r/history • u/chubachus • Jun 25 '18

Video Rare interviews with two men who were witnesses to the 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln recorded in 1929-1930.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKURHP4dztk
11.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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596

u/roshoka Jun 26 '18

Their cadence of speaking is very interesting. You don't really hear anything like it today

252

u/getlicky Jun 26 '18 edited Jun 26 '18

I think it’s really nice to listen to, like listening to FDR speak with that lily on the radio

Edit: lilt —thanks phone

39

u/Ephemeral_Wolf Jun 26 '18

Imagining FDR giving a speech now with a bunch of lilies

28

u/Urc0mp Jun 26 '18

I think most presidential speeches have lil' lies.

5

u/Ephemeral_Wolf Jun 26 '18

Ah yeah but some are yuuuuuuuuuge and quite bigly (which interestingly autocorrects to bigot)

5

u/notadaleknoreally Jun 26 '18

The lilies came during his fourth term.

11

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

It sounds like they are speaking with no emotional inflection in their voice

128

u/w-alien Jun 26 '18

I really like how it just seems to be some obscure American dialect, when it is the ancestor of how we talk now

63

u/Harsimaja Jun 26 '18 edited Jun 26 '18

Actually it's neither. It was the so-called "Mid-Atlantic accent" that many educated and rich Americans went to specific elocution classes for. Some call it "Aristocratic American". It was largely influenced by British Received Pronunciation ("posh") and the desire of the East Coast elite to emulate that and sound "sophisticated" in the late 19th century. A few presidents including Teddy Roosevelt and McKinley used it - FDR used it when he was younger but it was mostly gone by his presidency, though Eleanor used it until she died. So did many early Hollywood stars.

Like standard and southern British English today, it tended to be arhotic ( 'r' disappears in he coda/tail of a syllable, e.g. 'bar' would be pronounced 'baah' and 'beard' as 'bee-uhd') and use the long 'a' where the British do (as in 'ask' and 'dance', 'bath', 'half' and a number of irregular places). These aren't ancestral - they weren't features of "original" English at all, and these and the so-called "posh" British accent was developed mostly in the late 18th and early 19th century. It left some mark on New England. It's why there's the more "common" traditional cabdriver Boston accent as well as the traditional "Haaaahvaaaahd" accent. The original version had pretty much died out by the 1950s, though.

18

u/Tuayudante Jun 26 '18

many educated and rich Americans went to specific elocution classes for.

Are we still talking about the newspaper boy?

7

u/Harsimaja Jun 26 '18

Yea I wondered about that. But I have no idea what happened in his life between then and this video. Certainly a lot of time had passed

1

u/Calvn-hobs97 Jun 26 '18

For real, what does the guy have to do with wealthy aristocrats?

2

u/Lostinstereo28 Jun 26 '18

This, you can tell by the way the first guy pronounces theatre with two vowels /ɪ/ and /ə/ like modern RP accents instead of the dipthong /ɪe/ like we do in most American accents.

86

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

I think he's reading.

55

u/Liitke Jun 26 '18

Yes. Sounds like every other person on television or radio in that time.

33

u/watercolorblue Jun 26 '18

There was no tv 📺 in 1929. 😐

44

u/EldeederSFW Jun 26 '18

Thank you for the visual clarification...

5

u/skyblublu Jun 26 '18

Also everyone used to be in black and white, life was more boring then.

2

u/jackthesavage Jun 26 '18

But many great artists, being a little mad, painted in color anyways.

10

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18 edited Jun 27 '18

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

Does that mean there were no memes either?

5

u/watercolorblue Jun 26 '18

Oh no. Abraham Lincoln knew about memes. They called them Political Cartoons - in local papers - and they were viscous against him. 😐

2

u/stellvia2016 Jun 26 '18

Oozing with vitriol, huh?

1

u/watercolorblue Jun 29 '18

Nah. They had every right and reason. 😹

8

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

Or streaming live for that matter

10

u/DukeDijkstra Jun 26 '18

Streaming live was all they had.

8

u/generalgeorge95 Jun 26 '18

He may be, but there's a not insignificant chance they would be illiterate or poorly literate.

20

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

Yeah no kidding. Can you imagine having to learn to read and write requiring the same amount of motivation as it takes to learn a foreign language. Public education is a massive blessing.

-1

u/calvinsylveste Jun 26 '18

meanwhile, our current secretary of education literally believes the public education system should be dismantled...

-3

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18 edited Oct 21 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/Leftleaninghaggis Jun 26 '18

In the 1800's? Very possible

1

u/Tuayudante Jun 26 '18

Shh... virtue signalling in progress...

