I would like to point out another (fatal perhaps?) weakness of the tech elite, namely that they benefit the other Americans much much less than the Eastern Establishment. Three factors are at play 1 The technological breakthroughs are less revolutionary than the introduction of the electricity, car, radio etc (“I was promised a flying car and I got 140 characters”) 2 The success of some very big tech firms was predicated on destroying an existing economic reality, like the physical store in the case of Amazon or the unionized taxi drivers in the case of Uber and creating in its place jobs that are both more precarious and less well-paid; the cult of disruption is pervasive in the tech elites, but without taking responsibility for the wrecked lives and communities. This is not the stuff elites are made of 3. The technological breakthroughs elite has been much much more successful than the Eastern one in extracting and keeping all the value created for themselves, all the wealth goes to the very top. The so-called enshittification is something typical of the culture of the tech elite. The omens are for an elite that is ready to govern through brainwashing and repression. The signs are everywhere. You are hoping against hope that some sort of metanoia will transform them… Very slim odds, I think
I think #2 was absolutely true of the Eastern Establishment industrialists--they destroyed existing economic arrangements very thoroughly. Along the way they upended America's political order and made its existing political values (which enshrined "independence" -- basically, being one's own boss, as most yeoman farmers were -- as the main definition of freedom) impossible. Agrarian populists would certainly claim that the Establishment did not take "responsibility for the wrecked lives and communities" they caused. William Jennings Bryan came very close to winning the presidency with that exact claim.
I have tremendous sympathy for the small-r republicans who fought the death of their old republic between 1870 and 1910 or so. One of the weaknesses of these two essays is that they take the perspective of the men who did the killing. In truth I can see both sides of the question--which is one reason why I find that period of history so interesting.
Point taken, thank you. I still have the impression that there are two differences 1 this time the disruption is a value in itself ("Move fast and break things", probably this comes from the roots of the Silicon Valley in the counterculture of the Sixties) and not a means towards an end 2 the Eastern Elite could offer a quid pro quo to soften the disruption between 1870 and 1910, namely the creation of comparatively better-paid jobs in the industrial Northeast and Midwest. This time it is the opposite, well-paid jobs disappear and are replaced by gigs, and the AI could make things even worse. Please bear with me, I am from Italy and I do not have a fine grasp of US history, I might get things wrong, thank you for your patience.
futurism, modernism, the international efficiency movements, and the whole "cult of speed" in Italy ect sure placed a lot of explicit direct value on being fast ect and fit comfortably in the second half of that time frame.
SV innovation seems (so far) to be just a small echo of the scale of those.
There is a difference though. Italian futurists and their ilk were marginal artists. The Italian elites were conservatives, nationalists and reactionaries, disruption was the last thing they coveted.
When the Fascists (who were the intellectual offspring of the Futurists) came to power, they aligned themselves with the conservative and nationalist agenda, very quickly. Mussolini sidelined the idealists and revolutionary disrupters in a matter of months after taking power.
The problem nowadays is that the SV elites have embraced 100% the ideology of disruption. Add to the mix the rejection of democracy by Thiel, Srinivasan et al, the alignment with the MIC and you get a potential for disaster on the same order of magnitude as the 1930s. Hope fervently to be proven wrong, oc
I think another thing I would mention is that tech job creation is limited, generally speaking, to a few big tech hub cities, like SF, Seattle, Austin, etc.
Another good insight is that the elite was most glamorous as it was fading away. The boom in Ivy League style in the 50s and early 1960s was the last flowering of this cultural influence. The great exemplars of this were the Kennedy family, who were part of the cohort which displaced the old eastern establishment. They adopted the styles of the people they were eliminating. They also adopted their other symbols of prestige, including the places where they were educated.
This is a really interesting piece - I'm personally curious as to why Ohio and her politicians, industrialists, and institutions join the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast as the cockpit of America from 1860-1930. One could say "because thousands of Ohioans shed blood in the preservation of the Union", but a larger percentage of the young men of Illinois and Indiana joined the Grand Army of the Republic compared to Ohio. One could also say "the great Steel Belt industrial combines were predominantly located in Pennsylvania, Ohio and the immediately bordering regions", but Illinois and Indiana, especially the region around Chicago/Gary, were also home to a massive concentrated sprawl of enormous industrial wealth. The 1870 census saw Chicago overtake Cincinnati in population, unseating her to become the largest city of the Midwest, a lead she would never yield and and in fact increase to having nearly eightfold the population of Cincinnati by 1930. Ohio is the third most populous (and therefore third largest source of representatives and electoral votes) state outside the Solid South (actually, also if you include the Solid South) during the first third of this period, but in 1892 she is eclipsed by Illinois, which never loses that lead (of course she does remain fourth largest into the 1930s). And of course, the captain-general of the Union's war effort in the crucial formative war hailed from Illinois, not Ohio or the Mid-Atlantic or the Northeast.
