Talk:White Anglo-Saxon Protestants

Two groups

I have started a new section for the comment below, which is on a different topic than the discussion above on "term or concept?". --Macrakis (talk) 14:36, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

I have a problem with the suggestion that opens this section: "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs are white American Protestants, generally upper-class and usually of British descent." There are two groups --by far the most common usage deals with a small powerful white Protestant elite. The term is also used less often to cover 100 million plus Protestants of British descent. Rjensen (talk) 23:43, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

anglo saxons are english.

Anglo-Saxon refers to the ancestry of ENGLISH people: literally explained in the entry for "Anglo-Saxon". Britain is made up of 4 nations. The Welsh, Scottish and Irish peoples of Britain are not Anglo-Saxon, and no one ever called Irish-American people, even the protestant ones, WASPs. The term specifically excludes Americans of Irish ancestry, yet the Irish immigrants came from "Britain". This article should be more honest. 98.202.5.27 (talk) 07:45, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Article contents are based on published, reliabe sources. Feel free to present additional sources to support any desired changes. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 08:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

"But in fact WASPs were not an English but an American phenomenon, and it was not their English blood that particularly distinguished them or, for that matter, their Protestant religion. A large number of Americans who were of English descent, who were communicants in a Protestant church, and who might even have been rich, were nevertheless not WASPs. On the other hand, people who were not of English extraction or were only partially so (the Roosevelts, for example, and the Jameses) figure largely in the WASP story’. For it was not blood or heredity, but a longing for completeness that distinguished the WASPs in their prime..1. Yet the acronym we have fixed upon them is, in its absurdity, faithful to the tragicomedy of this once formidable tribe, so nearly visionary and so decisively blind, now that it has been reduced in stature and its most significant" [1]

The complaint is like saying the word anti-Semite means anti-Arab. Doug Weller talk 10:29, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

In a British Isle context you'd have a point: "Anglo" is used exclusively in Britain and Ireland to describe all things English, and is never applied to the Irish, Welsh or Scots. But this article is about the term "WASP" in a US historical context - which had initially evolved to describe a caste that had formed during the Gilded Age, and then came to represent social stratification in the World War 1 period. The European origins of these WASP families span many places other than England (the Astor family, for example, had roots all over Europe, including the Italian side of the Western Alps).

What distinguished these families, who in some cases had mixed and vague European backgrounds, from other Americans, and what inspired sociologists like Baltzell to single them out for special treatment, was that they occupied a unique social niche, attended the same boarding schools (finishing schools for women) and universities, were members of the same social clubs (eg the Union Club), and dominated the upper echelons of American political, financial and industrial institutions for several decades of US history. They also shared peculiar mannerisms (like speaking in a fake British accent), obsessions (genealogy, having perfect posture etc), and social etiquettes. In plain English, these families were all upper class Anglophiles in a country that was and had always been Anglophobic since the Revolutionary War (read about the Astor Place Riot for more insight into this 19th Century class dynamic).

There were indeed upper class families with Irish ancestry, and I'm not talking about the "Scots-Irish". Some obvious examples are the Kane family, the Carroll family, and the Iselin family. Arthur Leary was president of the Union Club and made Ward McAllister's 400 list, despite being the grandson of an Irish immigrant and a Catholic (his mother's family came from Dutch immigrants). Thomas Fortune Ryan was also cited by Baltzell in his Gilded Age WASP directory. You will find many other Irish family names in the Social Register directories for the period in question, particularly in New York and Boston (I counted dozens).Jonathan f1 (talk) 21:24, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Hacker, 1957

The statement that Andrew Hacker used "WASP" in 1957 with the "w" meaning "wealthy" is entirely false. The Hacker usage clearly used "w" to mean "white." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:192:80:99D0:708C:7B9C:AF86:4166 (talk) 15:08, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

The quote from Hacker is right there in the article:

First of all, they are 'WASPs'—in the cocktail party jargon of the sociologists. That is, they are wealthy, they are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and they are Protestants [...]

—Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:58, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

WASP presidents.

It seems that the whole list should be deleted or simply renamed to "Catholic presidents" leaving JFK and Biden. Everyone else descends from white anglo-saxons per extant wikipedia articles. 2603:7000:8E01:2B47:3595:F77C:F0A9:4EB6 (talk) 22:04, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

yes delete -- WASP means upper class (like Washington, Jefferson, Kennedy and the Bushes). That disqualifies poor boys like Truman, Ike, Clinton, Carter, Reagan Ford, Obama, Biden. WASP means British--and not Irish (like Kennedy and Biden) or German (like Trump or Ike or Hoover) or Dutch (Van Buren, both Roosevelts). As the article mentions, Theodore Roosevelt was strenuous in insisting he was Dutch and "not Anglo-Saxon)" -- so in the last century we have only Coolidge & the two Bushes who meet the criteria. Rjensen (talk) 02:23, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

With all due respect Jensen, but your insistence on excluding the Irish, Germans, Dutch etc from this category is tantamount to imposing an artificial division within this class when none existed. These are not even discrete categories: Is anyone seriously denying that the Astor family had German ancestry or that they were WASPs (ie upper class Americans)? This would've been news to anyone living in the Gilded Age much less the Astors themselves (who named their hotel the Waldorf Astoria, after their ancestral home).

I am also unaware of any reliable source that claims the population of British America was strictly "British" -predominately British Isles, sure, but that also includes Ireland. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity defines Anglo-Americans:

"Men and women from the British Isles predominated, but the group summarily called Anglo Americans were highly differentiated: the ethnically and linguistically diverse English-speakers included Anglicans and Dissenters, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Highland and Lowland Scots, Scots-Irish, and some Welsh..... These many-cultured English -and Gaelic-speakers needed to learn to get along with each other and to form a culture and institutions that would be called Anglo-America." (p. 37 [2])

So now we have a recent reliable source defining Anglo-Americans beyond the narrow category of "British", to include essentially all English-speaking Europeans that populated British America. Those who emerged from this population as upper class were certainly WASPs.

