What Are The Rhetorical Devices Used In Theodore Roosevelt's Speech

918 Words4 Pages

In the month of April in 1906, the realization that the nation was growing faster than the government was all to real (okayfey). Monopoles were influencing Americans negatively and the federal and State powers could do nothing about it. The rich had control of almost all the wealth in the United States, and the middle class was not happy about it. They were in a cage match that was only going to end in bloodshed and an unsettled dispute. That being said, President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was left between all of this to be the intermediary. On April 14, 1906, President Roosevelt delivered one of the most monumentally important speeches we have on record today. Using an impressive combination of the three appeals, he captures the crowd 's …show more content…

For example, the story about man with the muckrake is a metaphor for every working lower class person who works hard and chooses to not see the evil in society. Roosevelt says that if the “man with the muckrake” ever does realize the amount of muck on the ground, they might stop striving for the celestial crown and give up, but they need not give up. In addition to this metaphor, there is also a great phase in this speech that can be classified as an antithesis. Roosevelt says “But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.” This antithesis stresses the fact that the people who work hard, but never do anything about the growing economic issues, are also at fault. Roosevelt wants them to stand up and do something to better the nation. Lastly, an anaphora can be found towards the end of the speech when Roosevelt says,“The welfare of the wage worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil….” He uses this anaphora to list the welfare of different occupations. He 's trying to convey the idea that everybody 's welfare is

Open Document