Of course, the obvious objection to these points is that Ohio, compared to Chicago or Illinois as a whole, or any other non-Northeastern or non-Mid-Atlantic state, had disproportionate influence in American politics from 1860-1930. Six out of fifteen 1860-1930 Presidents hailed from Ohio (I don't think it's accurate to count Benjamin Harrison as an Ohioan President), 50% of all Republican presidents in this period, a number which exceeds the next highest state, New York, which as thesis 19 indicates, was the cockpit of the cockpit. Clearly, Ohio possessed massive political influence relative to its fundamental power (whereas after Lincoln, Illinois would not give another President to the nation until 1981, or arguably 2009). Population seems partially explanatory but does not seem to be enough IMO. I am curious as to what is.
It would also be interetsting to look at urbanization and agricultural mechanization rates in Illinois vs. Ohio during the Gilded Age. I suspect, but do not know, that Ohio developed faster along these lines than Illinois, especially Illinois outside of Chicago.
But I think the main story has to be Chicago itself, which by 1920 was New York's only real rival on the national stage, and was thus a center for non-WASP money, industrial capacity, and political leadership.
But was Chicago/midwest even really a distinct nexus? Potter Palmer, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, the McCormicks, not Chicago, but C. W. Post should get a mention, were all part of the same national elite, not a local one.
You may be right. I think one of the largest holes in my understanding of the era involves Chicago--I think I need to read a few histories of it before passing judgement, and I have not yet done that.
Since I read a whole book about this :-), I'm going to add to this very interesting and useful overview a brief note about the role of the Episcopal Church as a key binding institution for the Eastern Establishment and almost a de facto US "state church" during the period in question. Members of the Episcopal Church included many (most?) of the key financiers, industrialists, and politicians of the time, including JP Morgan, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor IV, Pierre du Pont, Henry Clay Frick (business partner of Andrew Carnegie), Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford and Edsel Ford, William Cooper Procter (of Procter & Gamble), and Nelson Aldrich (maternal grandfather of Nelson Rockefeller). The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, had aspirations of being the American Westminster Abbey, and even persuaded Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith to have him entombed there (she was an Episcopalian, but he was not).
(edited to add) An interesting question is whether any new institution, religious or otherwise, could serve the same or similar function for the 21st tech elite that the Episcopal Church did for the Eastern Establishment.
Only slightly tongue in cheek here: the "LessWrong/Rationalist" movement, which counts as its intellectual leading lights Scott Alexander, Julia Galef, Gwern, Paul Graham, Zvi Moskowitz, Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and probably some more that I can think of. One might reasonably say that Scott Alexander is a kind of "presiding bishop" for the LessWrong constellation of thinkers.
Of course, precisely *because* LessWrong is an intellectual movement, not a church, I am deeply skeptical that they will be able to perform the role of a glue institution as well as the Episcopal Church did historically. I would personally consider myself a postrat, and I became one when I became a (LDS) Christian. I think one of the big differences between me before and after is that the LessWrong movement offers only very poor substitutes for the kind of eternal transcendence a messianic religion can offer. A lot of rationalists are in LessWrong because they badly crave that kind of transcendental veiled knowledge of the universe, a kind of unspoken telos that they are doomed to not achieve.
A good suggestion, and worth considering how this movement resembles/differs from the Episcopal Church of old. Some key elements I highlighted in my own post: 1) Blesses its adherents as an elect (religious but also social and cultural. 2) But also reminds them of their obligations as an elect to the rest of society. 3) Restricted membership that is nonetheless open to worthy applicants. 4) Regular events where the elect and their families could meet, work together, build ties of friendship and often marriage. 5) Created an associated alternative educational system (I name-checked Alpha School and imitators as a present-day candidate for this).
It's not clear to me that this binding institution needs to be explicitly religious in character; some of the people I mentioned were extremely devout (JP Morgan in particular), some were not (Henry Ford). But of course this is true of all religions and religion-like institutions.
Part of why Religion succeeds as an institution over a Philosophy/Ideology, is because Religion directly promotes child birth. The focus on afterlife prompts worshippers to think posterity. Philosophy less so, especially modern selfish Libertarians. So Ideology has much less of the family-friendly social institution, and thus cannot substitute.
A lot of ambitious WASP farm boys from other Protestant sects who moved to New York to seek their fortune joined one particular Episcopalian congregation where JP Morgan was a deacon in the hopes of catching his eye.
I was introduced to the historical narrative of the Eastern Establishment by a remarkable 1960 book, "Who Killed Society?" by Cleveland Amory. In Amory's 1960, high society has already fallen in its role of gatekeeper and has been replaced by liberality and inclusion as the watchwords of the day.
To me, this makes perfect sense if you think about why that gatekeeping was done in the first place. As Amory puts it, old money kept out new money because new money did not meet their expectations of education, modesty, privacy, taste, and philanthropic service to the community. Race, ethnicity, and religion were only ever included within "taste" for the same reasons that the lowest of poor whites engaged in such discrimination. (I think some Jews and others were more easily included because WASP politicians, recognizing the shallowness of this discrimination, applied it more pragmatically.) World War II, where the nation demanded the sacrifice of all races, dealt a blow to discrimination, not only among the Eastern Establishment but in all walks of life. This wasn't just a WASP thing but with WASPs being in decision making positions, they saw how total inclusion was required for the work of the Manhattan Project etc. as you noted. To fight the Cold War, education and taste now both mandated inclusion and relegated bigotry to the uneducated backwater.
