Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor to its publication, “The Next Move.”
Haley Stevens went viral for a campaign talk she gave on July 11. A Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, she is now running for her party’s Senate nomination.
It wasn’t so much what she said as how she said it. She spoke in a strong accent — “a little bit o’ stick it to ’em” — different from her usual speech. Was this a Michigan accent?
To my Michigan-born ears, she was more idiosyncratic and personal than regional or local: a combination of the Upper Midwest and Betty Boop. In any event, Stevens came in for a lot of mockery nationwide.
Tell you something funny: When I was growing up, I didn’t realize we Michiganders had an accent. Ours was a neutral American speech — anchorman English. Then I moved around a little and discovered this was not quite right.
In the early 2010s, I was sitting with a group of journalists questioning Tom Price, a congressman from Georgia. I found myself strangely homesick — because he was speaking pure Michigan. On the internet, I confirmed that Price was born and raised in Michigan and earned two degrees from the University of Michigan, the second of them an MD. He then moved to Emory in Atlanta for a residency.
Phil Gramm is a famed and classic Texas politician. But his speech has always been pure Georgia. He was born and raised there and earned two degrees from the University of Georgia. He then went to teach at Texas A&M.
Americans are a mobile lot, which has contributed to the homogenization of speech. Regional distinctions persist, thank goodness. But, to a large degree, our speech has been put into a blender.
By the time I moved to New York in the late 1990s, traditional New York accents were thin on the ground, certainly in Manhattan. No more “Toidy-toid and Toid” — a cabbie’s way of saying “Thirty-third and Third.” Still, you could find some senior citizens who were New Yorky.
One of them taught down at Emory. That was Gene Genovese, the historian, whom I interviewed in 2011. Born in 1930, he grew up in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. You could have cut his accent with a knife.
At a conference, I encountered John Sweeney, the president of the AFL-CIO. I couldn’t place his accent. Smiling shyly, he told me, “I’m from the Bronx.” He was born in 1934, to Irish immigrants. He spoke in a rather lovely, almost musical way. That accent has died with him, I think.
The New Yorkiest voice in politics today? It belongs to a senator from Vermont: Bernie Sanders, born in Brooklyn in 1941.
In my lifetime, I have seen Boston accents virtually disappear. Listen to President John F. Kennedy in clips. He is shockingly regional, or local.
There is a John Kennedy from Louisiana — the junior senator from that state. He lays it on thick, in his populist mode, which is his usual mode. Huey Long might blush. How did Kennedy talk when he was earning a degree at Magdalen College, Oxford (where students have valets, called “scouts,” and a deer park)?
Let us grant that most of us have different modes of speech, depending on our interlocutors, our mood and so on. In 1973, Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia appeared on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line.” After the show, the governor’s aides told WFB that they had never heard their boss speak as he had. He had refined his accent. (Carter still sounded markedly Southern, as he always would.)
Race is a minefield in America. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris were accused of “talking Black” in front of Black audiences. (So was Hillary Clinton, and so was Joe Biden. For them, it might have been more awkward.)
And if race is our minefield, class is Britain’s. Margaret Thatcher’s English was long a work in progress. The grocer’s daughter from Grantham adopted a posh accent. Then, when advisers deemed it de trop, she went back “down” a little.
Tony Blair occasionally spoke “Estuary English,” complete with glottal stops (whereby a bottle of beer becomes a “bo’le o’ beer”). A writer in the Daily Mail asked, “Why did the Prime Minister take reverse elocution lessons?”
Returning to America, let me end where I began — if not Michigan, home of Haley Stevens, then the Midwest.
Ronald Reagan was an Illinoisian who spent many years in Hollywood. His speech was about as neutral as it comes. But, during his presidency, the Midwest would sometimes pop out.
At a news conference in 1985, someone asked Reagan about a visible problem with his nose. Said Reagan: “I picked at it and I squoze it and so forth and messed myself up a little.”
“Squoze it.” Pure Huck Finn.
Two years earlier, a piqued Reagan said, “I’ve had it up to my keister with these leaks.” Bill Buckley told me that never before then had he heard that word, and he chuckled at the memory of it, shaking his head affectionately. Me? I grew up with “keister.”
Vive la différence, as they might say in Maine, or Louisiana. And may we resist homogenization for as long as we can.
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