Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. For instance:

The American-British television presenter Loyd Grossman, who has described his accent as Mid-Atlantic. This speech pattern might be common among US expatriates in the UK, of which Grossman would seem to represent just the most ostentatious example.

If you listen to Grossman (who is originally from Boston) starting about 15 seconds into the clip below, you’ll see that he uses a split-the-difference UK/US hybrid that is literally “mid-Atlantic,” in the sense of combining accents from both countries, but is different from the newsreel announcer voice:

One more note from the academy:

You should talk to William Labov [JF: I will try] , pioneering sociolinguist, whose landmark study into New York City speech led him to ask the same question you have. NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. Labov suspected that WWII had something to do about it. I feel that his work on this and many other language-related matters should be far more widely known than it is.

The “flipped prestige markers” point here is fascinating. From looking at Labov’s study, I know today, as I didn’t know yesterday, that linguists use the term rhotic to describe whether a person pronounces, or doesn’t, the “R” sound before a consonant or at the end of a word. If you say, I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd, like some vaudeville version of a Boston accent, you are non-rhotic. If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. Now you know!

The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. Queen Elizabeth doesn’t say car, and neither did Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor did the newsreel announcers or movie actors of his day. But Labov said that in post-World War II New York, fancier people started becoming rhotic, and recovering their Rs. This brings us back to the “why things changed” question.

2) The Role of Broadway and Hollywood, and the Shift from Jimmy Cagney to Marlon Brando. A reader writes:

I’ve wondered about this myself when I see old Jimmy Cagney movies—and the date of his last starring role might give us a hint towards the date range of the change: "One, Two, Three" in 1961. (What else happened that year??? See below!) I’d like to offer a speculation, for what it’s worth. My suspicion is that the shift might have begun in the switch away from the two paired styles in American movies, the classical acting of the British School and the rapid patter of popular American actors (Marx Brothers, Cagney, Powell and Loy, etc), and over to the Method Acting style of the Strasberg/Brando/Dean school. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?) The enormously popular speech styles of Brando and Dean (and I could add Elvis Presley) clearly pushed vernacular style into a kind of mainstream acceptability, then desirability. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. (Did Eisenhower speak the newsreel style? A little before my time, but Kennedy certainly didn’t, even if his vernacular was more formal than Brando’s. His high Boston accent might have been heard as an influential transitional hybrid, and it’s interesting how prominent parodies of the speech of Brando, Dean, and Kennedy were at the time: seems a sign that we were noticing a marked change. So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? A heuristic approximation! Of the Murrow Boys, Eric Sevareid held on to the newsreel style the longest; relying on memory, I’m betting that we could actually watch the transition away from that to a more vernacular style in the long career of Walter Cronkite. He never went all the way, though his authenticity and newly-downstyle speaking could probably be marked in the crisis/triumph stages of his reporting: the death of JFK; the Vietnam report; the moon landing. Interesting that the two competitors for his anchor chair were both fully vernacular speakers from the South and West: Mudd and Rather. Dan Rather certainly marks the definitive end of the newsreel style and the ascendance of the folksy vernacular: those rustic analogies!

Another entertainment-related explanation for the shift, right about the time of the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition:

The plumby announcer voice that hovers over the Atlantic midway between the Eastern Seaboard and England was mortally wounded in 1959. That was when Westbrook van Voorhis, the famous “March of Time” voice, did the intro narration of the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone. After running the pilot, Rod Serling realized the narration needed a less pompous sounding and more natural voice – himself. The fake English announcer voice lingered on sporadically until the end of the Johnson administration in newsreels, which themselves ceased production around the same time, but Rod Serling’s decision sounded the death knell for that accent.

And similarly on the role of ridicule in speeding the move away from this accent:

This is only partly facetious, but I think I know who was the American to speak "Announcer." And the answer may explain partly why it has gone out of fashion: Jonathan Harris, the actor who played Dr. Smith on the television show "Lost in Space." I think that perhaps Harris' portrayal of Dr. Smith made the accent so identified with cowardly buffoonery that no one in the baby boom generation and later would want to use the accent as anything other than a joke. The funny thing about Harris was that he did not start out with that accent - as I suspect George Gershwin did not. Harris trained himself as a young man to lose his native Bronx accent - to the point that he was asked if he were British. His response was "no, just affected."

And the role of Katharine Hepburn, whose “Locust Valley Lockjaw” accent was a cousin of announcer-speak:

I was just discussing this not a week ago with a friend who has done voice work in film and television, and can adopt this accent in an instant to evoke that period, much to my amusement. But he has never employed that voice professionally, and certainly does not speak that way in “real life”. As an old film buff, I am used to this voice, though it figures unevenly in old movies. Katharine Hepburn spoke this way, on and off screen until she died. Jean Harlow, one of my favorites, is all over the map with this, sometimes sounding like a tough streetwalker, other times like a society matron, and, oddly, slipping in and out of both dialects in the same role, or even in one sentence. Even the manliest actors, such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable sometimes slipped into this voice-coach mode. One thinks of the glorious character actress, Kathleen Freeman, as the voice coach Phoebe Dinsmore in “Singing in the Rain”: “Round tones, Miss Lamont.” In Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”, Mia Farrow has an impossibly thick Brooklyn accent until she takes voice lessons and becomes a successful radio purveyor of celebrity gossip. After her transformation, I noted that Mia sounds precisely like her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, who had that patrician manner of speaking on and off screen. Mia had the perfect model! Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast. Prestigious prep schools and ivy league institutions (though Gore Vidal never went to college). Was this sheer affectation? I hope not. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these men speak. Orson Welles also comes to mind, though I noticed he spoke in this mode more often during his early days, on and off screen.

We’ll have a lot more to say about Buckley and Vidal — for now the leaders in the race for Last American to Talk This Way (with George Plimpton in third)—in the next installment. But for now, just one more category: