Alternate meaning: Wasp (disambiguation)

WASP (an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is a term that originally denoted the culture, customs, and heritage of the American élite Establishment. The term was first popularized by E. Digby Baltzell in his 1964 book . It originally included members of the U.S. Protestant upper class: the descendants of colonial-era immigrants from the British Isles—especially England and Scotland—who belonged to the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Episcopalian (Anglican) denominations of Protestantism. Usage of the term is growing in other English-speaking countries settled in part by similar groups, such as Australia.

Modern use

Use of the term WASP has broadened significantly since its coinage. Today any English-speaking Protestant of European descent may be called a "WASP", though most are not descended from Angles, Saxons, or members of closely-related tribes. Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians are excluded. This usage is ahistoric, simplistic, and trite: white Protestants in the U.S. comprise myriad national backgrounds and denominations. They may be the descendants of English, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Scotch-Irish (Irish Protestants, who composed about a quarter of the early colonial population), German, Dutch, Scandinavian, or French Huguenot people. They may belong to Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, Quaker, Baptist, Evangelical, or even Mormon denominations. They are found among all social classes, even those derogatorily called "poor white trash". The label of "WASP" attaches to all.

The original WASPs

The original WASP élite's hold on the social structure of the United States was, since the early 1800s, ironclad. Legacy admission to prep schools and Ivy League universities 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. They are rare in the Midwest, where generations of Yankee 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.

Connotations and stereotypes

The term is redundant, as all Anglo-Saxons are necessarily white, and associates the bearer with an unpleasant stinging insect and the terms for unpleasant dispositions (e.g. waspish) which derive from its name. (The acronym ASP was briefly popular, eliminating the redundancy but keeping the association with a poisonous animal.)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, though not without twinges of guilt—another WASP stereotype.

See also

• Boston Brahmin
• Locust Valley Lockjaw
• Preppy
• Social Register
• Social structure of the United States

WASP in the media

• WASP is a play by Steve Martin

Notes

• 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

References

• Allen, Irving Lewis: Unkind Words: Ethnic Labeling from Redskin to Wasp (NY: Bergin & Garvey, 1990)
• Cookson, Peter W.; Persell, Caroline Hodges: Preparing for Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools (NY: Basic Books, 1985)
• Davidson, James D.; Pyle, Ralph E.; Reyes, David V.: "Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment, 1930-1992"; Social Forces, Vol. 74, No. 1. (Sep., 1995), pp. 157-175.
• Pyle, Ralph E.: Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996)