As you mention, the 1930s made gatekeeping itself dubious to the halls of representative politics. You might date the beginning of that transformation even earlier, to the Populist movement -- that was a regional movement but its reforms soon came to the whole country. When you consider the longstanding power of country clubs, though, I think the other values of old money continued to serve the Eastern Establishment as a gatekept power elite, at least through George W's childhood in the 1960s and 70s. Cleveland Amory's idea of liberality must have been inconsistently applied.
Last night I had dinner with a son of the Eastern Establishment who came of age during the Vietnam War and detested the Establishment's hypocritical values. He grew out his hair, and he and resentful Ivy League graduates like him came out to Silicon Valley, determined to create a new society with its own value system. My dinner guest eventually lost his youthful rage and raised a family which still exemplifies WASP gentility, modesty, privacy, etc. Other people went a different way.
The tech right is still in wealth-building mode but - I agree - needs to shift to civilization-building, actively shaping the groundwork of the future we want our kids to live in. The Gen X cultural programming of most of these titans emphasizes a more globalized, grandiose humanism ("make humans interplanetary") while sometimes overlooking civic virtue in our own backyard. We must get over this allergy to investing in local and national civic fabric, nonprofits, and institutions. There are indeed many lessons to learn from the Eastern Establishment.
This framework reminds me of the last part of Albion’s Seed in which David Hackett Fisher speedruns post-Civil War politics. He also marks the New Deal as the end of…I guess we can call it English Heritage rule of the country. How useful is it to think about the Eastern Establishment within Fisher’s framework? Or would there be a notable cultural and ideological distinction between, say, elite Quakers and Puritans and the rank-and-file smallholders and poor of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York City?
Similarly, I can’t help but notice that California and Texas still seem to be the economic (and cultural?) center of gravity, even beyond DC. Is there a specific reason for that, or is it more happy accident? My understanding is that the Hollywood exec’s cultural power has long waned, and the pioneers in today’s shale-driven Texas were NOT the old guard.
Well written. I would not that we didn’t jump from antebellum localism straight to today’s deeply centralized unitary order. The post–Civil War headline reform, the National Banking Acts, didn’t create a single command hierarchy; it layered a federally chartered segment onto a still-plural, still-local banking/finance ecology, it was implemented unevenly and neve captured most capital formation. And the the original system change that featured the creation of the Fed was itself federated and decentralized and it didn’t replace the huge amount of credit and capital discretion that lived outside its structures; it should be noted that a national backstop is not a unitary national allocator.
Same story across other spheres, you can have national nodes and still not have a single operating system, policy variability, local autonomy (both geographic AND sectoral local), and institutional plurality persist for decades. And, in my opinion, if we’re talking about “modern West,” Silicon Valley has already had immense cultural and economic influence for a long time.
Big national projects and structures can (and did) occur within a decentralized, federated, and pluralistic regime, national overlays can coexist with a very plural, diversified, and locally federated decision making landscape, with state and local variability and pluralistic institutional redundancy doing most of the real decision making and work
And, in my opinion, I think Vietnam Vietnam is the tell for other reasons. That scale of sustained, system-wide error is what becomes possible only after decision-making concentrates enough to override feedback for years, LT Cols only spending on avg six months with their units, massive rear-base overhead, metric-driven delusions ("hamlet counts"! LMAO), and the biggest bombing campaigns in history which failed the whole time and were essentially campaigns against trees that sucked up a huge amount of material and human resources that could have been used for plans that actually made sense, and several other follies. Under the older federated regime, fiascos happened, but they were far less likely to be so system wide and to keep running for that long.
You’re basically right, and that’s a point thats part of the broader point I was trying to getting at. Nationally coordinated and centrally harmonized/directed structures were never the dominant form of banking/finance for most of American history. Even after the National Banking Acts of the 1860s and then even after, even if a bit less so, after the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, state-chartered banks, mutual savings banks, trust companies, credit cooperatives, geographically and sub-sectoraly orientated insurance/pensions based finance, thrifts, and more continued to handle a very large share, often the majority, of lending, deposits, and capital allocation decision making across economics, fiscal, scientific, and cultural matters, especially at the local and regional level, and the local and regional levels were in turn where most decision making across economics, fiscal, scientific, and cultural matters occurred.
Nationally orientated structures mattered quite a lot, and were disproportionately influential and powerful relative to the share of the population involved in their decision making, but they were a but a layer in a plural system, they were not a command center and their share of power and decision making in our system was, even though disproportionally relative to the share of people seriously involved in them, still firmly a minority share of the total power and decision making controls in the country as whole, even for the most important things
We began a multidecadal transformation process after WW2, in the banking/finance/monetary sphere it resulted that sphere becoming that should be labelled (in a centralized vs de-centralized context) a centralized system by the early 1980s and then even more so across the 1990s/2000s with us reaching where we are now during the results of the 2008 event.
