The best indicator of the waning influence of the WASP is that most people no longer know who the term refers to.
Stripped to its barest terms, “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” could mean anyone from an Appalachian bootlegger to a recently naturalized citizen who grew up in the Cotswolds. But these disparate figures, while white, of Anglo-Saxon descent, and notionally Protestant, are not members of the club. The most concise and useful definition comes from the WASP-adjacent writer and new 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat in a 2018 column occasioned by the death of President George H.W. Bush: “The term properly refers to a specific kind of American elite, mostly from the Northeast, mostly high-church Protestants, concentrated in a few cities (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, plus some Midwestern and Californian outposts), generally associated with the Republican Party (with occasional defectors like F.D.R.), who dominated a particular set of fields (academia, finance, foreign policy) and shared the code of service and piety and manners that defined the elder Bush’s career.”
Bush’s class was incubated in the American Northeast, but it was not dominant in the early decades of the republic. Instead, the WASPs’ Yankee predecessors were a regional elite who had to contend with other sectional interests. If any group came close to emulating the Roman model of a hereditary and deeply entrenched Republican aristocracy, it was the planters of Virginia, who supplied four of America’s first five presidents.
Despite its growing industrial and commercial weight, the Northeast lost as many political battles as it won during the Antebellum era, failing to permanently establish a national bank, avert a war with Mexico, or prevent the westward extension of slavery. But the Civil War permanently changed America’s regional balance of power. The Union won thanks in large part to the industrial, financial, and manpower sinews of the Northeast.
The so-called “Eastern Establishment” that emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War was more haute bourgeois than aristocratic. The most perceptive description of this milieu comes from the novelist Edith Wharton, herself a product of New York’s high society. In her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, Wharton neatly skewered the aristocratic pretensions of the city’s leading families through the mouth of a society matron:
“Don’t tell me,” Mrs. Archer would say to her children, “all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. … Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well.”
The WASPs are often compared to the British aristocracy, and from their mannerisms to their boarding schools, there is a familial resemblance. But British aristocrats groomed their sons for military service and political leadership, two professions the WASPs generally avoided. When a young Theodore Roosevelt decided to run for a seat in the New York State Assembly, the reaction among his peers ranged from bemused wonder to total bafflement. As an assemblyman, Roosevelt rubbed shoulders with Irish ward bosses and machine politicians, not fellow Harvard alumni. To the WASPs, politics was a dirty business — better to pursue a respectable career in law, finance, or industry than to sully yourself with grubby electioneering, notwithstanding Roosevelt’s meteoric political rise, and his fifth cousin Franklin’s later career.
The military is another profession that never held much appeal to the WASP elite. Even after the Civil War, the institution was dominated by Southerners and career officers from military families. When Theodore Roosevelt, always the maverick, raised a regiment of volunteers to fight in the Spanish-American War, his commanding officer was Joseph Wheeler, a former Confederate cavalry general who kept referring to the Spaniards as “Yankees.” It’s not that the WASPs were reluctant to enlist when called upon — the chapels of Yale and Harvard are inscribed with alumni who fell in the World Wars. Career military service, however, was not their metier.
The WASPs had other paths to power, though power, as such, was not an end but a means. As American capitalism matured and railroad barons erected libraries and sent their sons to prep schools, an identifiable WASP ethos of public service developed. E.H. Harriman built railroads — his son, Averell Harriman, went to Groton and Yale and helped build the post-World War II international order.
As this sensibility matured, the Eastern Establishment extended its tentacles outside the Yankee heartland. Stanford University was founded in 1885 as California’s answer to Cornell. T.S. Eliot came from a Boston Brahmin family that had relocated to St. Louis. Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson and Minnesota-born F. Scott Fitzgerald were both educated at Princeton. It is impossible not to see the imprimatur of this WASPy bastion on their later careers, from Wilson’s paternalistic brand of progressivism to Fitzgerald’s creation Jay Gatsby, who changed his name from “Gatz” and affected an Ivy League pedigree.
After the end of World War II, E.H. Harriman famously remarked that Americans only wanted to “go to the movies and drink Coke,” but he and a few other figures were determined not to repeat the mistakes of World War I. The intellectual justification for anti-Soviet containment was first laid out by Princeton-educated George F. Kennan, who, along with Harriman, became one of the so-called “Wise Men.” The Marshall Plan that rebuilt Western Europe was conceptualized and implemented by the same clique.
