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发帖数: 4825 | 1 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230436720457
By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
Dec. 20, 2013 7:44 p.m. ET
The U.S. once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn
from what came to be known as the WASP establishment. Members of this
establishment dominated politics, economics and education, but they do so no
longer. The WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it,
the power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless
one includes the entity that has come to be known as the meritocracy—
presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in
the nation's most prestigious schools.
The acronym WASP derives, of course, from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but
as acronyms go, this one is more deficient than most. Lots of people,
including powerful figures and some presidents, have been white, Anglo-Saxon
and Protestant but were far from being WASPs. Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill
Clinton qualified.
WASPs were a caste, closed off to all not born within it, with the possible
exception of those who crashed the barriers by marrying in. WASP credentials
came with lineage, and lineage—that is, proper birth—automatically
brought connections to the right institutions. Yale, Princeton and Harvard
were the great WASP universities, backed up by Choate, Groton, Andover,
Exeter and other prep schools. WASPs tended to live in exclusive
neighborhoods: on upper Park and Fifth Avenues in New York, on the Main Line
in Philadelphia, the Back Bay in Boston, Lake Forest and Winnetka in
Chicago.
WASP life, though, was chiefly found on the eastern seaboard. WASPs had
their own social clubs and did business with a small number of select
investment and legal firms, such as Brown Brothers Harriman and Sullivan &
Cromwell. Many lived on inherited money, soundly invested.
The State Department was once dominated by WASPs, and so, too, was the
Supreme Court, with one seat traditionally left unoccupied for a Jewish
jurist of proper mien. The House of Representatives was never preponderantly
WASP, though a number of prominent senators— Henry Cabot Lodge and
Leverett A. Saltonstall, both of Massachusetts, come to mind—have been
WASPs. Looking down on the crudities of quotidian American politics, Henry
Adams, a WASP to the highest power, called the dealings of Congress, the
horse-trading and corruption and the rest of it, "the dance of democracy."
In one of his short stories, Henry James has characters modeled on Adams and
his wife Clover, planning a social evening, say, "Let us be vulgar and have
some fun—let us invite the President."
So dominant was WASP culture that some wealthy families who didn't qualify
by lineage attempted to imitate and live the WASP life. The Catholic
Kennedys were the most notable example. The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port
—the sailing, the clothes, the touch football played on expansive green
lawns—was pure WASP mimicry, all of it, except that true WASPs were too
upstanding to go in for the unscrupulous business dealings of Joseph P.
Kennedy Sr. or the feckless philanderings of him and some of his sons.
That the Kennedys did their best to imitate WASP life is perhaps not
surprising, for in their exclusion, the Irish may have felt the sting of
envy for WASPocracy more than any others. The main literary chroniclers of
WASP culture— F. Scott Fitzgerald, say, or John O'Hara—were Irish. (Both
Fitzgerald and O'Hara tried to live their lives on the WASP model.) But the
pangs weren't limited to the Irish alone. To this day, the designer Ralph
Lauren (né Lifshitz) turns out clothes inspired by his notion of the WASP
high life, lived on the gracious margins of expensive leisure.
The last WASP president was George H.W. Bush, but there is reason to believe
he wasn't entirely proud of being a WASP. At any rate, he certainly wasn't
featuring it. When running for office he made every attempt to pass himself
off as a Texan, declaring a passion for pork rinds and a love for the music
of the Oak Ridge Boys. (His son George W. Bush, even though he can claim
impeccable WASP lineage and went to the right schools, seems otherwise to
have shed all WASPish coloration and become an authentic Texan, happily
married to a perfectly middle-class librarian.)
That George H.W. Bush felt it strategic not to emphasize his WASP background
was a strong sign that the decline of the WASP's prestige in American
culture was well on its way. Other signs had arisen much earlier. During the
late 1960s, some of the heirs of the Rockefeller clan openly admitted
feeling guilty about their wealth and the way their ancestors came by it. By
the 1970s, exclusive universities and prep schools began dropping their age
-old quotas on Catholics and Jews, lessening the number of legacies
automatically admitted, and using racial preferences to encourage the
enrollment of blacks. The social cachet of the Episcopal Church, a major
WASP institution, drained away as its clergy turned its major energies to
leftish causes.
Calling something elite, which was how WASPs of an earlier era preferred to
think of themselves, became a denunciation. Being a WASP was no longer a
source of happy pride but something distasteful if not slightly disgraceful
—the old privileges of membership now seeming unjust and therefore badly
tainted. An old joke has one bee asking another bee why he is wearing a
yarmulke. "Because," answers the second bee, "I don't want anyone to take me
for a WASP."
The late 1960s put the first serious dent into the WASPs as untitled
aristocrats and national leaders. For protesters of that generation, the
word WASP didn't come into play so much as the word Establishment,
heretofore chiefly an ecclesiastical term. The Establishment was the
protesters' enemy and target. The Establishment was thought to have sent the
country into Vietnam; it was perfectly content with the status quo, with
all its restrictions on freedom and tolerance for unjust social arrangements
; it stood for all that was uptight and generally repressive in American
culture.
The Establishment took its place in a long tradition of enemies of American
life. This list has included, at various times, Wall Street, Madison Avenue
and the military-industrial complex—vague entities all. But there was
nothing vague about the Establishment. They were alive and breathing, and
they had such names as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, W. Averell
Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Joseph Alsop, C. Douglas Dillon, George
F. Kennan and Robert McNamara. The WASPs ruled the country, and for those
who didn't much like the country or the directions in which they saw it
tending, the WASPs were a great and easily identifiable enemy.
