WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy

by Michael Knox Beran

An examination of WASP culture through the lives of some of its most prominent figures. Envied and lampooned, misunderstood and yet distinctly American, WASPs are as much a culture, socioeconomic and ethnic designation, and state of mind.

From politics to fashion, their style still intrigues us. WASPs produced brilliant reformers—Eleanor, Theodore, and Franklin Roosevelt—and inspired Cold Warriors—Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and Joe Alsop. In such dazzling figures as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Edie Sedgwick, Babe Paley, and Marietta Tree they embodied a chic and an allure that drove characters like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby mad with desire.

They were creatures of glamour, power, and privilege, living amid the splendor of great houses, flashing jewels, and glittering soirées. Envied and lampooned, they had something the rest of America craved.

Yet they were unhappy. Descended from families that created the United States, WASPs felt themselves stunted by a civilization that thwarted their higher aspirations at every turn. They were the original lost generation, adrift in the waters of the Gilded Age. Some were sent to lunatic asylums or languished in nervous debility. Others committed suicide.

Yet out of the neurotic ruins emerged a group of patriots devoted to public service and the renewal of society. In a groundbreaking study of the WASP revolution in American life, Michael Knox Beran brings the stories of Henry Adams and Henry Stimson, Learned Hand and Vida Scudder, John Jay Chapman and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to life. These characters were driven by a vision of human completeness, one that distinguishes them from the self-complacency of more recent power establishments narrowly founded on money and technical know-how.

WASPs shaped the America in which we so much so that it is not easy to understand our problems without a knowledge of their mistakes. They came to grief in Vietnam and through their own toxic blood pride, yet before they succumbed to the last temptation of arrogance, they struggled to fill a void in American life, one that many of us still feel.

For all their faults, they pointed—in an age of shrunken lives and diminished possibility—to the dream of a new life.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Sociology, American, Cultural

416 pages, Hardcover

Published August 3, 2021

Reviews

[Brian Gore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this. I picked it up in a bookstore while in Maine. I was not sure what to expect beyond some insight into what is really meant by the term WASP and perhaps some of the people. My sense is that the author's approach was to pick certain representatives of the class that he had researched so it is sort of a glimpse using certain people as examples. It was somewhat salacious at times which kept it entertaining. I learned a lot about the thinking that went into the founding of many of our most well known boarding schools, and that was unexpected. I also see museums a little differently now...the art is supposed to be all around us, not locked in buildings!

[Jason Reese · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a quite detailed and enjoyable survey of a social class through time. A good balance of social history and poignant biography, it was marred only by the author’s penchant for flights of fancy in the second person. All in all, a good read.

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

WASP stands for White Anglo Saxon Protestants, which I recall briefly reading at some other point prior to this. This book takes a historical dive into the concept of the WASP, and how they impacted the world around them. The book delves into the WASP in Pre and Post World War II eras, and how their status in society changed. Until the middle 20th Century, WASPS were prominent in all of the staple businesses and industries, such as railroads, banks, utilities, and major manufacturing. Most of these types were of European decent, and often clashed with the heavy Catholic presence in certain major cities. In the post war era, the availability of education and job opportunities helped put an end to the traditional WASP control. It was really interesting to follow the journey of this affluent group of people over the years, and compare it to modern times. Currently, WASP has been reborn to mean White Affluent Schooled Persons. If you are interested in race and social classes, this might be a good book for you to check out. I got this on Audible, and it was a LONG listen.

[Adrian Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

From my uncle. I learned so much about a group of people who mean almost nothing to me, and discovered why my father (who is from New York) is always referencing this group. I felt like the author took a long, long time to get to his point - most of the book - and then at the very end he finally explicitly says, "These people were interested in the development of the whole person - spiritual, physical, logical, philosophical, artistic - and we should be too." At the end he tells a lightly disguised story about a boy at a WASP private school and I discovered that he is himself a WASP, and that cast a lot of doubt on his conclusions, because he is suggesting that we should all become more like him. However, I appreciated what I learned from this book about an influential group, so three stars.

[Reading · Rating 1 out of 5]

An old wealthy white WASP (this is redundant, but then again so is this book) spends half a thousand pages trying to tell us how cool the WASPS were, but never quite gets there because he spends every single page trying to impress us with all the literary and classical Greek/Roman references he knows.

I have never read something more masturbatory in my entire life.

This joker ACTUALLY and UNIRONICALLY uses “antidisestablishmentarianism” in this miserable tome.

Dude should have just jerked it to a picture of Zelda Fitzgerald. Could have saved himself and me a heck of a lot of time

[Amir Geva · Rating 1 out of 5]

WASPS: Lizzie Borden x Dante Fan Fiction.
(Spoiler alert: the author of this book read Dante and you didn’t.)

