35 Theses on the WASPs

LAST MONTH American Affairs published my review of Alexander Karp’s The Technological Republic.1 While I had plenty critical to say about Karp’s book, the meat of my essay was a historical survey of the ascendant  “Eastern Establishment” of the Gilded Age. This class of men dominated American industry and exerted outsized influence in American politics in the decades between 1860 and 1930. They pioneered humanity’s leap into the industrial age and America’s rise to global preeminence. Much can be learned from them.

There are two groups who may reap special benefit from pondering the old Establishment’s origins and accomplishments. The first is the explicit target of my review: the engineering elite of Silicon Valley, especially those associated with the “tech-right.” My message to this group is simple: You live below your privileges. No matter your background or upbringing, you stand today as members of a distinct leadership class. You should think about what this means for your children and grandchildren. You have both the opportunity and the responsibility to shape American life for decades to come. Technological progress over that span is not automatic. No revolution in technology will persist without like change in culture and law. Such change is not automatic. You must build the foundations of the world you want your children to inherit. You have the means and the minds to do this. Your problem is that you are not properly ambitious.

That last sentence may seem strange to say to America’s tech titans, but I believe it is true. Silicon Valley’s problem is not a surfeit of ambition, but a lack of it. The more one studies the old Establishment, the more obvious this becomes.

But there is another group that should study the rise of the 19^th century elite: the upstart young of the “new right.” Eager to build something new out of the shambles of a dying order, these fellows are absorbed by many of the political and cultural questions the engineering elite do not usually ponder. The young right has thus thought a great deal about the Eastern Establishment of yore—but their thoughts rarely linger on the period my essay is focused on. They are drawn instead to the final decades of the Establishment, when the WASPs descended from decadence to irrelevance.

Why this obsession with the dotage of a dead establishment?2The attraction is partially aesthetic:  like many governing classes in the decline, the Establishment grew more glamorous as it decayed. The popular image of the WASP is almost entirely a product of those final years of sickly glitz.

Consider: the term “WASP” is no older than Digby Baltzell’s sociological treatise The Protestant Establishment, published in 1964. The Stories of John Cheever earned its Pulitzer in 1979. The most influential depiction of the WASPs—Lisa Birnbach’s Official Preppy Handbook—was published in 1980. These books are preoccupied with the prejudices and privileges of the Northeastern elite. Their focus is squarely on mores and manners. This should not surprise. By the time these works were written, the political power of the Establishment had been broken. Their economic preeminence had been eclipsed. Displaced from his central role in the national pageant, the mid-century Establishment man was distinguished mostly by his cultural pretensions—pretensions he clung to until J.Crew repackaged them as weekend wear.

Our image of the Eastern Establishment is drawn from this twilight hour. This is not unusual. We tend to remember past cultures as they were just before their close. A living culture is never too sharply defined. Its form is not fixed; its face shifts with mood and circumstance. The expression fixed on a death mask does not alter.

One problem with viewing the Eastern Establishment purely through a cultural lens is that it is easy to take the wrong lessons from their decline. Consider a tweet thread Helen Andrews typed out shortly after the Supreme Court’s 2023 rulings striking down affirmative action. Tweeted she: “The answer to the question why did the WASP elite collapse so rapidly is, literally, changes to undergraduate admissions at a few elite universities.” Andrews predicts that the Court’s decision will eventually erode the cultural coherence of America’s 21^st-century elite as conclusively as the meritocratic admissions policies inaugurated by James Conant, Kingston Brewster, and their fellows destroyed the coherence of their 20^th-century counterparts. “The lesson of WASPdom’s collapse,” she continues, “is that you can kill an elite by destroying the institutions by which it reproduces itself.”3

Those who have read my American Affairs essay can probably guess why I am skeptical of this claim. The most important passage in my essay was probably my attempt to nail down a few generalizable truths about elite class formation:

Any governing class requires three things: a political coalition to which it owes allegiance and over which it exercises influence; an economic base that provides this class with wealth and unites its members around shared material interests; and finally, a set of institutions, rituals, and social customs that give this class a culture distinct from the country at large. Absent the first two, a leadership class lacks the power to lead; absent the latter two, it lacks the ability to act as a class.4

Andrews is focused on the “institutions, rituals, and social customs” part of that equation. There is an implied counterfactual in her account: if the Ivy League schools had not opened their doors to Jews, white ethnics, and the best SAT-takers from across America, then the Eastern Establishment would be as dominant in 2020 as it was in 1920. I do not think it is easy to reconcile this counterfactual with the actual history of this class. The WASPs were stripped of their political preeminence in the 1930s. Mid-century America was home to many new founts of wealth that did not flow into Establishment coffers. By the late 20^th-century the families of the Eastern Establishment were just one group of wealthy Americans among many. Neither of these transformations had much to do with Harvard admissions committees.

