All We Say by Ben Rhodes

Author:Ben Rhodes [Rhodes, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2026-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

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For all his idealism, there was a hole in the Americanism of Louis Brandeis. “Throughout all these years,” he said near the beginning of his speech, “we have admitted to our country and to citizenship immigrants from the diverse lands of Europe.” Toward the end, he declared that “racial equality is the complement of democracy. America has, therefore, given like welcome to all the peoples of Europe.” Brandeis’s defense of diversity was radical in its embrace of European pluralism but conspicuously excluded America’s most entrenched exclusions: Black citizens living under Jim Crow, Chinese immigrants barred entry by federal law, and Native Americans confined to reservations did not figure into his picture of “inclusive brotherhood.”

In this, Brandeis was in step with his times. The administration of Woodrow Wilson that he advised was racist, segregating the federal workforce and showing deference to the apartheid system of Southern states, which delivered Democratic votes. In the Boston where Brandeis spoke, Black residents faced enormous structural disparities in housing, education, and employment, and were incapable of enjoying the full citizenship that Brandeis affirmed. His silence on these matters, while unexceptional, contrasted with the loftiness of his rhetoric and breadth of his vision: Surely a man with such wide-ranging interests in the society noticed these inequalities.

It is useful to consider Brandeis’s speech on “True Americanism” alongside Douglass’s “Composite Nation.” The America that emerged from the crucible of civil war was concerned with race, and the prophetic Douglass could foresee that the promise of equality was meaningless if it did not extend to all people. “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races,” he had said, “but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”[24] Fifty years after Douglass spoke those words, Brandeis spoke with a narrower vision about who was to feel at home in the United States.

On matters of opportunity and social justice, Brandeis was far more detailed than Douglass; indeed, his ideas would have done much to strengthen and fill out Douglass’s argument. However, this speaks to an uncomfortable reality of the progressive era: Programs of public education, empowerment, and social insurance focused on white citizens. Brandeis was attuned to the dangers of concentrated power when it came to monopolies or an intrusive state, but not to the dangers of concentrated power when it came to Jim Crow laws or the exclusion of non-white immigrants: the bigness of white supremacy, which was even more expansive, entrenched, and impervious to democratic accountability than the systems that Brandeis battled. While America overcame the aristocratic theory that pitted European nationalities against one another, it perpetuated that same theory in its treatment of non-white people.

This blind spot extended abroad as well. When Wilson brought his plan for peace to Europe after World War I, he promoted self-determination—a powerful concept that led to the formation of new nations and the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire which the Brandeis family had fled.

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