I’m not one to write reviews for books I didn’t finish, but the fact that a good-faith reader was exhausted before the end has to count for something.

Michael Knox Beran has a knack for prose and an encyclopedic command of elite American trivia. As a fan of gossip-laced exposés, I enjoyed the biographical details, which are laid out diligently with a pleasant dollop of irony. But once patterns began to emerge, I realized that the author's talents may have worked against him. For all the name-drops and tragic anecdotes, the underlying thesis is unconvincing at best.

The book’s premise is this: The Puritans land in Plymouth and establish a stringent Calvinist heaven. Their descendants, desperate to preserve their supremacy, give in to the soul-corrupting greed of the Gilded Age. As divine punishment, their sons and daughters are inflicted with existential despair over their “wasted talents” and the decline of civilization. They devolve into ineffectual, navel-gazing, neurotic wannabes who are *OBSESSED* with Dante and destined for suicide.

And that’s pretty much it. What follows is generation after generation of spiritually bankrupt socialites, beset by hedonism and Euro-fetishism, efficiently slaying themselves until only a faint sepia-toned portrait of a once—but really never—great civilization remains. Did I mention they read Dante?

This Greek tragedy would have made a great novel with an aftertaste of historical insight—or even a longform New Yorker article. But as a nonfiction thesis, it doesn’t hold. Beran’s peculiar decision to quote Dante (in ITALIAN) at the beginning of every chapter betrays a personal obsession projected onto elite biographies rather than a grounded analysis based on primary sources. The result is a flattening of 300 years of American cultural development into a 2D caricature of failed poets and their Halloweenish murder wives.

Are we cherry-picking here? The book’s subjects received a classical education that exposed them to Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, and countless others. Is there actual evidence that Dante held a uniquely dominant place in their reading? Is there evidence that the specific anguish over one's "wasted talents" was either prevalent among WASPs or more prevalent among them than elsewhere? Or is this fixation Beran’s own projection? If it’s meant as metaphor, it should have been framed as such—clearly and self-consciously—rather than presented as gospel. If you claim to reveal historical truth, you need to separate embellishment from evidence. Rather than buttressing his theory, the author's style undermined his credibility.

In reality, WASPs were not Nephilim. They went to work, got stuck in traffic, hosted parties, sailed, played golf, dated, paid bills. They didn’t spend every waking moment contemplating the redemption or extinction of their caste. A deep analysis of how noblesse oblige, inherited guilt, or residual Puritan ethics shaped their decisions and political influence would’ve been fascinating. Instead, Beran carries a stack of metaphors too heavy for the material and stumbles—leaving us with an American version of the Smurfs: they live together, dress alike, and refer to themselves incessantly by their own ethnonym.

I wish I could recommend this to anyone curious about American history or class culture—but I think your time is better spent elsewhere.

I was WASPed the WASP out.

[Nate Caress · Rating 2 out of 5]

At times one wonders, after one of the many rambling passages that yet again reference Groton and/or an obscure Greek playwright, if perhaps the author is a bit deep into his cups (of gin). Much promise with the subject matter and figures throughout, but a bit of a miss--or maybe just mess--on the finished product. Skip this and just head straight for James or Auchincloss instead.

[Donn Headley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give this history five stars not because I agree with it or even admire it all the time. I don't. Beran cavalierly scoffs at classical education as being, at best, anachronistic and, at worst, useless. He presents no evidence for this and rather lamely assumes his arrogant perspective to be self-evident to all "right thinking people" (how ironic). The reason for the stars is that this book explains much of American history through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from highly perceptive insights into our nation's ruling class, the descendants of the Puritans and (much more) the Episcopalians and Unitarians of the New England region and culture. An excellent update of this work, even though written better and published earlier, is Charles Murray's Coming Apart, that reveals how the WASPish Americans, both actual and pretending, are living today. As to classical education and its benefits: a full man is a full man in any age, in any land, while a specialized man (whom Beran admires) is a stunted man who stunts his society in general and all those around him in particular. We've had stunted men and women running this "republic" for the past 34 years (as of 2023), many of them wannabe WASPs, and they've only ground us into the dust. May we be released of them.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read as much of this as I wanted, considering it's 500+ pages and reads more like a collection of vignettes about specific people in this society/group rather than a chronological overview though it does cover pre- and post-WW II time periods. It's a very detailed biographical survey and study of the time period, socio-economics and how hard they tried to hold onto the past as time and society marched forward.

[Ell, Ess Jaeva · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf

[Amanda Sanders · Rating 3 out of 5]

if you don’t do edith wharton and henry james first this is prob not as interesting. tbh i don’t think i did enough henry james to love some of the pithiness