The Decline of the WASPs Revisited

One of the great mysteries of modern American history is why the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment abdicated its traditional rule in the late 1960’s. This was one of the key events that caused the 60’s to get out of hand. Nobody living in the politically-correct atmosphere of today can be unaware of this establishment’s faults, but as conservatives we can’t help being aware of its virtues, either.

Despite the nonsense said about it by the Left, it was the most enlightened ruling class in the world in its day. America in its final heyday, the 1950’s, had less economic inequality by standard measures than it has today and was a far more contented and morally confident society. This was an elite that sent its own sons, like George Bush Sr., to fight its wars, not somebody else’s. And many of its faults were being remedied at the time it died, anyway – it was still alive and kicking when the 1964-5 civil rights bills, which were opposed by the South, not the establishment as such, were passed.

For those of you whose sense of American social history is blurry, the WASP establishment was the world of the Ivy League, Fifth Avenue, gentlemen’s clubs, the Social Register, elite country clubs, top New York law firms and investment banks, Boston Brahmins, Main Line Philadelphia, the upper management of great corporations like the Pennsylvania Railroad, certain parts of the military, the OSS and its successor the CIA, the Episcopal Church, New England boarding schools, and the old diplomatic corps. It ruled America from Plymouth Rock until the late 1960’s.

The WASP establishment is truly dead and gone a generation ago now[1], so please let no-one imagine that anyone, least of all me, is advocating its return. But the fact is that this country hasn’t had a coherent ruling elite since. Human societies are inevitably hierarchical; the question is whether those at the top take seriously the obligation to govern that their social position imposes on them or whether they merely feather their own nests. In older nations with feudal roots, this function has traditionally been taken by an aristocracy with a sense of noblesse oblige. The WASP establishment was a kind of quasi-aristocracy for democratic America.

Bill Clinton’s crowd were, as David Brooks has accurately diagnosed, essentially bobos (bourgeois bohemians) and their ridiculous anti-establishment counter-culture posturing made clear that they refused to admit that they were the establishment. Except, of course, when the time came to exercise power; hypocrisy came as naturally to them as it does to all liberals. They thus lacked the crucial sense of responsibility for the nation that is at the core of any decent ruling class.

Bush’s crowd, while led by a member of a genuinely patrician old-American family, have at best a pale shadow of this sense of inherited duty. Bush’s desire to identify as a Texan, rather than with his Andover, Yale and Harvard heritage, is a sign that he is running away from something that is no longer accorded the respect it once was. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld probably comes closest to the old ideal in terms of his sense of duty, though it is interesting to note that although educated at ultra-establishmentarian Princeton, he is actually German-American by heritage, a reminder that “WASP” in the American context included a lot of people who are not actually Anglo-Saxon. And Rumsfeld is so blunt compared to the famously understated old establishment.

So how did this establishment, which no-one thought was on the verge of collapse, collapse? Some thoughts:

1. An ethnarchy like WASP-dom in a free society depends on WASPs being richer, better educated, and more powerful than everybody else. This is not sustainable in a dynamic economy where Irishmen and Jews and all sorts of people end up being rich. The WASPs may have been willing to maintain a Jewish quota at Yale (a private institution in all conscience) but they were not willing to repress non-WASPs hard enough to keep them down forever. In fact, they created an economy more open to the advancement of ethnic outsiders than any the world had yet seen. In 1920, they can rely on these people being fresh off the boat and uneducated, but they will not stay that way after a few generations. So this ethnarchy depended upon a basic social inequality that they weren't prepared to defend. Unlike, say, many Latin American countries, which are still run today by the descendants of the conquistadors because they really are willing to keep their countrymen poor and uneducated. Mexico, for example, is a nation of mostly Indian blood run by Iberian-descended white people who maintain a national myth of “we are all mestizos.”

2. The WASP establishment made a great wrong turn after immigration surged in the 1880’s by defining itself as Anglo-Saxon rather than native American. This had enormous consequences. If they are in essence Anglo-Saxon, it logically follows that they should rule England, not America. They defined themselves as foreigners in their own country for the sake of establishing an unsustainable title to social superiority. It caused them to shrivel into a narrow caste[2] rather than absorbing rising ethnics and defining a distinctively American upper class. (This did happen somewhat, by default, but it lacked this needed ideological underpinning and didn’t happen enough.)

