1 July 2026

Ben Rhodes’ empty words

This new history of America, told through political speeches, can’t see that progress truly comes through division

All We Say is an oddly inscrutable title, since part of this book’s message is that we don’t all speak or think alike. Yet Ben Rhodes’s theme, “the battle for American identity”, is one most readers would deduce from the speeches selected here. The book is an anthology with copious commentary and interlarded historical narrative. As a speechwriter for Barack Obama – a president commonly praised for his “soaring eloquence” – Rhodes came to know the value of a strong speech to boost team spirit and maintain a majority. To identify the character of an entire people from a few speeches looks like a taller order, but Rhodes takes that premise to be axiomatic. “In a democracy such as ours,” he writes, “a speech is the purest form of persuasion.” The purest form needn’t be the truest form, of course, but he does not humbly add that any selection is bound to be arbitrary. On the contrary, these speeches are “the speeches that have made us who we are”.

Rhodes’s introduction opens with a salvo against a nativist idea of American membership promoted in a recent speech by the US vice-president, JD Vance. The survival of the nation, Vance argued, requires something stronger than a “creedal” loyalty centred on the constitution and certain abstract beliefs. Rather, America depends on the coherence of a society whose participants have roots that go back a generation or more. By contrast, Rhodes wants his speeches to imply a tenable creed. Its content is suggested by phrases like “composite nation” and “inclusive brotherhood” – words that he lifts from his chosen speeches by the statesman and former slave Frederick Douglass and the early-20th-century Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. “Rainbow coalition”, the coinage of the Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, said much the same thing, and you soon notice that the adjectives and nouns in these slogans are exchangeable. Rainbow brotherhood will do the work; so will inclusive nation, or composite coalition. All the variants mean to evoke an integrated society of coexisting groups. So the progressive Brandeis and the abolitionist Douglass get into the book, unexpectedly, for being liberal-minded ahead of their time on a question off their usual beat: immigration.

Try to think of American political speeches that have been telling on a subject of sufficient importance to be remembered two generations later. The list is short. Washington’s farewell address, warning against “inveterate antipathies” towards certain nations, and Eisenhower’s against “the military-industrial complex,” both come to mind – their last words being some of their best. Lincoln’s second inaugural address gave a moral definition to the Civil War. Martin Luther King in his 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, “A Time to Break Silence”, connected the violence of an immoral war abroad with the injustices of American society at home. Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” (freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and from fear – a 1941 prelude to America’s entry into the Second World War) likewise belongs in the group; as does John Quincy Adams’s warning as secretary of state against the temptations of empire in a Fourth of July oration in 1821. John Kennedy’s inaugural address, a dangerously heady morale-builder for the Cold War, is still capable of moving readers and listeners. Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” might round out such a list. What becomes clear is that the lasting public utterances by Americans have not been reasoned expositions of principle or policy. They have either dealt with foreign affairs (mainly war) or been issued as statements of defiance by the leader of a protest movement.

The emphasis of All We Say is overwhelmingly domestic. (And this is a loss: in a recent memoir, writing from experience as Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Rhodes had critical things to say about the difficulty of reforming US policy towards Cuba and Iran.) He includes here the Lincoln and Roosevelt speeches, but King is more safely represented by his “I Have a Dream” address of August 1963.

Rhodes sometimes elects to break up a speech with patches of explication, and his manner, as guide, is an academic-popular hybrid, marked by an ingratiating ease that verges on glibness without quite falling in. Views “evolve”, cultures are “vibrant”, criticism is a “critique” and a committed politician doesn’t just support, he “advocates for” a chosen cause. The mix of pretended exactitude and vagueness can be annoying: “America’s founding documents embedded white supremacy in our national DNA.” It would be fairer to say the founding documents compromised with slavery, but a quantum of liberal guilt is a feature of this cruise, and the reward is an almost-happy ending. Things have been slowly getting better, says Rhodes. Or they seemed to be until recently. His final selection is Donald Trump’s inaugural address of 2017.