We were a flawed and imperfect system, we had major contradictions, but there were indeed actually existing lower case “d” democratic governance structures that while cruelly excluding some from access to them still made for a system whose power and decision making in economic and scientific matters (what the essay above refers to) was widely and deeply federatively distributed and pluralized
Thats the very basic jist, this requires much more space than above
This is outstanding. The only quibble I have is I don’t entirely agree that the World War II defense establishment was entirely or predominantly in the Sunbelt. The MIT rad lab led to the creation of the Route 128 electronics industry, which was defense driven. That was very much an eastern establishment Enterprise, and the first chairman of Raytheon was Charles Francis Adams. That was a mix of old northeastern lineage and the most modern technology. And of course, a lot of of the heavy components of the defense establishment were Midwestern at least during the war. Also, the Navy’s nuclear submarines were built in Connecticut. Nonetheless, you are correct that California was a key center of defense manufacturing. A good book on this is The Rise of the Gunbelt, Markuson, et al. (1991), which is largely consistent with your thesis.
There is a book on this I picked up some years ago From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938–1980 by Bruce Shulman. I recall it has some statistics showing how disproportionately beneficial to the sunbelt defense industry spending was in the '50s and '60s. I might have erred in reading that back into WW2 (though even there I suspect the sunbelt had a much larger % of new factories and shipyards vs retooled factories).
Obviously if I ever do the full, detailed essay version of this I will have to nail these numbers down.
An account of the American aviation industry is indeed fascinating. However, the Southwest steadily decreased over the years, despite its perfect test weather. Engineering fortunes ostensibly drove that decline, masked only by the satellite industry. But we have to ask if political and cultural factors are relevant to that decline, even if only as background.
A couple of comments here. First, allow me to take issue with your deprecation of the term "WASP" (full disclosure: one of my first cousins once removed married Digby Baltzell's brother, which I think makes him a first cousin-in-law).
First, I agree that the term "Eastern Establishment" is probably more inclusive (oh, that word!) but at the same time it lacks the cultural sensibility of the original. Sixty years ago, Bill Buckley actually wrote a column on this exact topic, which was called something like "CASPs, JASPs, and NASPs." His argument was that--owing to the assimilative sensibilities of the WASP class--we could now point to people who were clearly part of it while not sharing all of its denotative features.
He suggested--somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I daresay--that we consider the existence of the "Catholic WASP" (e.g. the Kennedy family); the "Jewish WASP" (he gave Justice Arthur Goldberg as a paradigmatic example); and "Negro WASP" (in which category he placed the columnist Carl Rowan).
But his larger point--about the assimilative nature of the WASP class--is important. You have already alluded to it in your discussion of how--like the landed classes in 19th-century England--the "Old WASPs" (for want of a better term) married into monied families from the rising entrepreneurial class.
But that's only one aspect: the very existence of the elite Ivy League schools and their connected network of "preparatory" secondary schools (full disclosure #2: I'm an Exeter man myself) were deliberately intended not just as finishing schools for the WASP elites, but as vehicles by which emergent members of the WASP class could be inculturated to WASP values.
This is quite different from the meritocratic approach the Ivies pivoted to in the 1930s and 1940s...and that has implications for the techno elites in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. The dark side of meritocracy is that there's no appeal from its judgment: you either have the necessary talent or you don't. The techno class is far more like a caste than a class in that sense. And of course the problem with that is the obvious one: people in those sorts of environments tend to become cocooned.
I know it's somewhat vulgar to respond to your own post, but for some reason my last two paragraphs are getting cut off:
And in fact that would also be part of the reason that WASP dominance collapsed in the post-War era. Yes...all of the things you suggested were factors, to be sure. But what was at the root of all that? The arrogance of power combined with a sense of infallibility. And of course the pivot to meritocracy played a significant role in that.
But in the end, the WASP class lost its mojo because it ceased being a class and became a caste instead.
But part of my criticism of the term is that it is not *exclusive* enough. Walter Lippmann is thrown out, somehow, but Lyndon B Johnson and the Texas oil barons are in. And that is not accurate either.
...Kidding, right? Lyndon Johnson was never, ever thought of as a WASP, nor were any others from Texas, oil barons or otherwise. Where in the world did you come up with that idea?
Look: I grew up in a WASP household [1]. My parents had WASP friends. We lived on the upper East Side. I went to prep school, then to an Ivy. I have a pretty good idea about this stuff...I'm baffled as to what could possibly make you think of LBJ as a WASP.
Can't speak to the Lippman thing, I know he was a journalist, but I have no direct recollection of what my WASPy parents thought of him. Perhaps it's that very fact that means he wasn't in the magic circle.
[1] Side note: my father was born and raised in Brooklyn as a nice Jewish boy. He went to Brooklyn College and then to Harvard. While at Harvard he was befriended by a well-known Anglican theologian of the era, and decided to convert to Episcopalianism. He and my mother met nearly a decade later, and I came onto the scene another decade after that. I had no idea about my father's Jewish roots until years later: by the time I was growing up he was completely assimilated and no one could have figured him for anything but a WASP. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I mention the assimilative aspect of WASPdom.