If they had contested the definition of what a "real, indigenous, non-foreign, native American" is, they could have won it, which would have carried the logical consequence that if they were the real Americans and therefore had a title to govern. But they didn't, either out of snobbery – which is perverse, given that defining oneself against the British is something that George Washington's generation and the one after would have understood and respected perfectly well – or out of the fact that America lacks enough of a long history and volkish culture for self-definition as an ethnic American to be emotionally satisfying to anyone in a way that it is in other nations.

This ultimately leaves the definition of what is a real American in the ethnic sense unclaimed, producing the void in our self-conception as a people that is later filled with “propositional nation” sophistry. (You can say America is not an ethnically-defined nation, but then what is its boundary? Question: whose well-being should it maximize? Answer: it should conquer the world and give the world what's good for it.)

3. The spiritual basis of WASP society, the Episcopal Church, was corrupted from within. Religious modernists started taking over the seminaries in the 1930's, resulting today in the terror-apologizing near-atheist Episcopal Bishop John Spong today and anti-Christian, anti-American Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold. Even among Episcopal bishops who do not express disdain for traditional Christian beliefs, there is a cold, alienated, intellectualized approach to central matters of faith.

4. WASP culture, particularly of the upper-class variety, is dependent upon a sense of superiority over other ethnic groups that is a lot easier to maintain when Britain is ruling 1/4 of the world. This goes away because of the collapse of the British Empire after WW II. And their instinctive sense of the legitimacy of racial and ethnic superiority was shaken by the Nazis.

5. There is great laziness in the generation that grew up in the 1920's, which is the cohort that abdicated in the 1960's. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this in his short stories like "Six of One." A bourgeois class can only really sustain itself if it has a quasi-aristocratic ethos of imposing a duty on itself to rule, which is entirely different from just making money and playing golf. (The biggest myth of the Left is that bourgeois society possesses the will to power.) The 1920's were similar to the 1990's in that a stock-market boom caused a lot of people to forget about their values and think making money is enough.

6. There are internal weaknesses in WASP culture, like an emotional coldness that produces alienation between generations with predictable consequences. And there is liquor; this is a stereotype but like all stereotypes it has significant truth.

7. The United States had to become a technocracy after WWII. Technocracy destroys aristocratic and quasi-aristocratic social orders because it requires society to give power to people with the wrong social backgrounds because there aren't enough trained people with the right ones. If a society has to hire and promote on brains rather than inherited status, inherited status ceases to be inherited. Technocracy becomes mandatory when economic progress and the democratic demand for efficient maximization of the economy produces the need for a huge administrative class. Clearly big government is the enemy of anything quasi-aristocratic. Technology just makes this worse. This is the story of how Pres. Connant of Harvard brought in the SAT. He was very conscious of the caste-destroying effects of what he was doing.

8. The decline of the WASP ascendancy resembles Plato's hierarchy of regimes and their cycle of decay in book VIII of The Republic. Plato’s analysis is an abstract formulation of the intrinsic truth that all ruling elites constantly face the temptation to cannibalize existing social capital. Why not just enjoy your rule, rather than working to maintain it for the next generation? Why maintain social structure rather than letting it run down? Frankly, this is a profound argument against democracy, i.e. the absolute sovereignty of any one generation. It is an argument for the Burkean sense of traditionalism as our duty to those who came before us and gave us what we have and to those who will come after us whose nation we are borrowing for a time. But this only works if one has a coherent sense of nationhood and peoplehood and we do not. Having a hereditary core to the ruling class can clearly help maintain this sense. Unless, of course, this core decays for the aforementioned reasons.

One of the great virtues of the WASP ascendancy is that it provided, in a nation made ethnically fluid by immigration, a concrete core towards which other groups should assimilate. Those of you who don’t like this, sorry, but they were here first[3]. To have a nation with open boundaries, one needs a solid core, not the “anyone can be an American the instant they sign their passport” chaos we have today. The WASPs played this role despite, as I noted above, failing to define themselves as real Americans rather than Anglo-Saxons as they should have.

The WASP ascendancy also contained, because the WASPs staged the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution, an emotional attachment to this country’s early history and founding that has either dissipated or become abstract, i.e. “propositional nation” sophistry. A nation must revere its history if it is to sustain its identity, and obviously people whose own ancestors were involved in that history have a more concrete relation to it than those of us who came later.

