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Ethos And Logos In Lyndon B. Johnson's We Shall Overcome

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In the 1960s the African Americans were freed, but did they really have all the rights they were promised? Racial conflicts were everywhere. Lyndon B. Johnson was current president and was trying to encourage congress to pass a bill called The Voting Rights Act. To influence the vote he gave the speech “We Shall Overcome.” In “We Shall Overcome” President Lyndon Johnson used ethos, pathos, logos, and other rhetorical devices such as allusions, repetition and appeals to authority to persuade congress to pass the act. Ethos is when one gives credibility. President Johnson has credibility in his speech when he claims, “Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the congress…” Mr. President also uses ethos when he states “...at the request of your beloved speaker, and the senator from Montana, the majority leader, the Senator from Illinois, the minority leader, Mr. McCulloch, and other members of both parties, I came here tonight…” These are example of ethos by giving credibility to everyone he mentioned. Aside from ethos there is pathos. Pathos is the passion in a speech or writing. President Johnson includes pathos in his speech by his use of diction and …show more content…

Johnson uses an infinite number rhetorical devices. He uses repetition, allusions, and appeals to authority, just to name a few. An example of repetition is “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.” This is repetition by repeating there is no problem with these things and then that the only problem is this. An example of allusion is “But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight,” where “He” is an allusion to God. He also appeals to a higher authority when he said “God.” Another example of allusion would be “All men are created equal.” That is an example of allusion by referring to the Declaration of

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Pathos is the appeal of the auhor to the emotions and the passions of the audience. The writing resource site reported that the language is used by the emotional appeal in a way that associated and authorized the audience sympathize with the writer. (http://figurativelanguage.net/.html) Throughout his autobiography, Frederick douglass portrayed his several experiences and make the audience feel the humiliation of being enslaved by another person. For instance, Douglass recounted his experience and feeling of watching his aunt being whipped by the master until she became totally covered with blood and described also the pleasure of the slavemaster seemed to take in it.

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He used Logos and Pathos by telling facts about racist voting restrictions and then phrased it in a way to make the crowd give sympathy. An example of him using logos and pathos is when he said: “Yet the harsh fact is that in many places of this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.” He said this right after he said “Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.” these two lines shock the audience. These two joined together, is the perfect strategy because when Lyndon Johnson stated what should be and what everyone believed, and then said what the harsh reality was in a negative way, it literally changed the perspective of many Members of congress and many other viewers.

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“What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?”Lyndon B Johnson wrote American Promise to America and Congress to persuade them to pass voting rights. Lyndon B Johnson uses metaphors, parallel structure and anaphora to persuade his audience that all people should be equal. LBJ uses anaphora to show his point in equality and give prominence to the idea of all men are created equal. “There is no”(paragraph 12). This uses pathos to show that this is an American problem,not a negro, southern or northern problem.

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As a matter of fact, many instances occurred where a word or phrase is used in repetition for emphasis. Johnson used phrases over and over to grab the attention of his crowd and to create precedence within the phrases. A repeated introduction to many sentences was “there is no”; this began the structure of the sentences where he’d address generalized groups of people. There is no southern problem and there is no northern problem were monumental statements in his speech; the crowd’s reaction was a turning point for the

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He successfully uses the three rhetorical appeals, allegory, and repetition to get his point across. His speech definitely shows the South it could be capable of amazing success, if the Whites and the African American realize they need each

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Robert F. Kennedy uses repetition to show the crowd how we are all the same, to prevent people from reacting too much and starting riots. Throought his speech kennedy repeats the words hatred, black, white, love, difficult, and passion. By saying these words he is making the crowd focus on that part of the message he is sending with the speech,really getting through to the crowd.

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By constntly bringing his argument back to the allusion of the Declaration, Lincoln becomes very persuasive to the American audience. Second, in Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, Loudenslager analyzes the effective biblical allusion in this speech where Lincoln uses phrasing from a story about Jesus casting out demons. By relating his argument to a well known story for the time, Lincoln demonstrates a mastery in public persuasion. Finally, Loudenslager takes a look at Lincoln’s address at Cooper Union. Here, the key aspect of this speech is Lincoln’s ability to employ exhaustive research in order to back up his argument.

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In 1972, Shirley Chisholm stood before thousands of people and presented her presidential bid declaration speech. Chisholm uses all three of Aristotle’s persuasive appeals. Throughout Chisholm’s speech, she used logos, pathos and ethos. Logos is the appeal to logic in which reasoning and facts comes into play. Then pathos is the appeal to emotions in which she uses words to pull and the heart strings of her audience.

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Jeannette Shackelford Duane Watson Engl 1302 02Febuary 2015 Press Hard For the Power to Vote In the speech “We Shall Overcome”, the speech was written by Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, the speech was addressed to Congress on voting legislation and to the United States as a whole. The speech was given on March 15, 1965 in an era where there was much bigotry, racial violence against blacks. The speech was televised a week after the after math of the deadly violence that had erupted in Salem Alabama, which was supposed to be a peaceful protest, that was given by the Negros a protest for equal rights to vote, turned into a violent protest.

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During the era of the civil rights movements in the 60s, among the segregation, racism, and injustice against the blacks, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial to deliver one of the greatest public speeches for freedom in that decade. In Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech he effectively uses ethos, diction and powerful metaphors to express the brutality endured by African American people. Yet his most important method of reaching his audience, and conveying his enduring message of equality and freedom for the whole nation was his appeal to pathos. With these devices, King was able to move thousands of hearts and inspire the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Opening his speech Martin Luther King Jr. sets up his credibility with his use of ethos, referring to the Declaration of Independence saying, “This note was a promise that all men… would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life.”

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In 1962 President John F. Kennedy held a press conference in which he informed the audience on his stance for the rising steel prices. Kennedy not only wanted to inform the audience, he wanted to get them on his side of the argument. He wanted to show the audience that the rising steel prices were going to have a negative impact on the nation. To do this Kennedy used some of the rhetoric strategies and tools. He used periodic sentences, anaphora, and diction.

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Ethos means convincing by the author. We tend to believe people whom we respect and look up to as role models. Persuading someone with their role model to buy the product. It like a endorsement deal with celebrity. Nike uses the most ethos to draw the age groups together to sell the product by signing endorsement deals with athletes.

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