Note I am not claiming someone like Trump is a WASP -he isn't upper class ('class' and 'wealth' are different). I am challenging this whole practice of excluding people by ancestry. Jonathan f1 (talk) 18:20, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

this article is about how the term "WASP" is actually used, according to reliable sources. The source you cite The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity does not discuss the term or use "WASP." Rjensen (talk) 22:28, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Yet the empirical fact remains that the ancestries of the WASP class were far more diverse than you acknowledge (in a European, or Northwestern European, sense). It isn't hard finding an RS that broadens the scope: "Kennedy is the only president to lack WASP (Dutch, British or Irish Protestant) ancestry." p.7[3] Jonathan f1 (talk) 04:11, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

a few sociologists (like Kaufman) use "wasp" to refer to hundreds of millions of Americans, while this article focuses on wasp-as-top-elite. It's the difference between Harvard and the local high school. Kaufman notes that "there is very little work on ethnic ideal-types " so he's something of an outlier. Rjensen (talk) 21:35, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

He was referring to ethnic ideals in contemporary US culture, but that's really beside the point. The "wasp-as-top-elite" did not have ancestry only from Britain, and this can be demonstrated by a cursory look at the family names that appeared in the blue books from the period[4]. I'll choose the Boston blue book for the year 1924: 1924 because it was something of a golden age of wasp dominance, and Boston because I'll assume this city's upper class would skew more 'Brahmin' or 'English' than what you'd find in New York or Baltimore society, much less San Francisco [5]. And yet even here we find, at least, dozens of names that are Irish, German or some other European. I started compiling a list of the names that were unambiguously Irish, but there were too many of them and it wouldn't be worth the time. Jonathan f1 (talk) 00:38, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

that would be forbidden as original research--we need to stick to published reliable secondary sources. Rjensen (talk) 03:39, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

In any case the usual source is the "Social Register" not the Blue Book. The Blue Book explicitly lists prominent Catholics (including mayors James Curley and John F Fitzgerald). These Irish Catholics are not in the "Social Register" (which is here for Boston 1922) Rjensen (talk) 03:58, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

If there's a paucity of genealogical research on the American upper class, then it would appear that sociologists and social historians have spent the last 50 odd years parroting Baltzell's claims as fact without bothering to scrutinize them. In The Protestant Establishment Baltzell himself cites Thomas Fortune Ryan and Thomas Dolan as two of the founding members of the American aristocracy (pp. 9 -11[6]) -both of Irish background, while one of them, Ryan, was a practicing Catholic. Baltzell also described F. Scott Fitzgerald as "half a WASP" -not because his father was Irish, but because he was brought up Catholic (although, bizarrely, he had no reservations about listing the more pious and dogmatic Catholic Ryan as a full-blooded WASP, probably because his status within the American establishment was beyond dispute).

It isn't just the blue books either. Even the Social Registers turn up an interesting assortment of non-British surnames, such as this New York SR from 1917 (Great Gatsby era[7]). I'm encountering numerous Irish names like Brennan, Callahan, Carroll, Coogan, Daly, Murphy, O'Donohue, O'Bryan, O'Connor etc. Interestingly I even came across a couple of Italian last names (Baltazzi, Catalani), and several of German or French origin.

Granted, with few exceptions (T. Ryan, Arthur Leary), these Irish names belonged to people who were almost certainly mainline Protestant. The trope that 'all Irish are Catholics' was an invention of nationalist Ireland, historians writing in the Whig tradition (ie -projecting the present onto the past). Jonathan f1 (talk) 23:19, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

The "white dominant culture"?

I recall a conversation about religion I once had with a native of North Jersey, someone who grew up in the metro region of NY City. He told me that he had no idea what a "Protestant" was until he was an adult, and at one point remarked, "I was over the age of 30 when I realized the majority of Americans aren't Catholic." This has something to do with the fact that New Jersey is one of at least 4 US states where Catholics outnumber Protestants (even as a collective), but also highlights the flaws in the "national culture" mythology: the US does not, in fact, have a "national culture," and certainly no national culture that has much to do with religion. In states like NY, NJ, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the dominant religion is Catholicism; in Utah Mormonism is mainstream while in the Bible Belt it is Evangelical Christianity. At the same time, the prevailing trend in the US as a whole has been secularization, and we are now at a point where nearly 1 in 3 Americans claim no religion at all. So what is the phrase "white dominant culture" supposed to mean in an article where religion is supposed to be a significant ethnic factor?

Another flaw in this piece is that it shifts back and forth from discussing "history" and contemporary society, and it is hard to tell if this subject has retained any relevance in this day and age. It also doesn't help that virtually all the sources used to support the notion of "continued WASP dominance" are rather dated -even the 'younger' sources from the 90s are ~30 years old, or at least published before the country elected its first black president and second Roman Catholic (Biden). I'll grant that during the Bush/Cheney administration it may have seemed that "WASPs" still mattered, but does it really seem like that in 2024?

Read the Kaufmann source cited in the lead. Kaufmann claims that one-time ethnic minorities matched or surpassed "WASPs" on key socioeconomic factors by 1980, and also cites sociologists who argue for a new "white ethnie" based on pan-European genealogical and cultural traits. He writes that only a minority of white Americans can claim a single European ancestry, and that there was a spike in inter-religious marriages in the postwar decades. And even this source was published 20 years ago. Jonathan f1 (talk) 21:31, 9 May 2024 (UTC)