The Decline and Fall of America's WASP Aristocracy
And How We Can Avoid the Same Fate
Welcome back, and thank you for reading! Today I am going to attempt to answer a question that I have been frequently asked, and which comes up a good bit online: what happened to the WASPs (White/Wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestants)? Particularly, why did the old American upper class seem to disappear over the middle of the 20th century? It’s a question I find quite interesting, as I think it has much relevance to our present woes and learning to avoid what happened to the WASPs is going to be critical for Heritage Americans who want to have some staying power moving forward. Further, dynasty is a concept that quite interests me, as I’ve discussed with some great guys like Ben Black1 and Johann Kurtz.2 I will be doing a part II of this covering the similar goings on in Britain on Tuesday.
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What happened to the WASPs? Seemingly every history of the early Republic through the early Cold War—particularly the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and Roaring 20s—includes this group of old American families who were just about omnipresent and determined the direction of America for decades.
At the highest level, these are the names that constantly crop up. The Morgans, Roosevelts, Adamses, Astors, and later on, the Rockefellers and Mellons. Below them were what passed for an American gentry, families who could trace their ancestry to New Amsterdam, the Mayflower, or something similar, and had accumulated capital over all those long generations. Their names appear in histories, on streets, and atop old government, public, and university buildings all over the Northeast.
This was a primarily Anglo-Saxon group with a few whiffs of Dutch blood. It was composed of the mid-Atlantic merchant bankers from Maryland and Philadelphia, the Dutch Knickerbockers and Patroons, the Boston Brahmins, the propertied New Yorkers, and a few tycoons who managed to become fashionable after moving to Gotham. Primarily, however, it was an old money collection of Anglo-Saxons who, by the late-19th century, were living in New York City. Hereafter, I’ll just call this group the WASPs.
Notably, it excluded the Southern Gentry, even the First Families of Virginia, as that class had lost so much of its wealth and influence in the War Between the States that it was not particularly economically, culturally, or politically important by a generation after the war ended. This is a story told by the Lee family. All the Lees through Gen. Lee are relatively well-known and were of momentous import in their ages, some Americans have a vague idea who Lee’s sons were, and there the family’s story ends.3 The same is true of the Wade Hamptons, who are still around and reasonably wealthy, but the history and importance of which largely died with Confederate cavalry commander Wade Hampton III.
In any case, the WASPs were both a true upper class, in that they intermarried and inherited their wealth and power,4 and were of momentous economic and political import. They co-ruled the country with the Cavaliers until the War, then ruled alone essentially until Truman. The WASPs composed the “techno-nationalist elite”5 that funded and directed America’s first industrial revolution, railroad buildout, and second industrial revolution, while also guiding America’s rise into international preeminence. The Livingstons brought steam power to America, the Adamses were presidents of the United States and Union Pacific, the Morgans invested in America while also making America investable,6 and so on.
They never wielded the picks and hammers that built such things, of course. The strength of the WASPs was neither their numbers nor their brawn. But they did direct such happenings while also keeping a lid on the political situation and “society”, and did so for a remarkable length of time. It was only really in the 1960s, as the relatively noveau Nelson Rockefeller faded from the political scene7, that their rule came to a firm end.8
And from there they disappear. A few of the newer entrants—Rockefellers and Mellons, mainly, along with the long-underknown Goelets9—remain, generally while hidden in the shadows.10 But even those who were once immensely wealthy and prominent, the Livingstons, (American-based) Astors, Adamses, Morgans, etc., are gone. Even if a few scattered remnants and descendants remain, their status as an upper-class that rules and intermarries is certainly gone.
So, what happened? Where did the WASPs go? Three interconnected factors related primarily to their leisure addiction and the manner in which they invested their wealth are nearly totally responsible, as I’ll explain here in an in-depth history of the class. I’ll then explain what we mere mortals should learn from this history to avoid the same fate and escape becoming part of the underclass in our own lands, as my friend Arbitrage Andy warned about recently.11 I think it is an important and broadly applicable subject, so I hope you check it out.
A note on sources: in addition to the more specific books and articles cited in the footnotes (make sure to check those out), the books most helpful in researching for this essay were Mellon by Cannadine, The House of Morgan by Chernow, The Livingstons by Brandt, and Dynasties by Landes. Further, the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald show all of this quite well through fiction.
The Decline and Fall of the WASP Aristocracy
