FLIGHT OF THE WASP

A critical history of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant cohort of American society, once dominant, now descending.

The first people to purchase enslaved Africans in Virginia were WASPs, but they were also among the first to launch coordinated abolitionist efforts. That diametrical division indicates that WASP society was not monolithic. Regardless, WASPs constituted “America’s elite from the eighteenth century until today,” writes Gross, author of Model and 740 Park. That elite remains economically powerful but culturally marginal. The author explains that its decline might be traced to the emergence of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as president—though, he adds, Kennedy was culturally aligned with WASPs and served as “a symbol of how an inclusive aristocracy replenishes itself, absorbing and even embracing those willing to learn and adapt to its ways.” That aristocracy was insular and to some extent inbred, though extraordinarily prolific: Were he alive to do so, a patriarch of the Bradford clan would have counted 11,272 descendants in just six generations, including Adlai Stevenson, Julia Child, Hugh Hefner, and Clint Eastwood. One thing is for certain: The American variety of Protestantism, whether “old school” or fundamentalist, proves Max Weber’s linking of the Protestant ethic to a kind of “hard frugality” capitalism that in many important respects all but replaced religion with business. Interestingly, as Gross writes, politics was long considered beneath the elite, but the crusading Theodore Roosevelt in particular made public service seem attractive to many. In conclusion, the author notes, whereas many WASPs have since retreated to “posh suburbs, restrictive clubs, elite charities, and the powerful financial sinecures that still cocooned them,” others are aligning themselves with a new America that many believe will become minority white by 2045.

A book of pop history and sociology that runs wide but not terribly deep, though readable and engaging all the same.