Essay: ARE THE WASPS COMING BACK? HAVE THEY EVER BEEN AWAY?

IT is a low-key intuition, not spiteful or malicious, but pervasive: in the minds of most Americans the incoming Nixon Administration seems to represent the comeback of the Wasp: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. True enough, the new President’s Cabinet, with three Roman Catholics, is statistically no more Waspish than most in recent decades, even though it stirred comment for including no Negro or Jew. But people sense about Nixon’s appointments, and his style, a tone of reassuring Wasp respectability and good manners. The forces that elected Nixon—those who most avidlv supported him—are Wasp to the core; the “ethnic blocs” voted for Humphrey. With Nixon’s accession, noted Norman Mailer, it is “possible, even likely, even necessary that the Wasp enter the center of our history again.”

Exactly who it is that will take over the center is a problem of definition. Wasps are not so easily characterized as other ethnic groups. The term itself can be merely descriptive or mildly offensive, depending on the user and the hearer; at any rate, it has become part of the American idiom. In one sense, it is redundant: since all Anglo-Saxons are white, the word could be Asp. Purists like to confine Wasps to descendants of the British Isles; less exacting analysts are willing to throw in Scandinavians, Netherlanders and Germans. At the narrowest, Wasps form a select band of well-heeled, well-descended members of the Eastern Establishment; at the widest, they include Okies and Snopeses, “Holy Rollers” and hillbillies. Wasps range from Mc-George Bundy and Penelope Tree to William Sloane Coffin Jr. and Phyllis Diller. Generously defined, Wasps constitute about 55% of the U.S. population, and they have in common what Columnist Russell Baker calls a “case of majority inferiority.”

A Quiet Retreat

Sometimes Wasps are treated like a species under examination before it becomes extinct. At the convocation of intellectuals in Princeton last month, Edward Shils, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, announced: “The Wasp has abdicated, and his place has been taken by ants and fleas. The Wasp is less rough and far more permissive. He lacks self-confidence and feels lost.” Other observers feel that the growing dissension in American life is a clear sign that the Wasp has lost his sting, that his culture no longer binds. The new radicals and protesters are not in rebellion against Wasp rule as such, but they deride the Wasp’s traditional values, including devotion to duty and hard work.

Although it is possible to exaggerate the decline of the Wasp, who has never really left the center of U.S. power, he is indisputably in an historical retreat. The big change came with the waves of migration from Europe in the 19th century, when many of his citadels—the big cities—were wrested from his political control. In a quiet fallback, the Wasps founded gilded ghettos—schools and suburbs, country clubs and summer colonies.

Lately, the non-Wasps have pursued them even there. A few years ago, Grosse Pointe, a Wasp suburb of Detroit, was notorious for rating prospective homeowners by a point system based on personal characteristics; Jews, Italians and “swarthy” persons almost invariably got so few points that they could not buy houses. Now all that has been abandoned, and Grosse Pointe has many Roman Catholic and Jewish residents. Downtown private clubs remain bastions of Wasp exclusiveness, but doors are opening. One recent example: Jews gained admission to the Kansas City Club in Kansas City, Mo., after an uproar over exclusionary policies; a rumor got out that the Atomic Energy Commission refused to locate a plant in the city because of private-club discrimination.

Non-Wasp groups are far better represented in Ivy League schools than they used to be: Jews, for instance, constitute about 25% of the student bodies. So traditional an Episcopal prep school as Groton now includes some 25 Roman Catholics, a dozen Negroes and three Jews. Jews stand out sharply in the nation’s intellectual life, and Jewish novelists are beginning to overtake the fertile Wasp talent. Scarcely a single Wasp is a culture hero to today’s youth; more likely he is the bad guy on the TV program, where names like Jones and Brown have replaced the Giovannis and O’Shaughnessys. The banker who made Skull and Bones is no model for undergraduates, writes Sociologist Nathan Glazer in FORTUNE. “Indeed, often the snobberies run the other way—the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, generally from a small town or an older and duller suburb, is likely to envy the big-city and culturally sophisticated Jewish students.”

Proper Wasps still rule in tight little enclaves of high society that are rarely cracked by newcomers. Yet anyone with a will—and money—can find a way to outflank Wasp society, which is often haunted by a sense of anachronism. Such is the hostility to the Veiled Prophet parade, an annual Wasp event in St. Louis, that the queen and her maids of honor last year had to be covered with a plastic sheet to protect them from missiles tossed from the crowd.

A Certain Security

But the Wasp retreat has by no means gone so far as to destroy his basic power—particularly strong in business and finance, considerable in politics, battered but tenacious in the social and moral field. Irishmen, Italians and Jews may have established themselves in construction, retailing, entertainment, electronics and light manufacturing, but big business and big banks belong to the Wasp. Almost 90% of the directors of the 50 largest corporations are Wasps. Similarly, about 80% of the directors of the ten largest banks are Wasps.

Wasps dominate the governing bodies of the richest universities in a ratio of four to one. More than four-fifths of the directors of the largest foundations are Wasps; of the 37 officers and directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, only one is non-Wasp. Under pressure of law and of the meritocratic “cult of performance,” Wall Street law firms and brokerage houses are making room for more Jews and Catholics, but they are still overwhelmingly Wasp-controlled.

