Flight of the WASP The rise, fall, and future of America's original ruling class

Historian Gross (740 Park) delivers an immersive and nuanced group portrait of New England's elite from 1609 to today. Delving into the genealogy of 15 prominent white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant families, Gross describes how over time this old ruling class "has drifted from American centrality to the periphery." In addition to providing succinct assessments of well-known names like Morgan, Biddle, Peabody, and Whitney, Gross spotlights William Bradford, a Yorkshire-born shepherd and religious dissident who became the first Pilgrim mayor of Plymouth, Mass. According to Gross, Bradford was the first progenitor of an elite American line: his illustrious descendants include Noah Webster, Hugh Hefner, Julia Child, and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Gross notes a decline in the influence of these families after "patrician" class-traitor FDR effectively redistributed their wealth through the New Deal; and, while WASP families "tightened their hold on the reins of government again via institutions they created or controlled" under President Kennedy, by the time of (elite New Englander) George H. W. Bush's death in 2018, they "seemed entirely irrelevant." Gross takes detours into extended considerations of areas in which his subjects had a hand, such as the displacement of Indigenous peoples and the study of eugenics. Striking an expert balance between the big picture and intimate thumbnails, this is an enlightening study of American culture. (Nov.)

A critical history of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant cohort of American society, once dominant, now descending. The first people to purchase enslaved Africans in Virginia were WASPs, but they were also among the first to launch coordinated abolitionist efforts. That diametrical division indicates that WASP society was not monolithic. Regardless, WASPs constituted "America's elite from the eighteenth century until today," writes Gross, author of Model and 740 Park. That elite remains economically powerful but culturally marginal. The author explains that its decline might be traced to the emergence of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as president--though, he adds, Kennedy was culturally aligned with WASPs and served as "a symbol of how an inclusive aristocracy replenishes itself, absorbing and even embracing those willing to learn and adapt to its ways." That aristocracy was insular and to some extent inbred, though extraordinarily prolific: Were he alive to do so, a patriarch of the Bradford clan would have counted 11,272 descendants in just six generations, including Adlai Stevenson, Julia Child, Hugh Hefner, and Clint Eastwood. One thing is for certain: The American variety of Protestantism, whether "old school" or fundamentalist, proves Max Weber's linking of the Protestant ethic to a kind of "hard frugality" capitalism that in many important respects all but replaced religion with business. Interestingly, as Gross writes, politics was long considered beneath the elite, but the crusading Theodore Roosevelt in particular made public service seem attractive to many. In conclusion, the author notes, whereas many WASPs have since retreated to "posh suburbs, restrictive clubs, elite charities, and the powerful financial sinecures that still cocooned them," others are aligning themselves with a new America that many believe will become minority white by 2045. A book of pop history and sociology that runs wide but not terribly deep, though readable and engaging all the same. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.