No this is my point. LBJ was not a WASP, and no one thought he was part of the Eastern Establishment... even though he was White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. "WASP" is a bad descriptor of this class of people when it does not explicitly exclude Johnson et al from it.
People do regularly get confused about this. Google "WASP presidents" and you get dozens and dozens of articles that start like this following one, from Reuters in 2011:
"White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) men are supposed to hold the reins of power in the United States. All but two presidents have been WASP males; almost all Supreme Court justices; most leaders of the House and Senate.
Today everyone knows America has a black president for the first time. It’s also the first time in American history that neither the president nor the vice president are WASPs. Of the six apparent frontrunners for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination to oppose Barack Obama, just one is a WASP. Of the four leaders of Congress, only one is a WASP. The Supreme Court not only has no WASP, it has no Protestant.
Consider the absence of WASP males at the top of public life. The president is African American, the vice president is Catholic. Current favorites to top the Republican 2012 ticket are Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, Mormons; Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, women; Newt Gingrich, a Catholic and Tim Pawlenty, a Baptist....."
So that is the problem with the term "WASP." People take it to mean ANY white, Anglo-saxon Protestant man, regardless of whether they have ever been to Upper East Side or stepped foot on an Ivy campus.
And actually this is not even a new thing--here is Time in 1969:
"The Federal Government has always been the domain of the Wasp. Until John Kennedy, every U.S. President was a Wasp, and so was every Vice President except Charles Curtis (1929-33), who was the son of an Indian. Last fall's candidates, Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, were quite predictably Wasps. Although the civil service has been a traditional path of advancement for non-Wasps (half of Post Office workers in the large cities are Negroes), the prestigious departments, such as State, are still run by Wasps. Congress is a Wasp stronghold: the newly elected one consists of 109 Catholics, 19 Jews, 10 Negroes, 3 Greek Orthodox, 4 Orientals and almost 400 Wasps. Committee chairmanships are largely in the hands of Wasps. Enlisted men in the armed services are an ethnic mix, but the officers are heavily Wasp. Even in the cities they no longer control politically—Chicago or Cleveland—Wasps have much behind-the-scenes power. In several cities, Wasp business leaders have mobilized to aid the blacks, including the militants in the ghettos. Other ethnic politicians fear the erosion of their own power as the result of Wasp-Negro deals. "
Well, the problem is, the guys writing those things are wrong. I mean...seriously...Nixon? Humphrey ?? WALLACE ??? Nuh-uh. Not even close.
Look. The term was--as you well know--coined by Digby Baltzell. And in his works--and by extension in the sociology profession--everyone uses it because everyone knows what it means, because Digby Baltzell casts a pretty long shadow.
When I still subscribed to The Economist, at some point they started having an obituary page. Exactly one person who had died since the last issue was featured. The week Digby Baltzell died, he was the guy The Economist featured.
So when it started, "WASP" was what they call in the professions a "term of art." You couldn't necessarily understand it unless you were familiar with the jargon. Of course this was less true among the actual WASP community, among whom I number myself and which as I described earlier, I grew up in.
In those precincts, everyone knew what the term meant and how to use it correctly. But of course, like all such terms, it eventually passed into a broader environment and then people started to use it in ways it had never been intended to be used. So when Time writes that, they're, shall we say, overgeneralizing .
Think of it this way...in those days, to be a WASP defined you as part of a specific socioeconomic community. You also had the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Jews, e tutti quanti. Nowadays, all of those groups are lumped together as "white." And I'm sure you can find plenty of articles that use the term "white" in that obviously indiscriminate fashion.
Does that make it correct usage? Well, not to me.
Look...I don't want to beat this horse any more than necessary. I've already said I'm OK with the term "Eastern Establishment," although to me that's the equivalent of calling a bunch of separate and distinct ethnic groups "white," as if there were no meaningful distinctions among them.
For what it's worth, if waspness inherently leads towards enlightenment ideals (on a winding path), then reducing the culture into demographics is about as poetic as it gets.
Solid analysis of the definition of WASP, and of an often overlooked point: Catholic and Jewish elites could marry and assimilate into WASP culture (many of whom later became Episcopalian).
Interesting that no one talks about The Social Register when analyzing the rise and fall of WASPs (a big clue to who was in the big club), but maybe many cultural writers aren’t familiar with it.
Anyways…
I especially relate to this point: “But that's only one aspect: the very existence of the elite Ivy League schools and their connected network of "preparatory" secondary schools (full disclosure #2: I'm an Exeter man myself) were deliberately intended not just as finishing schools for the WASP elites, but as vehicles by which emergent members of the WASP class could be inculturated to WASP values.”
A lot of people without insider knowledge (I was an SPS student) don’t fully grasp this. Starting the day with chapel every morning, honor codes, seated meal, etc.
The schools also pivoted in their purpose from educating the sons and daughters of the elite WASP families (a nepotistic system), to trying to justify themselves as the credentialers of merit in an emerging meritocracy (“we are the most rigorous schools out there and anyone who gets in and succeeds in our system is deserving of elite status, scholarship student or legacy”). This is why east coasters are all so obsessed with where they went to school (less important in the South for example other than in pointing to football team allegiances) when it comes to being qualified for jobs.
