he cites evidence that old money WASPs were not always the the liberals that they are popularly supposed to be.
I have seen so many statements by various people in discussions, asserting that old-line WASPs essentially colluded with the destruction of this country via immigration and leftist social engineering. In many people's minds, the WASPs are the arch-villains in the history of the country; it's popularly assumed that they were extreme liberals and practically the originators of the idea of the 'proposition nation' and its eventual mutant offspring, multiculturalism and mass immigration. To the contrary, according to the quotes from several sources presented in the series of blog posts. I would suggest reading the several pieces following the linked piece; scroll upwards to read the later ones.
It seems to me that in our politically correct era, it is allowable to blame WASPs as a group while criticizing those of other ethnicities is a violation of PC. So the WASPs continue to be the favored whipping boy, despite the fact that WASPs are not the influential group they once were, many years ago.
This old piece from TIME, which I've cited before, originally appeared some 40 years ago. It describes a state of affairs that no longer exists:
Wasps dominate the governing bodies of the richest universities in a ratio of four to one. More than four-fifths of the directors of the largest foundations are Wasps; of the 37 officers and directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, only one is non-Wasp. Under pressure of law and of the meritocratic "cult of performance," Wall Street law firms and brokerage houses are making room for more Jews and Catholics, but they are still overwhelmingly Wasp-controlled.
The Federal Government has always been the domain of the Wasp. Until John Kennedy, every U.S. President was a Wasp, and so was every Vice President except Charles Curtis (1929-33), who was the son of an Indian. Last fall's candidates, Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, were quite predictably Wasps. Although the civil service has been a traditional path of advancement for non-Wasps (half of Post Office workers in the large cities are Negroes), the prestigious departments, such as State, are still run by Wasps. Congress is a Wasp stronghold: the newly elected one consists of 109 Catholics, 19 Jews, 10 Negroes, 3 Greek Orthodox, 4 Orientals and almost 400 Wasps. Committee chairmanships are largely in the hands of Wasps. Enlisted men in the armed services are an ethnic mix, but the officers are heavily Wasp. Even in the cities they no longer control politically—Chicago or Cleveland—Wasps have much behind-the-scenes power.''
For some strange reason, many people seem to believe that there is still some kind of WASP elite lurking in the shadows, leading the globalist cabal. However, this seems ludicrous to me; the old-line WASP families are hardly the dominant force they once were, as illustrated by the pie chart in this post showing that the religious affiliations of the business elites is not predominantly that of the typical WASP.
In another post we see that the CFR is not dominated by WASPs as popularly supposed.
Blogger 'n/a' quotes the words of E. Digby Baltzell in The Protestant Establishment:
Except for the captains of industry, whose money-centered minds continued to welcome and encourage immigration because they believed it kept wages down and retarded unionization, most old-stock Americans were frankly appalled at the growing evils of industrialization, immigration and urbanization. As we have seen, the closing decades of the nineteenth century were marked by labor unrest and violence; many men, like Henry Adams, developed a violent nativism and anti-Semitism; others, following the lead of Jane Addams, discovered the slums and went to work to alleviate the evils of prostitution, disease, crime, political bossism and grinding poverty; both Midwestern Populism and the Eastern, patrician-led Progressive movement were part of the general protest and were, in turn, infused with varying degrees of nativism; [. . .]
In so many ways, nativism was part of a more generalized anti-urban and anti-capitalist mood. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is often allied with an antipathy toward the city and the money-power. Thus the first mass manifestations of anti-Semitism in America came out of the Midwest among the Populist leaders and their followers. In the campaign of 1896, for example, William Jennings Bryan was acused of anti-Semitism and had to explain to the Jewish Democrats of Chicago that in denouncing the policies of Wall Street and the Rothschilds [. . .]
Nativism was also a part of a status revolution at the elite level of leadershiop on the Eastern Seaboard. "The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich, the masters of the great corporations," wrote Richard Ofstadter, "were bypassing the men of the Mugwump type--the old gentry, the merchants of long standing, the small manufacturers, the established professional men, the civic leaders of an earlier era. In scores of cities and hundreds of towns, particularly in the East but also in the nation at large, the old-family, college-educated class that had deep ancestral roots in local communities and oftend owned family businesses, that had traditions of political leadership, belonged to the patriotic societies and the best clubs, staffed the government boards of philanthropic and cultural institutions, and led the movements for civic betterment, were being overshadowed and edged saside in making basic political and economic decisions. . . . They were less important and they knew it."
Many members of this class, of old-stock prestige and waning power, eventually allied themselves with the Progressive movement. Many also, like Henry Adams, withdrew almost entirely from the world of power. The "decent people," as Edith Wharton once put it, increasingly "fell back on sport and culture."
[...]
The Right Reverend Phillips Brooks--the favorite clergyman among Philadelphia's Victorian gentry, who was called to Boston's Trinity Church in 1869 [. . .] was one of the most sensistive barometers of the brahmin mind. Thus, although he himself had graduated from the Boston Latin School along with other patricians and plebeian gentlemen of his generation, he first suggested the idea of Groton to young Peabody in the eighties and joined the Sons of the Revolution in 1891, because, as he said at the time, "it is well to go in for the assertion that our dear land at least used to be American."
While in the TIME article, which was written at a later time, we read that
To some extent, Wasps are presiding over the dissolution of their own dominion, and they are proud of it. In a book he wrote four years ago, The Protestant Establishment, Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell criticized upper-class Wasps for establishing a caste system in many places. Today, he gives them credit for being neither "arrogant nor insensitive. They are the least prejudiced people as far as intermarriage is concerned. Catholics are much more prejudiced and Jews are the worst of all."
Actually, if you read through n/a's posts, you will see that statistically, Catholics and Jews seem to intermarry more.
But again, it seems evident that there are few predominantly old-stock Anglo-Saxons who have remained ethnically intact; New England itself became one of the first regions to receive large numbers of ethnic immigrants in the latter part of the 19th century, and in fact they were as Old Atlantic suggests, 'ethnically cleansed' in many areas by the Ellis Island wave of immigrants. Just look at the large number of ethnic surnames in New England now. Many of the old-stock WASP New Englanders went on to the Midwest or the Far West in the 19th century, pioneering there. Many of my Fairbank relatives settled the Midwest, along with many from New England. So the Midwest was and may still be (to some extent) a stronghold of old-stock WASPs, although many intermarried with German or Scandinavian settlers of those states.
I have no high hopes that any of the evidence will convince those who blame WASPs for their alleged role in the betrayal of old America; they serve too useful a purpose as the focus of blame. The fact that few people will stand up and identify themselves as WASPs these days in America makes them a popular target for those who want to blame our own for what is happening to our country.
And again, as I've said, the WASPs are usually resented by many of later immigrant stock; the WASPs committed the unpardonable sin of being here first (and yes, I know there were Dutch and French and others here in the 17th century; some were my ancestors) and of being the most successful, the people who really laid the groundwork for this country not only in a physical sense, but in a philosophical and cultural sense. This primacy makes them a popular target of envy and resentment especially on the part of later arrivals. Success is an unforgivable sin, for some.
If I have to blame my WASP ancestors for anything, it's for being just liberal enough, despite their supposed intolerance, to tolerate mass immigration which ended up displacing them in New England, and which has ultimately led towards the tidal wave of immigration which is today obliterating our country, threatening to displace all of us.
