Both Elie Wiesel and Susan B. Anthony lived in a harsh time, facing numerous complications and setbacks during their life. Wiesel being a holocaust survivor gave a moving speech on the night of April 12th, 1999 at a White House Millennial Lecture. Anthony was a social reformer and a women rights activist who also delivered a powerful speech on women suffrage in 1873. The two of these speeches produced by Wiesel and Anthony are very different, but also relate in some areas.
Early in Wiesel’s speech,”The Perils of Indifference”, it can clearly be indicated that his speech was informative. Wiesel spoke of a traumatic event that had occurred in his life, also known as the Holocaust. In 1944, at the age of 14, he and his family were deported by Nazis to Auschwitz (Wiesel 1999), he then uses this traumatic experience 45 years later to inform others about indifference. Typically an informative speech uses descriptions, demonstrations and vivid detail to explain a subject, person, or event. Wiesel perfectly uses his experience to educate others, categorizing his lecture as informative.
Anthony uses a different form known as persuasive. A persuasive speech has a goal to convince the audience to accept his or her point of view. In Anthony’s speech she covers the topic of women rights, specifically their right to vote. All throughout history women suffered from not being perceived as equal to men, and activist such as Susan B Anthony used their voice to put an end to this. Susan quickly shows her motive is to persuade the audience by stating, “It shall be my work today to prove to you…” (Anthony 1873). This is a clear indication by Anthony to try and convince the audience which groups her speech as persuasive.
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Anthony and Wiesel’s powerful messages also contrast by the tone being used in each. Anthony´s speech had a more aggressive tone compared to Wiesel who was more despondent. The author’s tone is their attitude towards their topic and their attitude is expressed through their choice of words. In Anthony´s work, she bashes the preamble by making statements such as, “It’s a downright mockery” (Anthony 1873). Her use of strong, powerful words help convey her aggressive tone and reinforce her message trying to be given. Wiesel on the other hand is very downcast with his tone using negative words. He states, “Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment” (Wiesel 1999). Indifference in the eyes of Wiesel meant rejecting the ability of acting upon or the responsibility of injustice. With Wiesel’s tone of disappointment, the act of humans being indifferent and losing their human like qualities has him perceive these acts as more than a sin.
Although these two messages contrast in numerous ways, they relate in their overall meaning. Both author´s faced discrimination at some point in their lives and were robbed of their rights. Anthony, an idol to many stated, “to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people” (Anthony 1873). At the time, women were not equivalent to men and were perceived that their only duty was to care for a family. Many influential women took a stand and helped fight against this insensitive stereotype created by men during this time period. In a similar way, Weisel himself faced discrimination along with other jews. He recalls that although being abandoned by humanity it was not worse than feeling abandoned by God himself, (Wiesel 1999). Stripped of their belongings and rights, Jews and other groups were taking from their homes during World War II by the Nazis. They were brought to concentration camps were they were used for labor or eventually executed just because they were different. Both of these authors faced discrimination in very contrasting ways.
Wiesel and Anthony together experienced huge drawbacks during their life. Although living at two different times, both authors struggled with facing discrimination. They used their voice and story to help inform others on the numerous obstacles they encountered throughout their time being. Wiesel and Anthony differed in their tone and also in their type of speech. The two speeches created by Wiesel and Anthony contasted in numerous ways but at the same time remained to relate in their overall meaning.