In other words, Ivy League admissions policies are a lagging indicator, not a leading one.

In the rest of this post, I want to sketch out my revisionist account of the Eastern Establishment. I am going to present this sketch by bullet point. Thirty-five bullet points, to be exact. A longer, meticulously sourced version of the first half (approximately everything between #2 and #21) can be found in the American Affairs essay linked to above. I have not written an equally well-sourced essay for the second half. Perhaps one day I will. Until then this bare-bones outline of my ideas will have to do.

35 THESES ON THE EASTERN ESTABLISHMENT

1. WASP is not the best term for the class of governing elites that dominated American industry in the six decades between 1870 and 1930 (and who retained vestigial influence over national affairs through the 1970s). Woodrow Wilson, Sam Rayburn, and Lyndon B. Johnson were all white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, but none were members of this class. In contrast, men like Jacob Schiff, Walter Lippman, Robert Moses, all of whom sprung from Jewish German stock, were very much members of this governing class. It is silly to pretend otherwise.5 I thus prefer the term “Eastern Establishment,” which excludes the former group and includes the latter in its ranks.
   
2. It does not make sense to speak of an American political or economic establishment before the U.S. Civil War. Antebellum and colonial leaders considered themselves leaders of their respective states and colonies. Their identities, their wealth, and their social networks were regional, not national.
   
3. The most ambitious political actors of the Antebellum era worked to keep things this way. The young republic did not have the sort of economic or political structures an elite class might use to nationalize the Union. This was largely by design: the majority of Americans were committed localists.
   
4. The Civil War would change this. The war began with the secession of the regional elite groups who were most resistant to national integration. The war would reduce their riches to char and rubble. It would take a century for the South to recover. The elect station of the Eastern Establishment was predicated on the continued suppression of Southern power.
   
5. The disparate political and civic leaders of the Northeast were bound together by the Civil War. This process was partially ideological and partially social. The war both instilled a new national consciousness in those who waged it and wove these geographically scattered leaders into a web of friendships that spanned the Northeast.
   
6. The war also threw the northeastern political elites together with a new social group: the rising class of industrialists, engineers, and financiers who made great fortunes building the industrial supply chains and financial machinery that sustained the Union war effort. The Eastern Establishment was born from the fusion of these two groups.
   
7. The “fusion” of the new class was not only ideological, economic, and political, but biological. The marriage of the different wings of the Eastern Establishment was literally consummated on hundreds of Northeastern bridal beds.
   
8. The cultural, political, and economic sway of the Civil War generation had unusual longevity. The young officers, politicos, and financiers who gave their youth to Union victory would dominate the American scene through the first decade of the 20^th-century. Their children and grandchildren would exert similar influence through the 1930s (and more limited but still significant influence several decades past that).
   
9. The origins of this class imprinted it with certain ideological priorities: above all else, an ironclad commitment to the integration and greatness of the American nation.
   
10. This class was also committed to technological acceleration. The Second Industrial Revolution was the primary source of the Eastern Establishment’s wealth. Their greatest accomplishment may have been the creation of the legal, financial, and administrative systems that made this revolution possible.
    
11. The chosen political vehicle of the Eastern Establishment was the Republican Party. Few of the Establishment’s economic or cultural ventures would have been successful without the dominance of the Republican Party during this era. Over these five decades most of the federal judiciary, the majority of Congresses, a supermajority of presidents, and the lion’s share of northern state governments were Republican.  
    
12. The Republican Party was a democratic coalition. The Eastern Establishment could not have played a central part in national affairs without the active support of this larger coalition. Unsurprisingly, the Establishment’s political program disproportionately benefited its coalition members.
    
13. America’s technological development—and thus the wealth of the Eastern Establishment—was dependent on a specific policy suite. This policy suite included the defense of the gold standard, a protective tariff regime, state and federal grants to railroads, judicial rulings which enshrined corporate personhood and which limited state-level regulation of commerce, and favorable bankruptcy and liability regimes.
    
