a few days ago, Philip wrote:

"That Professor Baltzell choose to use a tautology says a couple of things to me.
1. the term shows an underlying racism in it's constructor. Denying an economic factor in social structure then only leaves gender or racial differences to explain inequality.
2. He had a poor appreciation of language."

I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but my curiosity was piqued regarding this and so I sought out Baltzell's book, "The Protestant Establishment" (the subtitle itself is somewhat instructive: Aristocracy & Caste in America) -- it took me a few days to acquire it since it was only available from our central library.

I'll try to give a brief explanation of the genesis of WASP.
First, to lend some context, this stuff was written in the mid 50s and early 60s. Baltzell's central thesis was that the aristocracy of the Victorian age was a good thing in that it was the source of leadership; this was of course an Anglo-Saxon tradition. His contention was that there came to be a crisis in American leadership by the middle of the 20th century, partly due to the declining authority of an establishment which was now based on an increasingly castelike White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant upper class, which had been realizing great success but was not producing equivalent leadership. My reading of this is that he coined WASP to differentiate what was, he felt, a racist caste system (thus the added emphasis on the seemingly redundant white/protestant) -- in over-simplified terms, Anglo Saxon tradition = good, WASP = bad. He was, in his way, the very antithesis of a racist.

Hope this clears up some of the confusion....

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