Theodore Roosevelt’s D-Day Speech
Theodore Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer was a great speech for a multitude of reasons, including making the war seem like a holy crusade and making it sound like it was their duty to destroy the “...unholy forces of our enemy…” (Theodore Roosevelt, online) and praying to a God that most people in America believed in, thus making them believe that they had supernatural forces to support them.
One reason why Theodore Roosevelt’s speech was successful is the way he manipulated the language in his speech to make it a prayer.From the beginning when he said “I ask you to join with me in prayer…” (Theodore Roosevelt, online) this small change that set him apart from most other speakers helped him completely immerse his audience in the speech.Since the audience was wrapped up in the speech, it was easier to
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In fact, another big reason was how he kept talking about the audience in his prayer, mostly by constantly making their sons sound like heroes and sympathizing with the families of those “heroes”. This lead them to believe that he knew what they were going through and made them believe that what their sons were doing was important for the world. Some examples of him making their sons sound like heroes are “Our sons, pride of our nation…” and “They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people...Thy heroic servants…”(Theodore Roosevelt, online). One example of him sympathizing with his audience is ”And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be…”(Theodore Roosevelt, online)
Overall, it can be shown that Theodore Roosevelt’s D-Day speech was an amazing speech because of reasons ranging from making the war seem like it was a “holy crusade” that God wanted them to win to simply sympathizing with the audience and relating to