14. America’s technological development—and thus the wealth of the northeast Establishment—was dependent on a new set of administrative and financial forms. The prototypical businessman is closely associated with our image of the WASP because the Eastern Establishment pioneered this profession—and created the economic conditions that made business managers necessary in the first place.
    
15. The new technological systems created by the Eastern Establishment strengthened America’s national integration, contributed to America’s national glory, and gave the Republican Party access to a store of wealth their opponents did not possess. This is one of the reasons for Republican dominance in this era.
    
16. Many of the distinctive customs and institutions that we associate with the Eastern Establishment—such as the St. Grottlesex schools—were either founded or reformed as the children of the Civil War generation came of age. Institutions like these were necessary because the children of the new Establishment did not have the foundational Civil War experiences of their fathers.
    
17. This was also the era in which many existing regional institutions—such as Harvard—recast their mission and membership in national terms. These institutions helped cement the coherence of the Eastern Establishment as a nationally oriented class.
    
18. By the year 1900, we can safely include the leading industrialists and Republican politicians of New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, and Ohio as the members of this class. Upstarts from other regions might join this class by emigrating to these places, joining key firms, and so on, but as a general rule the leading men of the South, Midwest, and Far West were not members of it.
    
19. The key city in this constellation was always New York City. Much of the scholarship on the Eastern Establishment is distorted by its focus on elites in lesser Establishment cities such as Boston and Philadelphia. New York City was the central stage of the Establishment—and thus the American—story right up to the New Deal.
    
20. The Eastern Establishment’s political, cultural, and economic activities were self-reinforcing:  Republican legislators and judges crafted the legal and political conditions for industrial expansion; from this expansion came the wealth that maintained Republican power. With their wealth and power, Establishment figures built institutions (and patronized a public culture) that instilled their ideology in the next generation and kept the project rolling forward.
    
21. The Eastern Establishment’s 60-year run would not have been possible had its activities not greatly benefited most Americans. These benefits rarely extended to Southerners or rural Westerners, who resisted national integration to the last. But these were minorities. The majority of Americans, who lived in the populous heartland, lived tangibly better lives because of America’s industrial transformation.
    
22. The system came crashing down with the Great Depression. Most obviously, the Great Depression discredited the leadership of the Eastern Establishment in the eyes of the American people and destroyed the electoral viability of the Republican Party for a generation.
    
23. Less obviously, the Great Depression ruined a great many Eastern Establishment families—especially those then living off of the dividends of smaller fortunes. The standard lifeway of the Eastern Establishment assumed a level of wealth that many of these families no longer had access to as banks collapsed and stock prices crashed. In particular, many rentier artists, scholars, and civil servants were wiped out.
    
24. The New Deal was an explicit attempt to downgrade the political, economic, and cultural influence of Eastern elites. Politically, it empowered Southerners, Westerners, and white ethnics in the North’s cities—precisely the Americans who the old establishment had marginalized from national power. Now Washington, not New York, was the central node in the American economy. Many New Deal economic programs unapologetically funneled wealth from the pocketbooks of rich Northeasterners into the impoverished communities of the Sunbelt. Even the New Deal’s cultural programs were designed to fund artists and intellectuals far removed from the Ivy League.
    
25. The 1930s, not the 1960s, were the point where many prominent WASPs defected from the Establishment order. The most obvious of these defectors was FDR, the original “traitor to his class.” Many of his New Deal programs were also staffed by WASPy appointees. But these men were defectors—servants of a coalition in which neither Establishment money nor Establishment-mobilized voters played a great part. The communist/leftist sympathies of these young turncoats had far greater historical significance than the New Left sympathies of their boomer counterparts.
    
26. The 1940s war economy and military industrial complex of the early Cold War only strengthened these trends. The new armaments industries were sunbelt industries. However, the steep war taxes that funded them disproportionately fell on northeastern firms and incomes. It is unlikely that the fantastic economic growth of the post-war South would have been possible without this interregional transfer of wealth.
    
27. The creation of the American national-security state further marked the relative eclipse of the Eastern Establishment. Though the Establishment would own key outposts in the new national security state (such as the CIA and the NSC), the main story of the new policy complex was the commanding position of the U.S. military. The U.S. military is predominantly led and staffed by Southerners and Midwesterners, few of whom were schooled in Establishment ways (this was—and remains—especially true of the Army, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps). The leaders of these organizations commanded authority as vast as the greatest Wall Street banker.
    
