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The Rhetorical Analysis Of Every Man A King

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Elishah Abainza
25 November 2017
Comm 111
Every Man a King The speech I chose to analyze is Every Man a King by Huey P. Long. This speech was truly moving especially since the era was during the Great Depression. Wealth inequality was at an unsurpassed high in America, and the majority of the people were in the position of struggle and famine. Huey Long was a longtime advocate of redistributing wealth in his own state, he took this platform to a national scale to address his concern of building support for his movement. The society that he was making was the "Share the Wealth Society", a society in which the motto was "every man a king" and whose goal was the limit the wealth of the rich and share with the poor. He used sources such as the Bible, information about the past presidents and philosophers, as well as information of the amount of debt the U.S. has to support his claim. Huey P. Long used ethos, pathos, and logos to persuade his listeners of the broadcast to create a "Share the Wealth Society" in their communities. Huey P. Long advances his believability by referencing many different sources to back up his claim. He used ethos to demonstrate his trustworthiness of his character by referring stories from the Bible. During his speech, he mentions that "the Lord told us what difficulty is… it was later written in the Book of James, where everyone could read it (2)." He uses the Lord's name to help tell people what difficulty is. He tells of how the Lord said that the wealth must spread among the population for the country to stay alive. This applies to ethos because it is using religious deity to help back up what he is saying, making it relevant to the followers of religion. Although, he never called himself a saint, the audience can tell that Huey Long is a very dependable and honest man. Later he uses the United States Supreme Court to help back his statement of how the U.S. cannot pay off its debt easily. "The United States Supreme Court has definitely found out that it could not be done, because of a Minnesota case… [and] postponed collecting a debt (4)." He mentions this to enhance his credibility because the Supreme Court is the highest court in the United States that what the State had done

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