The thing is, good grades in elite schools don’t always translate to leadership competence even if they do often require hard work and smarts.
"The thing is, good grades in elite schools don’t always translate to leadership competence even if they do often require hard work and smarts."
Yeah...you said it. If anything it becomes--what is that phrase I've heard?--a "self-licking ice cream cone." <eyeroll>
Funny story: after college (Columbia...or as we used to call it, tongue-in-cheek, "SUNY-Harlem") I moved to Northern Virginia and went to work for the Navy Department. At my first annual performance appraisal, my supervisor tells me--completely casually, not as an insult--that the organization are relieved that I really dug into the work, since (I quote) "...we don't always see that from people we hire from those elite universities like Columbia."
I don't mind telling you, that was a bucket of icewater to the face: for the first time in my 22 years of life, someone had suggested--in the most matter-of-fact way!--that maybe being an Exeter and Columbia man wasn't all that.
I went to Tulane for college and then went to an ivy for grad school, but after grad school I was living and looking for permanent work back in New Orleans, as I had grown pretty attached to Louisiana and wanted to settle down there.
Few east coasters seem to realize that southerners aren’t really that impressed with elite east coast schools, and many assume you are rich, not smart, if you attended one. People I worked with were definitely skeptical of the Yale on my resume, so being a Tulane alum was more useful. Tulane still screams rich kid, but I’m one of “their” rich kids, if that makes sense. They are just as nepotistic in New Orleans as they are in New York, but in the South they are more transparent about it.
Your periodization reads thoughtfully enough to have excluded the Whigs, who clearly manifested a national self-understanding. Four presidents and an eternal Speaker of the House feels pretty establishment. How do you fit them into the history?
Here is how I treat it in the American Affairs essay:
"This vision of techno-nationalist development has a long American pedigree. Alexander Hamilton described its essential elements more than two centuries ago. Hamilton predicted that American independence would last only if the thirteen American states fused their economies into one national market governed by an energetic executive. This government would spur industry, uphold American credit, and deter foreign predation. This was an explicitly industrial vision. He believed that “not only the wealth but the independence and security of a country appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of [its] manufactures.” Industrial development, in turn, required the security and scale that could only come from a large and unified nation. Hamilton argued that the U.S. Constitution would create this nation. By “bind[ing] together [our states] in a strict and indissoluble Union,” the constitution would “erect one great American system . . . able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.”
The Hamiltonian program for “one great American system” of growing integration, advancing industry, and rising power was not realized in Hamilton’s lifetime. While the U.S. Constitution laid the groundwork for a technological republic, it was not enough to bring one into being. What the new republic required was a national elite resolutely committed to their nation’s technological ascent. But it would take decades before a class with such techno-nationalist inclinations came to helm the American state and economy....
The wealthiest elite groups of the antebellum era thus resembled Karp’s picture of the contemporary tech elite: they were suspicious of executive power, distrustful of American nationalism, insulated from the American public, and focused their investments in whatever field promised the highest returns, regardless of the political consequences for doing so. Many were localists; some were Atlanticists. Almost none were nationalists. Their favored politicians, men like Franklin Pierce, William Marcy, Howell Cobb, and James Henry Hammond, dismantled America’s system of centralized finance, slashed its tariffs, vetoed internal improvements, shoved industrial policy down to the states, and maligned the rising class of industrialists.
America’s most powerful regional elites simply had no material stake in a technological republic, and they lacked the nation-spanning institutions or social networks needed to lead one. The handful of antebellum statesmen who, with Daniel Webster, urged Americans to become “one people, one in interest, one in character, and one in political feeling,” were rewarded with a lifetime of political disappointments."
The whigs should be given their due but they were the minority party the majority of their existence, and not all of them were as strongly nationalistic as Henry Clay. For every Clay you had a John Tyler, who was driven to the whigs less because he bought into the premise of Whig style whiggery and more because he was a commercially minded anti-Democrat.
First, this class's influence was not “outsized” but rather coextensive with their position in the long period of American economic expansion. It therefore lasted well into the 1970s, and was eclipsed only by the final triumph of those gauche arrivistes from the sunbelt. In other words, the influence of this class was appropriate to their economic position—indeed, how could it have been otherwise?
Greer mentions Dubya Bush but fails to grasp his significance. W was not merely an echt preppie, he was also a prime exemplar of a social type most are completely unaware of, the Texas Preppie. That is, Wasp hegemony worked its fingers into the sunbelt (as it did into Hollywood) and not the other way round.
Nor is “decadent” the correct term. While Anglicans may not be aggressively Calvinist they are nevertheless Protestant. Had this class embraced decadence in any real way they would never have achieved their dominant position in society. As Weber well noted.
Nor were their cultural attitudes, modes of dress, etc. “pretentious”. It would of course be pretentious for an arriviste to ape the manners and habits of Groton old boy, but the old boy himself is not pretending.
