THE AGENDA Books Ex Libris
A history of WASPs reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of this particularly American social group, says Christopher Silvester
followed by the desire for ‘fair sheepfolds’ in which such souls might thrive (a reference to Dante’s line ‘the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb’). For male WASPs, it was about
WASPs
The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy MICHAEL KNOX BERAN (PEGASUS BOOKS, £22)
FOR A CENTURY after the WASPs came into existence, the term WASP – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant – barely existed. It was used by writer Stetson Kennedy as shorthand for white supremacist in 1948, was refined by political scientist Andrew Hacker in 1957 to include ‘Wealthy’ instead of ‘White’ and to emphasise ‘Episcopalian’ rather than merely Protestant, and was popularised as the acronym for a social caste by sociologist E Digby Baltzell in his 1964 book The Protestant Establishment. But already, in 1960, WASP writer
Cleveland Amory had published a book called Who Killed Society? The WASP dream was supposedly over before the WASPs had been classified. Prominent WASPs such as Henry Adams, Endicott Peabody, JP Morgan and the two presidents Roosevelt would never have heard the word used except in reference to the insect, nor did they have a handy term for encapsulating their caste. Yet I am sure they would all experience the
same pleasure of mutual self-recognition in reading Michael Knox Beran’s elegant and elegiac tribute to WASPdom. (Like Professor Baltzell, Beran considers himself a WASP, or perhaps a WASP remnant or ghost, since he believes WASPs are extinct.) The WASPs were born in the ‘Gilded
Age’ which followed the American Civil War, a time in which the patricians of the past, the New England Puritans and Boston Brahmins, rediscovered their purpose as guardians of a republic facing plutocracy and corruption. ‘They went in for political reform, as championed by the Roosevelts,’ writes Beran, ‘and founded institutions intended to produce a patrician class that would regenerate America.’ For WASPs, the desire for a wholeness of soul, a completed life, was paramount,
‘masculine strength’. For female WASPs, it was about breaking out of their gilded cages and demonstrating their unused powers, often in the field of social reform and philanthropy. The Bostonian Isabella Stewart Gardner, for example, was described by Henry James as ‘not a woman, but a locomotive, with a Pullman car attached’. But these WASP ideals were a terrible burden. As Beran puts it, ‘living a life so effortlessly perfect was, in fact, hard work, and bred its own unhappiness’. Or as Truman Capote put it in his summation of Babe Paley, she ‘had only one fault; she was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect’. High ideals came not only with abject disappointment, but also with neurasthenia, malady of the soul. Not for nothing was suicide described as the WASP disease. ‘WASPs have long been haunted by the despairs, lunacies, and hysterias in their domestic histories,’ says Beran. ‘We’re all fuck-ups trying to figure out how it is we got so fucked up,’ says one of the characters in a short story by WASP novelist Robert Worth Bingham, Jr, who died of a heroin overdose in 1999. At a lesser level, alcohol and alcoholism were a constant of WASP life, if not an obsession. It was WASPs, not the ‘Mad Men’ of Madison Avenue, who invented the cocktail hour. Washington insider columnist Joe Alsop, a classic WASP, critiqued the cocktail-making ability of FDR, who made ‘a good old-fashioned’ but only ‘a fair martini’, about ‘the color of spar varnish’. This ‘once formidable tribe’ are today, as Beran puts it, ‘lost in a haze of dry martinis’.
For male WASPs, it was about
‘masculine strength’. For female WASPs, it was about breaking out of their gilded cages and demonstrating their unused powers
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