Rhetorical Analysis Of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Address To The Commonwealth Club

My friends:
I want to speak not of politics, but of government. I want to speak not of parties, but of universal principles. They are not political, except in that larger sense in which a great American once expressed a definition of politics, that nothing in all of human life is foreign to the science of politics… The issue of government has always been whether individual men and women will have to serve some system of government and economics, or whether a system of government and economics exists to serve individual men and women. On questions relating to these things men have differed, and for time immemorial it is probable that honest men will continue to differ.
Thus began Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s address to the Commonwealth Club

According to Bitzer, a rhetorical situation is the context in which a speaker or writer creates rhetorical discourse. The goal of an effective speech in this model is to modify the situation by responding to an exigence, which Bitzer defines as ”an imperfection marked by urgency”, and compelling an audience, or group of interested individuals with the ability to induce change, to take action, all while meeting or overcoming constraints, which limit action, and are either a part of the situation or imposed by the speaker. In this case, Roosevelt’s situation is the dire economic state of the country, and his exigence is the continued suffering of the victims of that state and the rise of the emerging economic oligarchy who caused it. His audience is twofold; in the immediate term, it is the members of the prestigious Commonwealth Club, all of whom are influential, and very capable of making change. In a broader sense, it is the American people, whose ability to modify the situation comes both from their personal actions, and through the ballot box. In the next excerpt, Roosevelt will begin to lay out a progressive economic history of America, giving him a means to clarify the present

Here he unequivocally declares the exigence, the threat of America’s rapid pace towards economic oligarchy, which has urgency in that it cannot be stopped once the oligarchs become so entrenched and acquire so much power that their rise cannot be reversed. Here FDR also keeps to his opening pledge of non-partisanship by invoking Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, who shared his progressive values and provides a model to the audience for taking action to modify the situation that FDR decries. In the next excerpt, we hear Roosevelt lay out the actions he believes need to be taken to modify the situation, and introduce his constraints, both those provided by the situation, and those that he imposes