Why does Prescott Bush sound like a southerner in a 1953 interview?

[Ignacio Upton]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x5870

After watching this interview he made on a tv show in 1953, I'm wondering...what the hell is up with his accent? He was a freakin' Connecticut yankee, not Foghorn Leghorn! I could understand him having an old-school northeastern patrician accent like FDR at the least...but his accent is an anomaly.

[Nostradammit]

1. How can you sound like you are one of the people?

Wouldn't want to sound like an arrogant, nazi-loving aristocrat.


Wouldn't be prudent.

[RB TexLa]

2. Amazing, southern universities have classes on removing a southern accent

[let us vote]

3. Ford and Prescott were responsible for the Holocaust

[NorCalDem]

9. ummm, you can't be serious...

Ford and Prescott were not responsible for the Holocaust. They may have profited from it, and that is morally wrong, but i dare not say they're responsible for it.

Either way they're bastards, but let's try not to revise history too much now...

[carolinayellowdog]

4. Not so anomalous; not so Southern either

Hey,

You are right that some of his vowels sound Southern, but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that he was from the South after hearing the whole clip. I've noticed, in hearing clips recently from Grey Gardens and then thinking about the speech of people like Jacqueline Kennedy or Gloria Vanderbilt, that old money from the NYC area sounds a lot like old money from Virginia. (I'm a lifelong Virginian.) At least, more than they sound like New Yorkers from more recent immigrant stock. My theory about this is that regional accents have diverged a lot in the last 150 years since the immigrant influx, but probably in 1790 there was much less difference between the speech of New Yorkers and Virginians. The New Yorkers whose ancestors were already there in 1790 therefore sound more familiar to my Virginia ear than the New Yorkers whose ancestors arrived in the great waves of immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries.

All it would take to verify my theory is a time machine and a tape recorder:0

CYD

PS-- Wm FBuckley is another of those Connecticut Yankees whose drawling vowels sound familiar to my Virginian ear.

[Ignacio Upton]

7. Makes sense

I was watching a video of Ike yesterday that was from the same video forum, and he has a "regular" American accent, even though he a Prescott Bush were both born in the 1890's. However, I would assume that Eisenhower's ancestors were part of the German immigration wave that settled in states like Texas and the Great Plains. The "standard" American accent actually comes from parts of the Midwest.

Also...try listening to Tom Kean Sr. speak. He has a similar aristocratic pronounciation in some words (the Keans have been in this country since the Revolutionary War...although their prominent ancestor, John Kean, was a delegate from South Carolina during the Continental Congress, and not from New Jersey...although every prominent Kean politician after that lived in New Jersey or New York (the Keans also married into the Hamilton Fish family.)

[carolinayellowdog]

11. I was thinking of him-- a perfect example

My brother who lives in Boston says that Brahmins sound nothing like average Bostonians either.

[pinto]

5. Interesting. My guess is that you hear the more tight jawed, *Southern NE* patrician

accent, not the broader vowelled, more open jawed upstate New York accent or the more nasal Boston Brahmin accent. The Northeast has lots of very regional dialects/accents.

(aside) I can sometimes tell the accent difference in someone from the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts, say, from someone from the Massachusetts North Shore - a span of only 30 -40 miles.

:shrug:

[StrictlyRockers]

6. Bad actors who go on to act badly. Pressnot, 41 and 43.

Charlatans. Hacks. Wolves in sheep's clothing.

The sheep vote for the wolf because he says, "Baaa", so, he is obviously one of us.

[Solly Mack]

8. He was born/raised in Ohio

That might help explain some of it.

[shain from kane]

10. Surrounded by black servants.