Rhetorical Analysis Of Theodore Roosevelt's The New Nationalism

On a clear Kansas day in August of 1910, Theodore Roosevelt planted a flag on the fissure that ran through the Republican Party. At the dedication of the John Brown Memorial Park in Osawatomie, the former Republican president — and soon-to-be Progressive Party presidential candidate — sought to blaze a new path through his old party in a speech entitled “The New Nationalism.” The speech is best known for laying out the progressive agenda and served as the cornerstone for Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential platform. However, it served a secondary purpose: to unify a still-divided nation under an empowered federal government. Roosevelt’s discussion of John Brown offers the clearest exemplar of this attempt to unify, as his patriotic language and euphemistic

He links the struggles of the Civil War era to the modern day, equating the modern-day “sinister influence” of special interests to that of cotton and slavery (5). An industrialized American economy has given rise to new social and economic demands, he argues, that have challenged not only modern society but also the fabric of American democracy. Roosevelt then describes a series of sweeping reforms intended to rectify this: increased regulation of public corporation, a progressive income tax, labor reform, social security, mandated campaign finance disclosure, and more. The speech, remarkable in its comprehensiveness and conciseness, cloaked such radical progressive ideas in classic American rhetoric, thereby appealing to the audience’s sense of

He later links Brown and Lincoln, saying that he thought it “half melancholy and half amusing” that men “in company with John Brown, and under the lead of Abraham Lincoln” sought to address the problems of their time, but the men of his time nervously shrink from, or frantically denounce, those” — which includes Roosevelt himself — “who are trying to meet the problems of the twentieth century in the spirit which was accountable for the successful solution of the problems of Lincoln’s time” (2). He also describes Brown and Lincoln’s generation as the “men to whom we owe so much” (2). Placing Brown, an extremist, in Lincoln’s lionized class demonstrates Roosevelt’s admiration for Brown’s results, if not his methods. Though it is perhaps unfair to classify Roosevelt’s references to Brown as positive, grouping him and Lincoln is certainly an unusual historical and rhetorical decision. Lincoln himself condemned the man, declaring Brown was “no Republican” in an 1860 speech to the Cooper Institute, and general public opinion of Brown was highly negative. Roosevelt’s treatment was certainly more favorable than his