The last unashamed WASP to live in the White House was Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, and he, with his penchant for the reform of American society, was
considered by many a traitor to his social class. He is also likely to be
the last to reside there. WASP culture, though it exists in pockets of
private life—country clubs, neighborhoods, a few prep schools and law firms
—is finished as a phenomenon of public significance.
Much can be—and has been—written about the shortcomings of the WASPocracy.
As a class, it was exclusionary and hence tolerant of social prejudice, if
not often downright snobbish. Tradition-minded, it tended to be dead to
innovation and social change. Imagination wasn't high on its list of admired
qualities.
Yet the WASP elite had dignity and an impressive sense of social
responsibility. In a 1990 book called "The Way of the Wasp," Richard
Brookhiser held that the chief WASP qualities were "success depending on
industry; use giving industry its task; civic-mindedness placing obligations
on success, and antisensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it;
conscience watching over everything."
Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal and incompetence in high places
weren't, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability
, solidity, gravity and a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused
public life. As a ruling class, today's new meritocracy has failed to
provide the positive qualities that older generations of WASPs provided.
Meritocracy is leadership thought to be based on men and women who have
earned their way not through the privileges of birth but by merit. La carri
ère ouverte aux les talents: Careers open to the talented, is what Napoleon
Bonaparte promised, and it is what any meritocratic system is supposed to
provide.
The U.S. now fancies itself under a meritocratic system, through which the
highest jobs are open to the most talented people, no matter their lineage
or social background. And so it might seem, when one considers that our 42nd
president, Bill Clinton, came from a broken home in a backwater in Arkansas
, while our 44th, Barack Obama, was himself also from a broken home and
biracial into the bargain. Sen. Ted Cruz, the man who leads the tea party,
is the son of a Cuban émigré.
Meritocracy in America starts (and often ends) in what are thought to be the
best colleges and universities. On the meritocratic climb, one's mettle is
first tested by getting into these institutions—no easy task in the
contemporary overcrowded scramble for admission. Then, of course, one must
do well within them. In England, it was once said that Waterloo and the
empire were built on the playing fields of Eton. The current American
imperium appears to have been built at the offices of the Educational
Testing Service, which administers the SATs.
Whether Republican or Democrat, left or right, the leading figures in U.S.
public life today were good at school. Bill Clinton had Georgetown, Oxford (
as a Rhodes scholar) and Yale Law School on his résumé; Barack Obama had
Columbia and Harvard Law School. Their wives, respectively, had Wellesley
and Yale Law School and Princeton and Harvard Law School. Cruz went to
Princeton and thence to Harvard Law School. Players all—high rollers in the
great American game of meritocracy. Their merit resides, presumably, in
having been superior students.
But is the merit in our meritocracy genuine? Of the two strongest American
presidents since 1950— Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan —the first didn't
go to college at all, and the second went to Eureka College, a school
affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Eureka, Ill.
The notion of Harry Truman as a Princeton man or Ronald Reagan as a Yalie
somehow diminishes them both.
Apart from mathematics, which demands a high IQ, and science, which requires
a distinct aptitude, the only thing that normal undergraduate schooling
prepares a person for is... more schooling. Having been a good student, in
other words, means nothing more than that one was good at school: One had
the discipline to do as one was told, learned the skill of quick response to
oral and written questions, figured out what professors wanted and gave it
to them.
Having been a good student, no matter how good the reputation of the school
—and most of the good schools, we are coming to learn, are good chiefly in
reputation—is no indication of one's quality or promise as a leader. A good
student might even be more than a bit of a follower, a conformist, standing
ready to give satisfaction to the powers that be so that one can proceed to
the next good school, taking another step up the ladder of meritocracy.
What our new meritocrats have failed to evince—and what the older WASP
generation prided itself on—is character and the ability to put the well-
being of the nation before their own. Character embodied in honorable action
is at the heart of the novels and stories of Louis Auchincloss, America's
last unembarrassedly WASP writer. Doing the right thing, especially in the
face of temptations to do otherwise, was the WASP test par excellence. Most
of our meritocrats, by contrast, seem to be in business for themselves.
Trust, honor, character: The elements that have departed U.S. public life
with the departure from prominence of WASP culture have not been taken up by
the meritocrats. Many meritocrats who enter politics, when retired by the
electorate from public life, proceed to careers in lobbying or other special
-interest advocacy. University presidents no longer speak to the great
issues in education but instead devote themselves to fundraising and public
relations, and look to move on to the next, more prestigious university
presidency.
A financier I know who grew up under the WASP standard not long ago told me
that he thought that the subprime real estate collapse and the continuing
hedge-fund scandals have been brought on directly by men and women who are
little more than "greedy pigs" (his words) without a shred of character or
concern for their clients or country. Naturally, he added, they all have
master's degrees from the putatively best business schools in the nation.
Thus far in their history, meritocrats, those earnest good students, appear
to be about little more than getting on, getting ahead and (above all)
getting their own. The WASP leadership, for all that may be said in
criticism of it, was better than that.
The WASPs' day is done. Such leadership as it provided isn't likely to be
revived. Recalling it at its best is a reminder that the meritocracy that
has followed it marks something less than clear progress. Rather the reverse.
—Mr. Epstein's new book, "A Literary Education and Other Essays," will be
published by Axios Press in the spring of 2014. | P******0
发帖数: 9787 | 2 Good article.
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【在 u***r 的大作中提到】
: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230436720457
: By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
: Dec. 20, 2013 7:44 p.m. ET
: The U.S. once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn
: from what came to be known as the WASP establishment. Members of this
: establishment dominated politics, economics and education, but they do so no
: longer. The WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it,
: the power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless
: one includes the entity that has come to be known as the meritocracy—
: presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in
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