Revising US history through WASP-tinted glasses

WASPs present themselves as born, not made — part of a kind of natural aristocracy, bred to rule with dignity and wisdom. But WASPs, like other Americans, are a product of their environment, not their breeding. And the birth of the WASP was largely reactive.

When, during the 19th century, Jews, Catholics and others poured onto American shores, some of them, like Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie, were lucky enough to become fantastically successful. They joined other new men — like John D. Rockefeller — and built their wealth in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, fueled by the fires of innovation and the work of an ever-expanding immigrant labor force. This new elite began to economically surpass the old, which responded by suggesting that working for a living was distasteful.

Threatened by the massive fortunes of new men, the old elites fashioned themselves as the establishment — creating an exclusionary culture, drawing on their social connections built in private spaces like the Union Club and using their associations with such institutions as Ivy League universities to help support their positions. The establishment feared the rabble of the working classes. So scared of the potential threats of Gilded Age workers were members of the Upper East Side establishment that they built an armory in their neighborhood to protect themselves in the event of class warfare. And so the WASP was made: a clique not dedicated to the betterment of the nation but consolidated through its members’ fear and motivated to realize their continued shared advantage.

The legacy of the WASP is thus found in exclusion, anxiety and class interests. The civilized reforms that we now associate with this era were the result of fights in which the WASP was most often on the wrong side. We might ask, “Why do workers enjoy a 40-hour workweek, a weekend and modest but important labor protections?” Certainly not because of the magnanimity of their managers. Let us not forget that there were some 37,000 strikes in the United States from 1881 to 1905, in which more than 7 million men and women put their livelihoods on the line.

WASPs were hardly supportive of these movements. U.S. Attorney General and known WASP Richard Olney led the response to the Pullman strike of 1894, sending some 12,000 U.S. troops to confront the workers. Thirty strikers were killed, and eventually the WASPs had to concede the right for workers to enjoy reasonable wages, benefits and labor conditions. But they put up a fight while they could.

The civil rights movement is another example of progress that took place not because of WASPs but despite them. It would be absurd to suggest that the extension of political rights to African-Americans was somehow not the result of popular protest and outrage against white America. We cannot claim with a straight face that men like Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. were secondary players and that women like Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates and Diane Nash were merely beneficiaries of WASP grace.

There is a long intellectual tradition that seeks to glorify the WASP on religious grounds. The sociologist Max Weber famously argued that Protestantism made capitalism possible, thereby helping the nations of Northern Europe and the United States distance themselves from the rest of the world. Weber’s arguments are easily misconstrued. Intellectually lazy thinkers extrapolate his ideas and suggest that the virtuous character of Protestantism is the source of all that is good. The perceived loss of association with Protestantism, then, must help explain America’s so-called national decline.

The current wave of WASP nostalgia draws from this tradition. But why choose now to lament the WASP? Perhaps because our current president is not white. Perhaps because Barack Obama’s Christianity has been questioned. Even the president’s birthplace has been the subject of endless debate since before he took office. It is clear, at the very least, that Obama is no WASP.

Racism and bigotry may well part of the great WASP lament, but they are not its only sources. A coordinated, homogeneous ruling class does seem more able to achieve its goals than the (admittedly more diverse) fractured and fighting leaders we have today. But the goals of a unified elite aren’t always worthwhile, and great men do not necessarily make great leaders. It’s unique situations that make good leadership possible, and those situations often include a coordinated opposition movement that speaks truth to the powers that be.

We need a return to this sort of progressive opposition, not some fabricated memory of great leaders. If we wish to lament the loss of the WASP era, let us not suggest that it is establishment white Protestants we need. Instead we need what made the WASP great: the diverse and driven people who opposed them.