Even critics of the Eastern Establishment can appreciate the significance of these postwar achievements. In an otherwise acerbic 2019 Harper’s essay on the WASP legacy, the left-wing economist Doug Henwood admitted as much: “It must be conceded that they had a pretty good run, designing a relatively stable international order steered from Washington, which endured for decades.”
Ruling classes decline when their power base erodes and they lose legitimacy in the eyes of the ruled. Rome’s evolution from an Italian city-state to a Mediterranean empire coincided with a shift in political power from the landed nobility to wealthy plutocrats and generals who could command the loyalty of armies. Civil wars and endemic public disorder delegitimized the old system. The figures we associate with the Roman Empire at its height — Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius — were drawn from the empire’s provincial landowning class, hungry outsiders with no ties to the old elite.
Something similar happened to the WASPs in the second half of the 20th century. America’s economic center of gravity shifted from the Northeast to the West and the Sun Belt. The Ivy League, Wall Street, the CIA, and corporate America opened their doors to talented newcomers from all backgrounds.
E. Digby Baltzell, the academic who originally popularized the term “WASP,” argued that, by the 1960s, the Eastern Establishment had become too snobby, too precious about going to the right schools and summering in the right zip codes, and too closed off to new talent. An alternative explanation is that the upheavals of the 1960s and the wider crisis of confidence they inspired reached the inner circles of the establishment, delegitimizing the very idea of grooming a narrow, privileged elite for leadership. The Carter administration’s behind-the-scenes struggle between Polish-born national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance, the Connecticut prep school- and Yale-educated secretary of state, is emblematic of this shift.
By the 1980s, the country had changed so dramatically that the WASPs were becoming a folk memory: fodder for Hollywood villains, style advice from The Official Preppy Handbook, or the character of Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, an insecure Wall Street trader ashamed that he might be related to someone from Kentucky. The failed reelection campaign of Bush, a Connecticut Yankee who never found the common touch, was another sign of the times. In a more democratic, media-saturated age, the Eastern Establishment’s aversion to electoral politics and preference for behind-the-scenes maneuvers had become major liabilities.
Bush’s son, George W. Bush, moved to Texas, became an oilman, and adopted a cowboy persona to reclaim the presidency for his family. Older brother Jeb moved to Florida, married a Hispanic woman, and converted to Catholicism, only to lose the 2016 Republican presidential primary to Donald Trump, the boastful, vulgar antithesis of everything the old establishment once stood for. In an appropriate bookend, Trump’s great first-term antagonist was Robert Mueller III, whose buttoned-up public persona and WASPy style seemed relics from an older era. Naturally, Mueller never did get his man.
Unlike the nobiles of Ancient Rome, the WASPs didn’t decline because of incompetence or misrule. Instead, they were victims of their own success. From exclusive prep schools to Harvard to the civil service, the institutions they once dominated, and, in many cases, built from the ground up, worked so well that outsiders insisted on getting in on the action.
Our current political climate could use a hearty dose of the old virtues. One bitter irony is that Ivy League secret societies and exclusive organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the infamous Bohemian Grove were often fodder for conspiracy theories about sex parties, bizarre pagan rituals, and other hidden crimes. Yet the Epstein files, which have revealed an elite class that is every bit as insular as that of the WASPs, minus its sense of duty or proper conduct, suggest that the old codes were much better at regulating the behavior of the rich and powerful.
The Republican Party was once a vehicle for the establishment, but the country-club set has been thoroughly routed by a wave of Trump-inflected politicians and influencers. But this new generation has forgotten one of the old guard’s cardinal rules: Discretion and self-restraint make elites more palatable to the broader public. There was a practical reason that flaunting your wealth was considered bad form: It invites anger, resentment, jealousy, and accusations of self-dealing. Trump’s political success is often credited to his showman qualities, but he has never put together a truly dominant electoral win, and underlings who try to ape Trump’s over-the-top theatrics have met with even less success.
THE WASP WHO LANDED ON THE FUNNY PAGES
At first glance, the technocrats of the modern American Left seem to be the WASPs’ natural inheritors, having taken over the charitable foundations, government agencies, and universities that once belonged to the Eastern Establishment. But the Left seems embarrassed by the very idea of patriotic public service. The great achievements of the postwar American order, from the Marshall Plan to the establishment of NATO, were inspired not just by noblesse oblige but by a sincere belief in advancing American interests.
Today, your average Ivy League undergraduate is more likely to wear sweatpants than loafers and more familiar with the language of social justice than the Social Register. Sometimes, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.