I understand how it sounded like I meant that. I only mentioned the particular speeches because they're so well known and I *THINK* they're examples (not completely sure, but it seems likely). I don't know if public speakers and radio/TV announcers tended to be upper-class and from those areas, or if people had to learn to talk that way to get hired, or what. It might have been a trend, and people just learned to talk like that if they wanted to get a speaking job. I like conjecturing about this kind of stuff.
Not necessarily upper-class, but Dan Rather mentions having had to ditch his native Texas accent when he became a national news anchor, and Maureen Corrigan, the book reviewer for NPR, talked about how she had to disguise a very distinctive Brooklyn accent. Both went for the "generic American" accent rather than an upper-class one, though. So I think the trend goes the other way, with people hiding whatever upper-class accents they may have had in order to get hired by mainstream media. The only commentator I can think of who used an upper-class accent throughout his career was William F. Buckley.
Well it would depend on the time period of course. By the time of Dan Rahter (though I'm not sure when he first got started) I don't think anybody was really using the Mid Atlantic dialect anymore. I was talking about early television and radio, from before WWII. William F Buckley was one of the people mentioned in that article who had it. They also tended to talk in a high somewhat nasaly range, because microphones of the time didn't deal well with a more baritone voice.
I think you're right about that. Those media, like early sound films, descended directly from "stage diction" an era where actors would use a special sort of diction that helped them project their voices, and I would imagine that the British influence was strong there. And, of course, most of the plays and films of that era portrayed upper-class life (or what was imagined as upper-class life) rather that of the common folk... Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge had yet to make their marks on drama. The only exception I can think of is George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, where use is made of a lower-class Cockney accent, and the whole point of that play was to show the difference between that sort of talk and the rarified upper-class accent used by Higgins and Pickering.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "accent" was an example of the posh accent described. JFK's accent was pure Boston, and I'm sure it wasn't taught to him -- that's the way they talk around there (at least the upper crust of Boston and environs.)
True. and many people have become acquainted with a working-class white Bostonian accent while listening to the Magliozzi brothers on the American radio program Car Talk.
Dewey, Cheatem and Howe. They actually had an office with that name painted on the windows overlooking a square in Cambridge.
