea that men know better, the ways in which women are taken advantage of because they don’t have political power.”

Dickinson lost sight of it. After being adopted by his family, his life, Rhodes said, “became a wonderful proof of his words: women should be locked up, and if you don’t, you’re an idiot, in the medical mind.” In writing this book, you see who is being forgotten. him, because he did not play by their rules.

The same fate befell Mary Elizabeth Lease, a popular figure of many years who attracted large crowds and whose speech Wall Street Owns This Country Rhodes compares to the style and content of Bernie Sanders – if the senator spoke with a big law of racism. Traditions and attitudes change. In 1915, in Boston, the progressive lawyer Louis Brandeis gave a speech called True Americanism, an inspiring message of integration…only for whites. 60 years later, Dolores Huerta worked with Cesar Chavez. Rhodes finished his book before revealing the latest The rape of Chavezincluding the rape of Huerta.

“None of these people are perfect,” Rhodes said. “Even Lincoln, some of the great white men’s beliefs that he gave, he gave. Red Jacket was also very controversial. When I went to the Seneca Nation, and I met the man who helped run the museum, he said, ‘Our people think that Red Jacket was for sale.’

Pa Douglassthe central figure in the book, Rhodes focuses on the Composite Nation model, which was presented in 1869. The main anti-slavery figure had a black mother and a white father – apparently, he was a slave. His speech was a plea for multiracial democracy, a century ahead of its time.

It was also a mistake, “very difficult for his first wife, Anna”. However, the main speaker is short White House meeting with Lincoln in 1865, after the inauguration of Lincoln again, and in Rhodes a moment in which the invisible composite nation swam briefly.

“If Lincoln’s Second Inauguration is a clear statement of what America could be then it would be he stops compromise (on slavery), and say, ‘We say we belong to these things, we must belong to them, even if it is very expensive,’ so I like Douglass’s Composite Nation speech because he is saying the same thing: ‘If I support a multiracial democracy, if I believe in international principles, it’s not just about the rights of black people. I have to stand up and defend the Chinese people when people don’t like it.’

“It’s like somebody standing up today and saying, ‘We have to legalize every person who comes into the United States.’ It makes us accountable for what we say. If anyone can become an American, if we are a multiracial democracy, why was it not available to a Chinese man in 1867, just as it should be available to a Somali immigrant in Minnesota today?

That’s All We Say out now. Rhodes is also the author of The World As It Is (2018), obama white house memo, is After the Fall (2021).