Speeches as a Key to American Identity

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**Brian Lehrer** (0:27)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Joining us now is Ben Rhodes. You may know him as a former Deputy National Security Advisor and Speech Writer for President Barack Obama. He wrote a lot of Obama's most well-known speeches, or co-host of Pod Save the World, or as a New York Times bestselling author and a New York Times contributor. He is out with a new book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches, which traces the 250-year argument over what it means to be American through 15 pivotal speeches. It starts with Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention and goes all the way to President Donald Trump's second inaugural address last year. With these speeches, he argues that they're actually two competing stories of American exceptionalism, and they have always coexisted, but in tension with each other. One story is rooted in a particular identity, maybe call it white, Christian, native born, and the other is rooted in a universal idea of equality drawn from the Declaration of Independence. So Ben Rhodes joins us now. Hey, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the book. Welcome back to WNYC.

**Ben Rhodes** (1:43)
Thanks, Brian. It's so good to talk to you.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:44)
You wanted to say briefly first, since you're best known probably as a foreign policy expert, why a book of speeches from history about American identity?

**Ben Rhodes** (1:56)
Well, my last book was about the rise of authoritarianism, and I looked at Putin, I looked at Trump, I looked at Viktor Orban in Hungary, Xi Jinping. What I found in trying to understand what had happened to global politics today is how central history was to those types of leaders. Because essentially, what a strongman does is make all of history a prequel to their ascent, their leadership. And I also kind of felt that Trump and Obama, in addition to kind of being on opposite sides of the current political spectrum, embodied these two different stories. Not that Obama is perfect in any way, but he represented this kind of progressive exceptionalism of struggling to live up to an idea. Whereas Trump really represented this idea of inherited exceptionalism. We can do whatever we want, quite literally, because we're American.
And given that I'm not an historian, but I am a speechwriter and a speechwriter who used to draw on past speeches to do my own work.
I knew that there would be a rich set of materials to mine. Because if you go back and you look at speeches from history, they're kind of history in the present tense. So that gave me the idea of telling this one story about America and our battle over identity through a number of speeches.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:08)
Before we get to some excerpts from some of the speeches you identified from the last 40 years, you want to do a few from really earlier in American history. I'm curious why you started with the Benjamin Franklin speech, in particular from the Constitutional Convention.
Then I see that Frederick Douglass, who we don't have any tape of, unfortunately, is very central to the book. So talk about Benjamin Franklin speech, and we'll talk a little bit of Frederick Douglass too.

**Ben Rhodes** (3:38)
Yeah. I mean, the goal here was not, this is not an anthology, right? Each chapter is about an argument and a person who made that argument in a moment in time. So I didn't want the 15 greatest hits here. I wanted a representative sample of different sides of the argument. Franklin was the perfect starting place because Ben Franklin authored the closing argument for the Constitution at the convention in Philadelphia. He was an old man. He was into his 80s. He couldn't even stand because he had gout and kidney stones. And the speech he wrote doesn't even talk about the Constitution. It talks about compromise and the essential need for compromise. When you get people together in a room, you not only get their different wisdom, you get their different interests, their different prejudices, and nobody's going to get everything they want in that kind of assembly. And I think in addition to just being very wise and even entertaining speech, because Franklin had a very almost comic and satirical voice, it kind of captured something essential to me, which is that compromise made the union possible. But we also compromised about pretty enormous things. Human slavery, the kind of nature of citizenship and who can access that. Immigration was kind of set aside for states.