The Federal Government has always been the domain of the Wasp. Until John Kennedy, every U.S. President was a Wasp, and so was every Vice President except Charles Curtis (1929-33), who was the son of an Indian. Last fall’s candidates, Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, were quite predictably Wasps. Although the civil service has been a traditional path of advancement for non-Wasps (half of Post Office workers in the large cities are Negroes), the prestigious departments, such as State, are still run by Wasps. Congress is a Wasp stronghold: the newly elected one consists of 109 Catholics, 19 Jews, 10 Negroes, 3 Greek Orthodox, 4 Orientals and almost 400 Wasps. Committee chairmanships are largely in the hands of Wasps. Enlisted men in the armed services are an ethnic mix, but the officers are heavily Wasp. Even in the cities they no longer control politically—Chicago or Cleveland—Wasps have much behind-the-scenes power. In several cities, Wasp business leaders have mobilized to aid the blacks, including the militants in the ghettos. Other ethnic politicians fear the erosion of their own power as the result of Wasp-Negro deals.

A Divided Majority

As for the Wasp’s moral authority, it is clearly waning, but he still has an inimitable asset: the inner security inherited from his Protestant background and his expansive American experience. “If you are a Wasp, you have the confidence that the Establishment is yours and that you are on the top,” says Novelist Herbert Gold. “There is the feeling that the love of a horsy woman comes to you as a birthright,” Hollywood may be filled mainly with non-Wasps, but they still usually take Wasp names and act out Wasp fantasies in films. In Jewish novels, the central character is often driven to live a Wasp-like life. Herzog finds his ultimate solace in a little bit of land he owns in the Berkshires: “symbol of his Jewish struggle for a solid footing in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America.”

Wasp power is obscured by the divisions natural to a majority, which keep Wasps from coalescing into the kind of cohesive blocs that other groups have formed. The Republican Party is preeminently Wasp; yet it has been rent for generations by deep-seated disagreements. Norman Mailer characterized the alienated delegates lusting for liberal blood at the 1964 convention. In a typical Mailer caricature, he evoked a “Wasp Mafia where the grapes of wrath were stored. Not for nothing did the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have a five-year subscription to Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, high colonies and arthritis, silver-rimmed spectacles, punched-out bellies and that air of controlled schizophrenia which is the merit badge for having spent one’s life on Main Street. Indeed, there was agreement that the war was between Main Street and Wall Street.”

To some extent, Wasps are presiding over the dissolution of their own dominion, and they are proud of it. In a book he wrote four years ago, The Protestant Establishment, Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell criticized upper-class Wasps for establishing a caste system in many places. Today, he gives them credit for being neither “arrogant nor insensitive. They are the least prejudiced people as far as intermarriage is concerned. Catholics are much more prejudiced and Jews are the worst of all.” The great assimilating Presidents of this century—the two Roosevelts—were quintessential Wasps.

The well-bred Wasp who rebels against the snobbishness and starchiness of his background is an almost classic figure in American life. Prominent Wasp families have contributed to the ranks of the current youthful revolutionaries.

Ultimately, Waspism may be more a state of mind, a pattern of behavior, than a rigid ethnic type. Some non-Wasps display all the characteristics normally associated with the most purebred Wasps. Consciously or not, they are Waspirants. Many people were surprised to learn that Edmund Muskie, who talked and looked like a Down East Yankee, was actually of Polish descent. Edward Brooke, who was successfully promoted for the U.S. Senate by civic-spirited Wasps, has all the attributes of a well-bred Wasp, as does Whitney Young Jr. One doesn’t have to be white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant to be a Wasp in spirit. The Wasp aura is created by the right education, style, social position, genealogy, achievement, wealth, profession, influence or politics.

Thus Roman Catholics like William Buckley, Sargent Shriver and Ted Kennedy are pushed toward Waspdom by their associations, professions and life styles. Though German Jewish, Walter Lippmann is still a Waspirant. His clubs (Metropolitan, Cosmos, River) and his influence on opinion give him undeniable Wasp power. Wall Street Dynasts John Schiff and John Loeb may qualify, if they want, as honorary Wasps. So may Walt Whitman Rostow, who has been a top aide of Lyndon Johnson and beats most Wasps at tennis.

“The perfect candidate,” wrote Harvard Professors Edward Banfield and James Wilson, “is of Jewish, Polish, Italian or Irish extraction and has the speech, dress, manners and the public virtues—honesty, impartiality and devotion for public interest—of the upper-class Anglo-Saxon.”

A Sense of Public Service

Ironically, it was a member of a Roman Catholic dynasty, John F. Kennedy, who added new luster to Wasp ideals. He was such a model Wasp with his dry humor, his laconic eloquence and his lack of sentimentality, that he set a style which encouraged many authentic upper-class Wasps to take heart and to run for political office. John D. Rockefeller IV was one. He was followed by George Bush in Texas, William L. Saltonstall and John Winthrop Sears in Massachusetts and Bronson La Follette in Wisconsin. “In previous times, you had to be born in a log cabin to be elected to office,” notes John Jay McCloy, who has been called the board chairman of the U.S. Wasp Establishment. “Now, to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth often means you have a distinct advantage. This would seem to indicate that the tradition of the Adamses, Elihu Root and Henry Stimson is perhaps even greater today.”

At his worst, the Wasp has been too repressive and rigid. At his best, he has stood for a certain selflessness, a sense of public service, a disinterestedness in the face of brawling passions. A feeling is growing that in this time of ideological rancor these are qualities worth reviving.