WSJ | The U.S. once had an unofficial but
nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as
the WASP establishment. Members of this establishment dominated
politics, economics and education, but they do so no longer. The
WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it, the
power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless
one includes the entity that has come to be known as the
meritocracy—presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and
women trained in the nation's most prestigious schools.
The
acronym WASP derives, of course, from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but
as acronyms go, this one is more deficient than most. Lots of people,
including powerful figures and some presidents, have been white,
Anglo-Saxon and Protestant but were far from being WASPs. Neither
Jimmy Carter
nor
Bill Clinton
qualified.
WASPs were a caste,
closed off to all not born within it, with the possible exception of
those who crashed the barriers by marrying in. WASP credentials came
with lineage, and lineage—that is, proper birth—automatically brought
connections to the right institutions. Yale, Princeton and Harvard were
the great WASP universities, backed up by Choate, Groton, Andover,
Exeter and other prep schools. WASPs tended to live in exclusive
neighborhoods: on upper Park and Fifth Avenues in New York, on the Main
Line in Philadelphia, the Back Bay in Boston, Lake Forest and Winnetka
in Chicago.
WASP life, though, was
chiefly found on the eastern seaboard. WASPs had their own social clubs
and did business with a small number of select investment and legal
firms, such as Brown Brothers Harriman and Sullivan & Cromwell. Many
lived on inherited money, soundly invested.
The State Department was once dominated by
WASPs, and so, too, was the Supreme Court, with one seat traditionally
left unoccupied for a Jewish jurist of proper mien. The House of
Representatives was never preponderantly WASP, though a number of
prominent senators—
Henry Cabot Lodge
and
Leverett A. Saltonstall,
both of Massachusetts, come to mind—have been WASPs. Looking down
on the crudities of quotidian American politics,
Henry Adams,
a WASP to the highest power, called the dealings of Congress, the
horse-trading and corruption and the rest of it, "the dance of
democracy." In one of his short stories,
Henry James
has characters modeled on Adams and his wife Clover, planning a
social evening, say, "Let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite
the President."
So dominant was WASP
culture that some wealthy families who didn't qualify by lineage
attempted to imitate and live the WASP life. The Catholic Kennedys were
the most notable example. The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port—the
sailing, the clothes, the touch football played on expansive green
lawns—was pure WASP mimicry, all of it, except that true WASPs were too
upstanding to go in for the unscrupulous business dealings of
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.
or the feckless philanderings of him and some of his sons.
That
the Kennedys did their best to imitate WASP life is perhaps not
surprising, for in their exclusion, the Irish may have felt the sting of
envy for WASPocracy more than any others. The main literary chroniclers
of WASP culture—
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
say, or John O'Hara—were Irish. (Both Fitzgerald and O'Hara tried
to live their lives on the WASP model.) But the pangs weren't limited
to the Irish alone. To this day, the designer
Ralph Lauren
(né Lifshitz) turns out clothes inspired by his notion of the
WASP high life, lived on the gracious margins of expensive leisure. Fist tap Vic.