I have never met anyone under the age of 60 who isn't Ghanaian, Jamaican, Hong Kong etc who was legitimately born and raised Mainline Protestant. I actually have one Hispanic friend who was raised Episcopal but she's 70+. Most people are Evangelical.
Here in NYC, you find the same division in religion as you do in China. You're either a "Christian" meaning Fundamentalist, Evangelical and Pentecostal in a storefront box or house church, or you're a Catholic, meaning just that. Its the same in Spanish, Cristiano means Evangelical/Pentecostal.
People here in NYC will openly repeat the Chinese maxim that Christians worship Jesus and Catholics worship Mary.
I wonder, though, about the rise of Progressives well before the New Deal. One reason New Dealers were pretty competent is because many of them had prior government experience under Woodrow Wilson or the Republican presidents Taft and Teddy.
My vague impression is that pre-New Deal progressives tended to be from the same class as their Big Business opponents. For instance, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which the Supreme Court finally authorized in 1911 by breaking up the Standard Oil monopoly, was sponsored by Senator John Sherman, the brother of General William T. Sherman of Civil War fame.
I can recall Harvard historian and Navy admiral Samuel Eliot Morison writing about how a formative experience for his generation of Democratic Progressives was serving on Wilson's staff at Versailles.
The Eliots were one of the most famous Boston Brahmin families -- e.g., poet T.S. Eliot and Harvard president Charles Eliot. Morison said the Eliots had gotten rich enough by the 1820s that they left business and went into the profession of "uplift."
So, perhaps the Progressives tended to be WASPs who had done well in business while the big business Republicans tended to be WASPs who were doing well in business?
I think that last sentence is a good one. Must ponder on it more--but note this paragraph in my American Affairs essay:
"Consider the composition of Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet. Before he served as Roosevelt’s postmaster general or the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Henry Clay Pyne worked as both an electricity and railway executive. He was not the only railway or electricity executive in the cabinet: Roosevelt’s vice president, his first secretary of the interior, and two of his Navy secretaries had been railway men, while his first secretary of commerce and second postmaster general both served as the presidents of electric utilities.
The cabinet also included several accomplished industrial lawyers, among them Victor Metcalf, Elihu Root, and Philander Knox, who began his career representing Andrew Carnegie. Before he led the State Department, Robert Bacon managed J. P. Morgan’s steel and railroad interests; Lyman Gage, in contrast, would leave the administration to serve as the president of U.S. Trust. Even the literary-minded John Hay, who never held a corporate job in his life, was thoroughly enmeshed in the world of industry by way of marriage: his wife was Clara Stone, daughter of Ohio railroad mogul Amasa Stone. During the Second Industrial Revolution, the families that governed the United States and the families that captained its industries were one and the same."
Another thought: progressivism had WASP defectors but I think of it first and foremost as the brainchild of Germans and Nordics, 1st and 2nd generations. There is a reason the progressive governance project really starts as "the Wisconsin Idea" and wins over the Midwest long before it wins over the Northeast.
To some extent Germans and Nordics played a role in American progressivism c. 1900, but looking at the big names of the progressive movement, their surnames are highly WASP.
I've never really figured out a way to predict whether a member of the Eastern Establishment in 1890-1930 will side with the laissez-faire conservatives or with the big government progressives (other than obvious ones like: Does he have a financial tie to Standard Oil?).
Even David Hackett Fischer's four Anglo sub-ethnicities model doesn't seem to be much help. My impression is that the leadership of both political tendencies tended to be disproportionately descended from New England Puritans.
One interesting question is whether the Eastern Establishment bifurcated into endogamous wings over its ideological split during the Progressive Era.
Offhand, I don't think so. It seems like by the 1960s or 1970s, "country club Republicans" tended to be seen by Catholic conservatives like W.F. Buckley as excessively moderate.
I’d buy and read this book.
I would like to point out another (fatal perhaps?) weakness of the tech elite, namely that they benefit the other Americans much much less than the Eastern Establishment. Three factors are at play 1 The technological breakthroughs are less revolutionary than the introduction of the electricity, car, radio etc (“I was promised a flying car and I got 140 characters”) 2 The success of some very big tech firms was predicated on destroying an existing economic reality, like the physical store in the case of Amazon or the unionized taxi drivers in the case of Uber and creating in its place jobs that are both more precarious and less well-paid; the cult of disruption is pervasive in the tech elites, but without taking responsibility for the wrecked lives and communities. This is not the stuff elites are made of 3. The technological breakthroughs elite has been much much more successful than the Eastern one in extracting and keeping all the value created for themselves, all the wealth goes to the very top. The so-called enshittification is something typical of the culture of the tech elite. The omens are for an elite that is ready to govern through brainwashing and repression. The signs are everywhere. You are hoping against hope that some sort of metanoia will transform them… Very slim odds, I think
I think #2 was absolutely true of the Eastern Establishment industrialists--they destroyed existing economic arrangements very thoroughly. Along the way they upended America's political order and made its existing political values (which enshrined "independence" -- basically, being one's own boss, as most yeoman farmers were -- as the main definition of freedom) impossible. Agrarian populists would certainly claim that the Establishment did not take "responsibility for the wrecked lives and communities" they caused. William Jennings Bryan came very close to winning the presidency with that exact claim.
