A Comparison of Techniques of Persuasion in Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
I have chosen to analyse two famous speeches from the 1960s, which have both been in the news recently, showing their continued contemporary relevance. One is Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. This was delivered on August 28th 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during a march of American civil rights supporters. King spoke of his desire that blacks and whites could live together harmoniously as equals. Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was delivered to the Conservative Party in the UK on April 20th 1968. In contrast with King’s speech, Powell’s speech expressed the desire to limit immigration and stop anti-discrimination laws. I have chosen these speeches as they have obvious ideological conflict, but also as they are good examples of the techniques of rhetoric discussed by Cockcroft and Cockcroft (referred to throughout as Cockcroft for simplicity).
Rhetoric is defined by Cockcroft as a form of “manipulative or collaborative verbal interaction, one which requires a particularly astute assessment of the audience” (Cockroft 2005: 28). This is the case in both of my examples, where existing beliefs, prejudices, or feelings of injustice in the audience are amplified, given voice and made powerful. Ethos, Pathos and Logos are Aristotle’s three proofs of rhetoric, and what I will focus on here. As Cockcroft makes clear, they take place during speech as a “simultaneous process” (81) rather than in a linear sequence. Analysing them separately however can help us better understand how they work together.
Ethos is defined by Aristotle as “the proof brought about by the character or virtue of the speaker, and revealed in his speech” (28). The main elements of Ethos are ‘personality’ and ‘stance’. As Cockcroft argues, the personality of the speaker is very important, “it links a persuaders unique individuality with the act of persuasion, accentuating those character traits best matched to the audience and topic. The more individually engaged a persuader seems to be, the more convincing the persuasion” (28).
Powell for example, starts his speech with an anecdote,
A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries (Powell: 1)
This serves to create an impression of his own personality, as a humble man, in touch with the ‘ordinary’ people who make up his constituents. Negatively it could be read as patronizing and arrogant to speak on behalf of other people in such a way. King’s repetition of ‘I’, “I have a dream today” (King: 4) makes the ‘dream’ something that reflects his own personality, creating an impression of him as a visionary and idealist, who also demands action.
‘Stance’ is “something inherently interactive, reflecting group values, but decidedly subject to the persuader’s own control” (Cockcroft 2005: 28). Both speakers take up an implicit stance through the language they use.
The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: How can its dimensions be reduced? (Powell: 1)
So we have come here today to dramatise a shameful condition. (King: 1)
Powell frames his stance on reducing levels of immigration as something ‘universal’ and ‘natural’ attempting to distance it from the status of opinion and make it self-evident and ‘rational’. By moving from his own anecdote to speaking of ‘the nation’ he also projects his personality onto the nation, suggesting that what he says is not just his stance, but the stance of the whole country. ‘Prospect’ and ‘confronted’ are negatively loaded terms, already creating images of an army of immigrants sweeping over the country. King’s stance is also made clear through the emotive negative language he uses, if the condition is so ‘shameful’, how could anyone continue to support it. He uses the ‘we’ to form a smaller community, one that implies him and the audience, more personal and intimate, making the audience feel, by sharing this stance, they are part of a momentous moment.
Pathos suggests the emotional impact of the speech on its audience. Cockcroft breaks it down into two stages. The first stage “requires an appropriate orientation between persuader, topic and audience…For the second, there must be an actualization of the emotion by the persuader, who needs to arouse in an audience emotions of appropriate intensity, clarity and sharpness of focus” (56). If King’s dramatization of the condition suggests the orientation of the first stage, then he drives home the second stage through a series of repetitions of rousing, poetic and loaded language,
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this cheque. (King: 2)
He frequently uses metaphors to convey his argument and create powerful images in the minds of his audience. Here his use of banking language helps to convey the sense of something ‘owed’ to his audience. His use of ‘we’ is again very emotive, forming a body of agreement against a common enemy with his audience. He cleverly draws on the idealistic manifesto-like language of the American Constitution in order to show how it has failed black people. Terms like ‘opportunity’ conflict powerfully with ones like ‘bankrupt’, creating a persuasive impression of being denied basic rights.
Powell also actualizes the emotions he arouses,
I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. (Powell: 2)
Powell, as King does, unites the community he forms against a common enemy. In Powell’s case, this is an attempt to mobilize the whole nation against immigrants. There is never any questioning of what the nation is or how it could change, as this is one of his implicit assumptions. He also takes the opportunity to mark the occasion as momentous, and requiring rapid immediate action. Both speakers use this sense of immediacy by constantly dramatizing the importance of the content of their own speeches, creating and actualizing powerful desire for change in the audience. A feeling of having a ‘right’ which is unfulfilled is used by both of the speakers to great emotional impact.
Logos, as Aristotle’s third proof, suggests the reason or resources used in an argument. We can look here at the structure of argument.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the negro still is not free. (King: 1)
The opening of King’s speech for example inverts a cause and effect model of argument by suggesting that the promised ‘beacon of light’ has never been realized. He uses an opposition between the idealized state of things and the actual state of things, associations of grand concepts of freedom and captivity, and also defines his argument quite simply and powerfully emotively as a call for freedom. These are elements of what Cockcroft describes as ‘invention’. The speech however must also be judged as successful by its audience, and it is the combination of King’s emotive appeal to demanded ideals, the repetitive and insistent structured form of his speech, and his own personality and implied stance, which allow it to be judged as successful.
The style of Powell’s speech differs,
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. (Powell: 1)
He opens for example, not with an emotive call to ideals but, through his choice of language and mode of address, a more rational sounding appeal to logic. He constantly draws on facts and figures as well as the testimonies of others, to back up his argument.
What can be seen in both of the speeches however is a powerful combination of reason and resources with emotive effect. Powell’s audience, politicians at a conference, would be more impressed by being addressed as logical thinkers, who share in the political ‘self-evidents’ that Powell delivers. What his speech cleverly does is to present his own prejudices and racist views in such a way that they seem ‘natural’ and obvious. It seems surprising that there was no immediate massive negative reaction to Powell’s racism, but this just shows how successfully and dangerously persuasive it was. King’s speech, in a different context, draws on the already mobilized emotional state of a demonstration crowd and appeals, equally successfully, to grand abstract concepts of justice and freedom enshrined in the constitution. He does this however, by also using a careful structure and argument. While both speeches present very different ideological perspectives, they do so using similar elements of rhetoric and very successful techniques of persuasion.
Bibliography
Robert Cockcroft and Susan Cockcroft Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric, 2nd Edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
‘Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’: Speech delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20th, 1968’ (2007)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/11/06/do0607.xml&page=1, accessed 9th May, 2008
‘Let Freedom Ring…: Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech, 1963’ (2003)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/21/usa.features11, accessed 8th May, 2008