One of America's big problems as an historical nation has been its lack of interest in culture – Camille Paglia calls America “this masculine pioneer country that has never taken the arts seriously”[4] – and failure to see the need to impose a national culture of real quality as an emotional and intellectual focus of its sense of nationhood. We used to have some of this prior to the 1960’s, but it didn’t really stick and has since been drowned by commercial pop culture and delegitimated by multiculturalism, which denies that we even should have a common culture. One can still see remnants of it here and there, like the architecture of our better old universities. A nation's sense of identity should be organized around its history and its peoplehood but you need culture to make this pretty so people will like it and feel it as well as think it. It is clearly against our grain to have an Academie Americain to distill our culture for us, but we have various vested interests, like the universities, doing this de facto anyway.

One conclusion one could draw from this is that an artificially-created nation is a rationalist mistake, but I think not, particularly given the ambiguous balance between conscious self-creation and unconscious emergence that exists in the history of many superficially "organic" nations. (Don't tell me Germany is not a conscious creation! But then of course look what a mess they made; this is clearly a partial, if not a whole, truth.) There is also a degree to which America is not even artificial, i.e. not identical with its state and founded in 1776 but organically growing from 1620, but consciousness of this is undermined by changes in our ethnic makeup due to immigration. An explicitly founded nation merely has to be aware of the temptations to which it is uniquely suspect – like propositionism – and avoid them. Unfortunately, this requires a degree of self-restraint which is against the grain of current American culture.

[2] This is the essential point of E. Digby Baltzell in his fine book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America.

[3] My own people were actually Scots, which makes them Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon, and respectable though not upper-class.

Interesting article to study further later. It looks rewarding. I'd disagree with this, though:

Go back to any census or newspaper from 1880 or 1920 and you'll find that native born Americans did identify themselves as such. If you were from Southern or Eastern Europe, Asia or the Middle East in those days, you probably weren't native born.

The elite was a little different from the general native-born population -- they wouldn't be an elite if they weren't. The common phrase at the time was "old stock Americans" or "old colonial stock." And that's what they were: people whose ancestors came over before 1776 or 1820 and achieved some prominence. Their ancestry was a mixture of the English with Scots, Welsh, Irish, French, Germans, Dutch and other groups, including Jews (Separdic, assimilated, and intermarried).

Anglo-Saxon was an alternative label, but one shouldn't attach too much weight to it or take it too literally. The term WASP and the theory the author expounds here go back to Digby Baltzell, a sociologist in the 1960s. No one in the 1880s or 1920s would have defined himself as a "WASP," and intelligent people would have recognized that "Anglo-Saxon" was a metaphor (the "best people" in England claimed to have been of Norman, rather than Anglo-Saxon ancestry).

There was a tendency from the heavy immigration of 1880-1920 until the 1960s for the elite to pull up the drawbridges and exclude more recent immigrants and their children. But in retrospect it's hard to see what else they could have done. Elites do elect and exclude, and it usually takes about three generations to assimilate fully.

An elite that recognizes merit and performance alone may be more efficient and fairer to outsiders, but it ceases to be a vehicle for transmitting a common culture and non-pragmatic values. A full embrace of the ambitious, wherever they came from, would have meant, and did mean, the end of the elite's continuity as a group.

What's interesting and novel isn't so much the seventy years of general ethnic exclusion, but the years since then. In the 1960s, all the old WASP institutions acquired a reputation for being first stodgy, then second-rate, then repressive. If you take the general rule of thumb that three generations are necessary to fully assimilate newcomers, exclusion followed by admission wasn't surprising or unexpected, though the collapse of elite confidence was.

Thanks. Locke has hit on a topic that ought to be of some interest. Richard Brookhiser has also written on this topic ("The Way of the Wasp'), and it inspired him to turn back to the founders to see how that "way" developed.

But I think Locke gets some of the details wrong. There was some identification with England among American elites after 1880, but their legitimacy was always based on their connection to American history. You could draw a parallel with Australian or Latin American history: elites relished their connection with the first settlers, but didn't much care for actual Englishmen or Spaniards who presumed to rule over them. "Colonial stock" or "old stock" Americans weren't so much looking over the water, as back into the American past, for something more solid than contemporary market society to identify with and base their authority upon.

Bourgeois societies do find it hard to put perpetuation above temporary enjoyment, and this was certainly true of young people in the 1920s, but that generation would have been stepping down from power in the 1960s, and those who had achieved positions of power had been in harness and working diligently for about forty years, so I don't think one can blame them for the decline of the WASP in the 1960s and later. It was young people coming up, first Kennedy's liberal wing of the GI generation, and then the Baby Boomers who changed things. In other words, the Twenties generation pretty much overcame their love of "fun;" subsequent generations didn't.