28. The Manhattan Project illustrates another challenge to the old Establishment Elite: by the mid-20^th century, national power was partially a function of scientific brilliance. Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, George Kistiakowsky, Alvin Weinberg, Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe (among so many others) were not WASPs. Many of the WASPier scientists involved were educated in places like the University of Wisconsin, Caltech, and Purdue. The rise of the national scientific complex, and the prestige that accrued to its leading scientists, posed a fundamental challenge to older Establishment institutions and cultural authority.   
    
29. The Manhattan Project was the most extreme example of a more general trend: the post-war world put an economic premium on intelligence. In the new information economy, smarts trumped polish. (The Second World War was really the watershed here. Consider: the rudiments of statistics, operations research, mathematical economics, and computation existed before 1940; after 1950 they lay at the center of government and corporate decision making). However, the families of the Eastern Establishment did not have a monopoly on intelligence. It would be difficult for this class to maintain a dominant position in any economic order that advantaged raw intelligence.
    
30. But there were other challenges to the Establishment’s economic predominance. The ‘20s and ‘30s gave birth to two new types of millionaire: the Hollywood Mogul and the Texas oil tycoon. There were Establishment investors who profited from investments in these industries, but both were projects of their respective regions and peoples. The wealth created by these industries rivaled that of the old WASP fortunes and helped spur the development of Texas and Southern California independent of federal subsidy. (Hollywood, and the larger mass entertainment industry that it pioneered, would become a rival cultural force. Soon Hollywood studio execs, not northeastern writers and activists would be defining what it meant to be an American).
    
31. This is the situation by the late 1950s: the political power of the Eastern Establishment was broken, the wealth it commanded was already in a state of relative decline, and its cultural authority was waning. Establishment figures were most successful in the fields of power that were most isolated from popular opinion: the judiciary, the intelligence agencies, old money foundations, and the executive suites of older firms.
    
32. This is the context in which Harvard et. al. changed their admission policies. In many realms America had already advanced past its old Establishment. Both American letters and American science were led by emigres and Jews. The country’s richest man was a Texan. It elected in quick succession a Missourian, a Kansan, a Catholic, and a Texan as president. By opening its doors to students of every state and stock, the Ivies simply ratified and hastened changes that were already sweeping the nation.  
    
33.  Two final wounds finished off this dying Establishment. The first was the expulsion of the Establishment from the GOP. This was a decade-long process, but is best dramatized by Nelson Rockefeller’s defeat at the hands of Barry Goldwater in 1960.
    
    (A relevant line from Richard Norton Smith’s Rockefeller biography that is too good to save for some future essay: “At a low point in this spring’s California primary campaign against Goldwater, political operative Stuart Spencer had pressed his candidate to summon that fabled nexus of money, influence, and condescension known as the Eastern Establishment. “You’re looking at it, buddy,’ Rockefeller told Spencer. “I’m all that’s left.”).6
    
34. The second was the Vietnam War. The Eastern Establishment foreign policy elite insisted on and presided over this war. It discredited their credibility as national leaders, destroyed their relationship with the American left, and relegated them to bystander status in their last domain of power. (If we must find a single moment to dramatize this change, I second Godfrey Hodgson’s selection of Henry Kissinger’s dismissive conference with the academic old guard in 1970).7
    
35. Many conservatives point to WASP hippies as a fitting symbol for the Establishment’s abnegation. I offer a different candidate: our 43^rd president, George W. Bush. Bush is the scion of the Eastern Establishment. He inherited his family’s tradition of public service while rejecting entirely the Establishment trappings of that tradition. Those who study the death of the Eastern Establishment would do well to ponder Bush’s decision to reject his roots in favor of a Texan identity, a Texan accent, and a thoroughly Texan set of ideals—and the electorate’s decision to reward him for doing this.

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Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found this post worth reading, you might find some of my other essays on elite education up your ally. Check out “Yale and the Education of Governing Elites,” “The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite,” and “Culture Wars are Long Wars.” If instead you want to read more about 19th century America, try “Lessons From the 19th Century,” “Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: A Tour Through Three Centuries of American Political Culture,” or “On Sparks Before the Prairie Fire.”

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