In Congressman Robert H. Clancy’s speech “An ‘Un-American Bill’: A Congress Denounces Immigration Quotas”, he addresses how the Johnson-Reed Act goes against fundamental American values. Clancy is urging the United States Congress and the American people to reconsider how important foreign immigration is to the American way of life. He adopts a sincere, urgent, and patriotic tone in hopes of testifying about the lack of conviction America would appear to have if Congress passes the act. Clancy uses of diction, repetition, and anecdotal tales to emphasize this. In Clancy’s speech, his use of simplistic sentence structure and moderately complex words to provide a sense of familiarity and intelligence. For example, he states that “Italian-Americans of Detroit played a glorious part in the Great War” (Clancy 12). The word “glorious” evokes a sense of pride and patriotism, not only in the Italian-Americans, but the American people as a whole as well. You can also see this when Clancy states “They are essentially home …show more content…
He tells the story of his family during the Revolutionary War: “My family put 11 men and boys into the Revolutionary War… Some of these men and boys shed their blood and left their bodies to rot on American battlefields” (Clancy 20). This story gives the reader confirmation on his loyalty to America and its values. Another example is the story of his grandfather during the Civil War: “My mother’s father fought in the Civil War, leaving his six children in Detroit when he marched away to the southern battlefields to fight racial discrimination and protect his country” (Clancy 21). By sharing the tale of his grandfather, he provides the audience with a more recent example of the loyalty his immigrant ancestors had in America. This more recent instance induces a belief that Clancy was raised to uphold the same level of loyalty that his ancestors