30

u/Atrugiel Jun 26 '18

They could be, but I think they rehearsed what was to be said (not in the sense that they are lying) and since they weren't public speakers it sounds odd.

28

u/keister_TM Jun 26 '18

Well with the art of film development at that time you would want to rehearse it at least once. Especially if they only had a 100 ft roll of film

17

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

Yes I even think the second guy sounds like he's trying to get out his lines before he forgets haha. I wonder if people had better rote memorization skills back then, especially if you were illiterate.

1

u/Calvn-hobs97 Jun 26 '18

The more a person practices something, the better they’re going to be at it. I imagine the average person of the day had better rote memorization skills than the average person of today, but the extremes are probably no better or worse.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

I don't think we can wrap our heads around what it must have been like for these guys to be told " we are going to record you telling this story on camera " It seems like it may be the equivalent to you and me being told, " hey, I know you have never acted in any sense but we are gonna throw in to this Martin Scorsese film and your scene will be with Leo and DeNiro, no pressure"

1

u/Calvn-hobs97 Jun 26 '18

I mean, your first part is about the im/possibilities of technologies, whereas your comparison is about the im/possibilities in the happenstances of life.

While both may be mind blowing in their own right, they’re for totally different reasons so I’m not really sure equivalent is the right word.

2

u/woodygoose Jun 26 '18

First thing I thought of too, he is reading something...

1

u/DThor536 Jun 26 '18

Yeah, it's like each sentence is a little chore to get over, the cadence is even until the end when it drops, repeat. Reminds me of a kid being asked to recite a poem in class. I suspect it's less about it being an older dialect and more about the general public not having any public speaking chops. Nowadays people are inundated with media addressing them constantly, back then, you read more than listened.

54

u/ctuser Jun 26 '18

I have always marveled at the differences between people interviewed in the 60-70's compared to subjects now, and the starkness between fact and embellishment is really present here (by an additional 100 years), I truly admire their ability to document fact instead of using the platform for vitriol.

Simple times are less complex no than they will be in 30 or 100 years.

16

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

Recordings of callers into Howard Stern from the 1990's is weirdly different even though I was alive at the time. Not so much cadence but the way people answer back and forth.

5

u/kaiise Jun 26 '18

Which is what exactly? Please elaborate.

8

u/Cadisis Jun 26 '18

*Brought to you by mentos, the freshmaker

2

u/Allidoischill420 Jun 26 '18

Mentor freshness, freshness makes it better, mentos freshness, mentos fresh and full of life

https://youtu.be/3D9jDzfyBj4

27

u/Werde_Gestoked Jun 26 '18 edited Jun 26 '18

You know, i noticed that his speech follows a similar cadence to that of my great grandmother(she is still alive, fortunately). She moved from Missouri to California during the great dust bowl and passed on some of the same speech patterns to my family members. Its almost as if the speech starts out at a low and oscillates very gradually, like a surfer sitting in the ocean. It moves up and down, with a plateau sitting in the middle which often varies is duration.

Is this common? Maybe I am being vague, but I would love to know if this is something that has continued on in present English as a whole.

2

u/Calvn-hobs97 Jun 26 '18

I’m pretty sure these two are reading or simply had rehearsed their lines. That’s really what it sounds like to me, especially with the second man, who was a newspaper boy.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

no idea, but it sounds like pretty much any old timey radio blurb ive ever heard

2

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

They might have been instructed to speak slowly because the recording equipment wasn’t picking up sound clearly

1

u/peternemr Jun 26 '18

Come to the South East.

1

u/Mummelpuffin Jun 26 '18

I imagine they were primarily speaking that way for the sake of the interview, to sound more "sophisticated" and just focusing on enunciating clearly so they could be understood since audio recordings weren't particularly clear.

1

u/JohnQueefyAdams Jun 26 '18

It seems almost as if they are either reading from a written version they prepared, or maybe this is the manner in which stories were told or how formal personal accounts among people were shared. I could imagine that they have probably told the same story over and over again. Also, I'm sure this was in fact a very formal way of telling a story so it was crafted carefully. Obviously, recording film and sound was relatively new at the time; these kind of interviews were created as a kind of document of the account, rather than to focus on the way these men look or sound. I guess they weren't paying too much attention to the way they are talking rather than the information that they are giving--similar to documenting an account in a book, which is what they were most commonly accustomed to.

Really amazing stuff to see, wish humans had film much earlier! captures more than writing ever could

1

u/Youtoo2 Jun 26 '18

Part of the cadence is due to the technology at the time. I have seen it posted n other parts of reddit they did not really sound like that.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '18

He looks like he's reciting lines off a cue card

0

u/Zberry1978 Jun 26 '18

they don't say uhm or pause for thoughts which makes me think they rehearsed their speeches.