For the rest, the collection leads off with Benjamin Franklin recommending the US constitution to the ratifying convention in Philadelphia. Next comes Red Jacket, a Native American of the Haudenosaunee tribe, contesting the claim of white settlers to tribal lands; Maria Stewart, a black abolitionist speaking in 1833, a generation before the Civil War; the “Cornerstone Speech” delivered in 1861 by Alexander Stephens as vice-president of the Confederacy, which announced “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man”; the suffragist Anna Dickinson asking in 1868, “Why did it happen that in this land there was the worst of aristocracies where the men were the aristocrats and the women the plebeians?” Mary Lease, instead of William Jennings Bryan, is taken to represent the populism of the 1890s in a speech entitled “Wall Street Owns This Country”; Dolores Huerta speaks for the National Farm Workers in Sacramento, California, in 1966; and the pre-Trump ending is ecumenical: Ronald Reagan, pledging his opposition to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union (in a 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals), is paired with Barack Obama offering a circumspect defence of his association with the radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright – the speech that saved Obama’s candidacy in 2008.

The apportioning of race and gender has been carried out with visible care – hence the displacement of WEB Du Bois and John L Lewis by historically less prominent but more intersectional figures like Stewart and Huerta. This is a soft-activist anthology made to administer a Fourth of July lift that recalls the morale of Obama’s second term. Social justice is the overriding concern. Freedom of speech and the right to privacy are presumed by several speakers but dwelt on by none; and no suggestion arises anywhere concerning the limits of state action.

Rhodes has mastered the history he covers, and his commentary has some fine moments: for example, the use of the same Bible text by Stephens and Lincoln, wherein Adam is condemned to labour for sustenance by the sweat of his brow (free labour and slave labour having different consequences for the dole of the labourer). At the same time, the uplift motive occasionally deprives the author of his usual wariness of myths. “It is hard to calculate”, says Rhodes, “just how far Roosevelt’s transformative vision reached. He, perhaps as much as any other person, defeated fascism.” It was not a person but a country, however, that “more than any other” defeated fascism, and the country was not the US or Britain or France. It was the Soviet Union – an ally tainted by its own extreme despotism. But the truth should be told all the same.

The Fourth of July mood also invites a species of celebration that alternates with unctuous displays of conscience:

Red Jacket’s words endure because his people do, and they resonate because they raise questions that Americans have failed to answer ever since. Are we a nation committed to ideals of fairness and equality, or are we an ever-growing organism of conquest and consumption – the “Great Eater”, justifying our appetites as serving a white, Christian, American identity.

What is “American” doing in that last string of adjectives? Are citizens of the US expected to be not necessarily American? Or is there a tacit message relating to the superfluousness of citizenship as such? If so, the point should be argued for and not made to hang on a coat-trailing comma.

Allowing for the exceptions, the emphasis in this selection is an appeal to common humanity for the sake of national unity. Is it then the case that a judicious moderation has produced the most eloquent and persuasive American speeches?

A very different anthology could be made from speeches calculated to arouse opinion against a wrong unity. It was the “House Divided” speech of 1858 that made Lincoln a major voice in the Republican Party. “Either,” he said, “the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall became alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.” The aggressive italics were in the original, and the last sentence was followed by the one-sentence paragraph: “Have we no tendency to the latter condition?” This was a speech as likely to stimulate as to subdue the passions that led the country into war. It would be innocent to suppose that Lincoln didn’t know the risk he took; and the same was true of King speaking against the Vietnam War 109 years later.

Ben Rhodes is an intelligent American who shares the temperament of the president he wrote for. “A more perfect union” seemed just over the horizon in 2016, but a cruel, greedy, and seductive personality blocked the way: that was their story. Trump was a one-man retrogression, a turn away from “who we are as a people” (a phrase that Obama loved). Yet the demagogue-president, who is now approaching the halfway mark of his second term, has dominated the country’s politics for more than a decade. To see him as a mere spellbinder and therefore a curable aberration from normal politics is to miss a salient fact: the votes for Trump in 2016, and much more in 2024, were votes against the Democrats; and they were votes against the causes with which that party has lately identified itself: uncontrolled immigration, “gender-affirming” medical treatment for puberty-age children, protracted wars, and trade deals that shuttered factories in a swath of states ignominiously known as “the Rust Belt” and “flyover country.”

Trump’s waning popularity in 2026 has shown the limits of the theory that credited his victories to nothing but personality and an age-old redneck bigotry. People will vote for reforms they can make sense of, they will even consent to a degree of self-sacrifice, but your version of justice has to include them in the array of good intentions – preferably as persons and not only as members of a fraction of the inclusive brotherhood.

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His books include American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us (Verso)

[Further reading: Why the Islamic Republic of Iran endures]