The Deterioration of WASP Nests : U.S. ‘Aristocracy’ Has Become More Diverse, Author Says

After publishing two of Robert Christopher’s successful books about Japan, editors at Simon & Schuster had agreed with the graying journalist that he would write about America’s hidden aristocracy.

He was to examine the roots of power and persuasion in the nation.

But he did so reluctantly.

“I think I did it in a moment of desperation, to tell you the truth,” Christopher said, bemused at his predicament. “That’s not totally fair. I was mildly interested in some aspects of it. But mainly, I had a contract to write a book, and I had to come up with an idea that the publisher found acceptable.”

In six months of traveling the private corridors of the nation’s landed gentry and stepping through many ivy-covered gates, he made a startling discovery. And his note-taking stopped.

Did Not Set History’s Course

White Anglo-Saxon Protestants did not wield extraordinary power; they did not set the course of history. On the whole, he discovered, wealthy WASPs lived quite sensibly, conserving their fortunes and enjoying life. They were not hiding from the public, as people suspected. In many ways, they formed an ordinary and unexciting clan.

“The reason they’re not in the public eye,” Christopher said, “is because they don’t do very much that’s interesting. The basic thesis of the book was unsound. Power in this country had, in fact, shifted to a very diverse elite.”

For the past three years, Christopher has examined a phenomenon that has been so rapid that the most critical observation has rarely been made: The highest echelons of power--in government, in business, in the academies of arts and sciences--no longer provide cushy residences for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

What once were exclusive breeding grounds for WASPs are now remarkably varied nesting sites for a multiethnic, interbreeding Power Elite.

Christopher’s resulting work, “Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite,” is a curiosity of optimism in a frantically changing and often cynical time.

In many respects, Christopher has been a privileged guest among the WASP elite for most of his life.

At his home in Old Lyme on the Connecticut shore, there’s evidence of refined upbringing throughout the living room. Clarinet reeds lie on a piano. A page of music is opened to exercises. Fine Japanese prints adorn the room. A large assembly of lead soldiers, collected from across the world, stand on glass-encased shelves.

Although the environment in his red-shingled home in the woods is properly WASP, the symbols in his living room lose significance daily.

Not Necessarily Bad

This, he might point out, is not a bad sign.

Christopher came from a lower WASP caste. His father was a schoolteacher in New Haven, Conn., during the ‘30s, and the family’s lineage is a mucky track through Canada, Scotland and Ireland, rather than a straight course from England.

“All I know is I’m a mutt,” he said.

A scholarship won him entry to Yale University before World War II, and for the first time, he entered what was one of the great WASP hatcheries of the era. His colleagues came from the illustrious WASP prep schools, such as Groton, Exeter and St. Paul’s. Although Christopher learned “a certain style” from the WASPs, he and his fellow scholarship students were socialized at the feet of the “St. Grottlesex crowd,” and never allowed into the inner circle.

World War II changed that hierarchy for good.

Its effect on race relations has often been remarked upon, but Christopher recounts his own experience as a veteran returning to find Yale radically altered. The GI Bill fractured the St. Grottlesex crowd and opened the gates of the university to a far more diverse group of students. For example, Italian-American boys from New Haven, whose parents once would have considered a college education “frippery,” no longer had their sons cowed. Postwar undergraduate classes contained more and more sons of immigrant families.

Managerial Pool Changed

The experience of “crashing the gates,” as Christopher calls it, was felt not just in New Haven and not just at Yale.

“The net result of the GI Bill,” he writes, “was that in the two decades following World War II, the pool of Americans with the educational qualifications for managerial and professional careers steadily became a more accurate reflection of the overall ethnic composition of the population.”

Christopher graduated, became a foreign correspondent and, later, an editor for Time and Newsweek magazines. He was witness to the changes about which he writes. He clutters the book with reams of anecdotal evidence about WASPdom’s decline in Connecticut, in New England and throughout the United States.

The names of non-WASPs among America’s ruling class have become as familiar as the Rockefellers, Fords, Adamses and Franklins of history: Dukakis, Iacocca, Laventhol, Yankelovich, Kissinger, Giamatti, Sarnoff, Mailer, Warhol.

The evidence Christopher has marshaled is overwhelming. Even those who might wish for a more scholarly, methodical query should be impressed with Christopher’s revised thesis.

One reviewer complained that the book had a Northeastern bias. But, of course, New England and New York are not only where Christopher has spent most of his life, it’s also the region where WASP supremacy once ruled in all its glory, and has fallen into disarray.

Indeed, the book is full of names and places New Englanders would recognize.

Christopher points out that in southeastern Connecticut, “the prime movers in such liberal causes as the nuclear freeze or the Jesse Jackson presidential candidacy tend to be drawn from the ranks of old-line WASPs.”

The preppiest Yankees, he says, are now progressives and decidedly non-WASP in their social and political outlook. The change he witnesses in his home state and region, he claims, echo a broad change in the American landscape.

“I think New England’s fascinating,” Christopher said, “because there’s no place in the country where WASP supremacy was stronger and so clear cut. And yet today there’s probably no place in the country where power is more widely dispersed among non-WASPs than it is in New England.”

Money Equals Power

In New England, he says, aristocratic surnames no longer carry much weight. The idea that aristocracy has nothing to do with money is not, and never has been, true.

“If you don’t have money, you stop being an aristocrat real fast,” he said. And because WASPs and non-WASPs have intermarried and melded fortunes, the significance of family heritage has dwindled.

Barriers to power in the United States, because of race, religion and ethnic background, have deteriorated, Christopher said.

In a time of otherwise tumultuous change in the nation’s social fabric, he points out, it is worth noting with pleasure that WASPs no longer rule. Racism and prejudice, of course, will never be stamped out; the most recent wave of immigrants will always suffer from prejudice.

But, overall, there are reasons to believe that power can be challenged and the leadership of the past will yield.