In 1950, or even 1960 the American establishment must have looked unshakeable. By 1980 or 1990 it was only a memory. Doubtless there were some people in the early twentieth century who took it very seriously. A few even developed racial theories of "Anglo-Saxon" or "Nordic" hegemony. In retrospect, though, it looks like it was a transitional phase, a screen for the long process of assimilating and "wasping" immigrants. To be sure, though, those on both sides of the caste lines saw things differently at the time.

Thanks for your note. I think the question of English identification is more complex than you appear to. The WASP upper class in late 19th century Boston (think the James, Adams, Hay, etc. families) certainly did identify with England in a way that that in New York did not (although, consider Morgan, the Astors and Vanderbuilts marrying daughters off to minor British nobility in "morganatic" marraiges in this era), and the Tidewater upperclass aways had a strong 'cavalier' English identity (in their minds, if not in fact). Charleston, less so, I think. Philadelphia Main Line society was not so English oriented, either.

Also, the upper class in the US has always included members of the various Continental aristocracies who lived here for one reason or another. Depending on their breeding, charm and wit, such foreigners were accepted in varying degrees, but accepted nonetheless.

Class is a fascinating topic, one less talked of than it might be.

The one area where the WASPS were weakest was in cultural assimilation.

The greatest strength of the Roman Empire was its ability to assimilate subject people, i.e. to convert Gauls, Celt-Iberians, Britons, etc., willy-nilly, into Romans, who were expected to behave as such, and treated equally with all other Romans as long as they did so.

While the WASPS set up a political mechanism that allowed this, WASPs as individuals and in groups did not choose to Americanize newcomers. They moved out of areas where non-English people from other parts of Europe settled, permitting them to establish social enclaves which were microcosms of the worlds they left. Some of those immigrants from Europe were successfully Americanized, others were not. Those that were, were Americanized mainly because they CHOSE to be Americans.

We are seeing the same pattern today with immigrants from South America. They and their first generation children may continue to practise the cultural and linguistic patterns of their forebearers, but THEIR children eat fast foods, wear jeans, and frequnetly speak only English. They become Americans.

The problem lies in the defining attributes of what constitutes an American and this definition in the modern perspective, is one which is not as desireable as the definition of say, a Teddy Roosevelt or John Adams. And this problem transcends all ethninc and religious groups, even modern WASPs, as the author points out.

We have to make a stronger commitment on a national level to Americanize newcomers. One of the first steps in doing so is to eliminate illegal aliens and to control the flow of immigrnats coming into the America to a level where they can be effectively Americanized and absorbed.

We also need to redefine ourselves as Americans by heakening back to more traditional values and mores.

There was, I believe, a vast gulf between the kind of WASPs who settled America and the effete elitist snobs from Harvard and Yale, the followers of the Modern Epicopalian Church, etc. (If anything, the Episcopalian Church was historically the Church of England. Most of the frontier fighting and settlement was done by other religious denominations like the Presbyterian Scots Irish and Germans.)

The WASP elite (largely a Yankee descended elite) disappeared in part because now "everyone" is WASP in an sense. In my lifetime I have seen it happen almost totally with American Catholics. There simply are not any cultural differences that I can pick up between middle class Catholics and WASPS. That was not true when I was a kid. I am somewhat bemused by all the hand wringing about immigration, and its threat to a supposedly fragile American culture. What I see is a culture that is more homogenous and Yankee WASP than it ever has been before, as it sweeps away all that stands before it, including Southern culture, which is also steadily becoming less distinctive.

True, but that assimilation took some time to really become effective. One question is whether the old nation-building experiences and institutions are still working.

Another how much universal "Americanized" popular culture and American political culture and identity overlap. Is the triumph of American pop culture among the middle classes of the world really a good thing for American politics? Are shared civic values being replaced by consumerism? Faded Mosaic: the Emergence of Post-Cultural America deals with this question. We can imagine a world that is dominated by Hollywood where traditional political loyalties decline and make problems for those who rely on borders and established identities. In any event that prospect isn't very comforting for those who already find themselves alienated from Hollywood's way of life. There's a feeling that as American-style consumerism spreads, some essential American characteristics will be lost.

But things do look different today than they did before 9/11. I wonder if there isn't some validity in the old idea that complex diverse societies need external enemies to keep from falling apart or destroying themselves. Adversity brings out virtues. Also, the same processes that make us uneasy at home, may help to defuse states that oppose us. If modernization and globalization do wean the Middle East from tyranny and terrorism -- which is probably not as likely as some people think -- maybe they are less to be feared.

But the unknown is always frightening, and tearing down borders is to invite mischief.

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