WASP: Encyclopedia - WASP

WASP

WASP (an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is a term that denotes the culture, customs, and heritage of the American élite Establishment. The term was first used by Irish Catholics to designate an adversarial relationship, and was popularized ¹ by sociologist E. Digby Baltzell in his 1964 book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America. The term is vague and can be streched or compressed by different writers. Baltzell originally included focused on a small, rich upper class. Others add the descendants of colonial-era immigrants from the British Isles—especially England, but also from Wales and Scotland (irrespective of the fact that Scots and Welsh people are predominantly descended from Celts, not descendants of Angles and Saxons) —who belonged to the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Episcopalian (Anglican) denominations of Protestantism. Southerners are usually not designated WASPS. The WASP designation also usually includes persons of Dutch descent such as the Vanderbilts and Roosevelts-- Theodore Roosevelt vigorously rejected the term. However, the WASP designation is usually not applied to working class descendents of ths Scots, Ulster-Scots/Scots Irish, and the Welsh. Usage of the term is growing in other English-speaking countries settled in part by similar groups, such as Australia.

WASP - Modern use

Use of the term WASP has broadened significantly since its coinage, and it is now sometimes applied to all Protestants of European descent. In the East Coast region of the United States, it generally is used to contrast 'old stock' Americans from the colonial era with the descendants of later European immigrants, such as Irish-American Catholics, Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and other "white ethnics."

In the South, where relatively few immigrants settled after 1860, WASP is less commonly used. In the Western United States, 'Anglo' is often used to contrast white Americans of European ancestry from Hispanics. It has a broader meaning than 'WASP'.

WASP - The original WASPs

The original WASP élite had an ironclad hold on the social structure of the United States since the early 1800s. Legacy admission to prep schools and to large universities in Ivy League or small liberal arts colleges such as the Five Colleges of Ohio taught habit and attitude and formed connections which carried over to the influential spheres of finance, culture, and politics. Intermarriage preserved large inherited fortunes. Diversions such as polo and yachting marked those with sufficient wealth and leisure to pursue them. Social registers and society pages listed the privileged, who mingled in the same private clubs, attended the same churches, and lived in neighborhoods—Philadelphia's Main Line and Boston's Back Bay are two notable examples—governed by covenants designed to separate the well-bred from the merely wealthy. As the 19th century progressed, WASP enclaves sprung up in the Midwest and West, in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan and Pasadena, California, spreading the practices and perspectives of the group beyond their traditional redoubts.

Newer immigrants lacked property or connections with the U.S. political system—creating, at first, a profound difference in wealth and influence across religious and ethnic lines. In response, they formed parallel institutions in politics (e.g. the political machines of New York City and Chicago), business, and academia which, in time, eroded this concentration of wealth and influence in WASP hands. It was not until after World War II that the networks of privilege and power in the old Protestant establishment began to lose significance. The GI Bill brought higher education to the children of poor immigrants, civil rights legislation did away with explicit discrimination in the workplace, and the prosperity of the postwar era created ample economic opportunity and a large new middle class. Nevertheless, the old WASPs are overrepresented in the country's cultural, political, and economic élite. ²

Aspects of the WASP establishment remain visible today. They are still upper middle to upper class educated Protestants, members of high society, with prep school and Ivy League educations. They are concentrated in New England and the Northeast. However, these regions now have majority Catholic populations and are no longer WASP heartlands, while Ivy League schools no longer admit WASPs in disproportionate numbers. The term does not easily apply in the Midwest, where generations of Yankee, Pennsylvanian, and Virginian pioneers and farmers settled, though this region maintains a Protestant majority. In the South, the term is more common than in the Midwest, although because the South is dominated by Evangelical churches, which have different educational and cultural values than their Northern American Protestant counterparts, Southern usage of the term does not fit its traditional definition. In general, the American protestant heartland is now located in the Midwest and South, and as protestants from these regions achieve national prominence, they reflect an entirely different family of the species of WASP than once existed on the Eastern Seaboard.

WASP - Connotations and stereotypes

The term is redundant because all Anglo-Saxons are white. It is ethnically false because there were no "Anglo-Saxons" in America in the first place. The English who came derived from many different ethnic stocks over 1000 years. The Anglo-Saxon language, or Old English, disappeared 800+ years ago. 'WASP' is a term with an edge--not quite nasty, like "Wop", but not friendly. ³ It is sometimes pejorative, intended to drag up the history of racism, nativism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and attitudes of cultural superiority among the white Anglo-Saxon population. "To this day in America, the Wasps are the one group about which--in a politically correct atmosphere--jokes can be made with impunity." remarks Joseph Epstein, in Washington Monthly, 2001. Various stereotypes attach to the term: WASPs are thought to be boring, greedy, frugal, snobbish, distant, compulsively hardworking, emotionally undemonstrative and arrogant⁴. Nonetheless, some Americans will happily self-identify as WASPs.

Physically, the stereotype remains that many in this group bear typical "English" looks; tall in stature with slight builds. However, more than any other stereotype, WASP's are more often than not noted for having pale, and often sunburnt skin complexions, fair coloured wavy to curly hair, and light colored eyes. Another stereotype prevails that a propensity for alcohol often seems to give many people from this ethnic group beet red faces. According to the Official Preppy Handbook, Gin and Tonic aka "G&T" is the preferred libation. This along with a physiological inability to tan in the sun may have given rise to the classist term, redneck. This latter term is a classically prejudicial term as it describes how pale skin color turns red when working outside or in the fields, increasingly jobs for the lowest classes.

See also

• Frugality
• Boston Brahmin
• Locust Valley Lockjaw
• Preppy
• Social Register
• Social structure of the United States
• Protestantism
• Anti-Protestantism

WASP - Notes

• Note 1: Erdman B. Palmore coined the term in his article "Ethnophaulisms and Ethnocentrisms" (The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 67, No. 4. (Jan., 1962), p. 442), but it was Baltzell who popularized it.
• Note 2: Davidson, Pyle, Reyes, p. 164
• Note 3: Allen, p. 110
• Note 4: Allen, pp. 114–116

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "WASP", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki