Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy

by Michael Knox Beran

Overview

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, as a 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 live: 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639362103
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Pages:	546
Sales rank:	638,156
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Michael Knox Beran's previous books include Forge of Empires, 1861-1871, The Last Patrician, a study of Robert Kennedy that was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Murder by Candlelight, also available from Pegasus Books. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the National Review. He lives in Westchester County, New York. michaelknoxberan.com

Table of Contents

A WASP Genealogy vii

Preface xiii

1 Twilight of the WASPs 1

2 A Dying Race 30

3 Mrs. Jack Gardner and Her Unlikely Swan 39

4 Henry Adams Fails to Reform America 45

5 Cotty Peabody Leaves the Bank 54

6 Mrs. Jack Seeks a Humanized Society 60

7 The Lost Hand of John Jay Chapman 65

8 A Glorious and Most Intensely Interesting Life 71

9 The Madonnas of Henry Adams 79

10 A Constancy in the Stars: The Harvards of George Santayana 91

11 Teddy 98

12 Vida Scudder Emulates Sc. Francis 106

13 The Visionary Neurasthenics 116

14 Billy Wag's Paideia 124

15 Henry Stimson Sees the Stars 132

16 Pax Americana 139

17 The Great World and J. P. Morgan 149

18 Mandarinism 158

19 From Theodore at Armageddon to the New Republic on West Twenty-first Street 167

20 Franklin and Eleanor

21 The WASPs Throw Off Victorianism 184

22 The New Patricians in War 196

23 The New Patricians in Peace 213

24 Lost in the Jazz Age 229

25 In the Secret Parts of Fortune 241

26 The Waste Land 251

27 Young Men Who Would Return to the Provinces 261

28 Fear Itself 276

29 The Terrors of the Earth 295

30 Joy Lane 305

31 The Death of Men 318

32 Pour le Mérite 336

33 Centurions of an American Century 346

34 Burnt Offerings: The Ember Days of the WASPs 360

35 The Eutrapelian Imagination, or WASP Neurasthenia-and Ours 402

36 Recessional: The WASP and God 418

37 When We Are Gone 422

Postscript: Orpheus's Head 437

Picture Credits 446

Notes and Sources 447

Index 521