Reply to Is “WASP” culture still a thing?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] Wasp culture has become synonymous with UMC success.
Can join a country club?
Send kids to elite private?
Do you “summer”?
Live in the best enclave, with appropriate zoning? ( obviously this means no multi family dwellings ( exception: NYC) 
That’s wasp culture.
Simply shorthand for making it.[/quote]

No, it’s much more than that. No new money. Your family has to have been WASP’s for generations.[/quote]

Yep, hence the comment above about the Bushes, Roosevelts, and Tafts being the only 20th century WASP presidents.  Particularly the Bushes.[/quote]

Not the Bushes, they're newish oil money.

The Roosevelts for sure. There's a joke about FDR, that at his boarding school he was beaten up because he was small, then at reunions they hated him because he was a "traitor to his class" with the New Deal.[/quote]

The Bushes are very much in the model of old school WASPs. Family made fortune in Ohio in the 19th century and resettled back in Connecticut, intermarrying with other Wasp families. GHWB was the ideal specimen, not just in background, but in mannerism and attitude, of the reserved New England WASPs. His mother used to constantly tell him not to say "I" too much. It was GHWB who left CT to move to Texas to make his own way in life, which is also another WASP characteristic.

The confusion on this thread stems from that there are two interpretations for WASPs. First is based on the concept of a very small and privileged minority of old families in the northeastern cities, especially NY, Philadelphia and Boston, traced back to the 18th century and whose descendants provided a disproportionate share of the nation's leadership in civics, culture, finance and even politics up through the 1950s. They were the people of the New England boarding schools and Harvard and Yale and eating clubs at Princeton and summering in Maine or Nantucket and so on. Over time they developed a reputation for a somewhat idiosyncratic, self-effacious, highly self restrained and distant personalities that shunned attention, with a strong focus on mannerism, virtues and ethical behaviors and fair play.

Then you have the much broader upper middle class of professionals and finance people all across the east coast and the Midwest, who took a great deal of their social cues from the upper class WASPs without having the same ancestry or wealth. These are the people who really gave us the "preppy" look and enshrined the vaguely Anglo-Saxon decor as the idealized taste, but with an affluence coming through more obviously than that of the idealized discreet WASPs. It doesn't matter if your ancestry is really Polish or a mixture, like most people are these days, or Catholic rather than Protestant, or even Jewish, it's become a socio-economic cultural ethos based on self-satisfied aspirational comforts and professionalism. The American bourgeoisie, when you think about it, and that's why you find them all over the place, not just in certain areas of the East.

Most people's encounters with "WASPs" is really with this second group of people, and which has always been the case.

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