I have tremendous sympathy for the small-r republicans who fought the death of their old republic between 1870 and 1910 or so. One of the weaknesses of these two essays is that they take the perspective of the men who did the killing. In truth I can see both sides of the question--which is one reason why I find that period of history so interesting.
Point taken, thank you. I still have the impression that there are two differences 1 this time the disruption is a value in itself ("Move fast and break things", probably this comes from the roots of the Silicon Valley in the counterculture of the Sixties) and not a means towards an end 2 the Eastern Elite could offer a quid pro quo to soften the disruption between 1870 and 1910, namely the creation of comparatively better-paid jobs in the industrial Northeast and Midwest. This time it is the opposite, well-paid jobs disappear and are replaced by gigs, and the AI could make things even worse. Please bear with me, I am from Italy and I do not have a fine grasp of US history, I might get things wrong, thank you for your patience.
futurism, modernism, the international efficiency movements, and the whole "cult of speed" in Italy ect sure placed a lot of explicit direct value on being fast ect and fit comfortably in the second half of that time frame.
SV innovation seems (so far) to be just a small echo of the scale of those.
There is a difference though. Italian futurists and their ilk were marginal artists. The Italian elites were conservatives, nationalists and reactionaries, disruption was the last thing they coveted.
When the Fascists (who were the intellectual offspring of the Futurists) came to power, they aligned themselves with the conservative and nationalist agenda, very quickly. Mussolini sidelined the idealists and revolutionary disrupters in a matter of months after taking power.
The problem nowadays is that the SV elites have embraced 100% the ideology of disruption. Add to the mix the rejection of democracy by Thiel, Srinivasan et al, the alignment with the MIC and you get a potential for disaster on the same order of magnitude as the 1930s. Hope fervently to be proven wrong, oc
Amazon and uber make 99% of people’s lives way better, the benefits also aren’t limited to a specific region.
I think another thing I would mention is that tech job creation is limited, generally speaking, to a few big tech hub cities, like SF, Seattle, Austin, etc.
Another good insight is that the elite was most glamorous as it was fading away. The boom in Ivy League style in the 50s and early 1960s was the last flowering of this cultural influence. The great exemplars of this were the Kennedy family, who were part of the cohort which displaced the old eastern establishment. They adopted the styles of the people they were eliminating. They also adopted their other symbols of prestige, including the places where they were educated.
This is a really interesting piece - I'm personally curious as to why Ohio and her politicians, industrialists, and institutions join the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast as the cockpit of America from 1860-1930. One could say "because thousands of Ohioans shed blood in the preservation of the Union", but a larger percentage of the young men of Illinois and Indiana joined the Grand Army of the Republic compared to Ohio. One could also say "the great Steel Belt industrial combines were predominantly located in Pennsylvania, Ohio and the immediately bordering regions", but Illinois and Indiana, especially the region around Chicago/Gary, were also home to a massive concentrated sprawl of enormous industrial wealth. The 1870 census saw Chicago overtake Cincinnati in population, unseating her to become the largest city of the Midwest, a lead she would never yield and and in fact increase to having nearly eightfold the population of Cincinnati by 1930. Ohio is the third most populous (and therefore third largest source of representatives and electoral votes) state outside the Solid South (actually, also if you include the Solid South) during the first third of this period, but in 1892 she is eclipsed by Illinois, which never loses that lead (of course she does remain fourth largest into the 1930s). And of course, the captain-general of the Union's war effort in the crucial formative war hailed from Illinois, not Ohio or the Mid-Atlantic or the Northeast.
Of course, the obvious objection to these points is that Ohio, compared to Chicago or Illinois as a whole, or any other non-Northeastern or non-Mid-Atlantic state, had disproportionate influence in American politics from 1860-1930. Six out of fifteen 1860-1930 Presidents hailed from Ohio (I don't think it's accurate to count Benjamin Harrison as an Ohioan President), 50% of all Republican presidents in this period, a number which exceeds the next highest state, New York, which as thesis 19 indicates, was the cockpit of the cockpit. Clearly, Ohio possessed massive political influence relative to its fundamental power (whereas after Lincoln, Illinois would not give another President to the nation until 1981, or arguably 2009). Population seems partially explanatory but does not seem to be enough IMO. I am curious as to what is.
Where they sent their kids to school.
Another part: Ohio still revolved around New York. West of Ohio, they turned to Chicago.
It would also be interetsting to look at urbanization and agricultural mechanization rates in Illinois vs. Ohio during the Gilded Age. I suspect, but do not know, that Ohio developed faster along these lines than Illinois, especially Illinois outside of Chicago.
But I think the main story has to be Chicago itself, which by 1920 was New York's only real rival on the national stage, and was thus a center for non-WASP money, industrial capacity, and political leadership.
But was Chicago/midwest even really a distinct nexus? Potter Palmer, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, the McCormicks, not Chicago, but C. W. Post should get a mention, were all part of the same national elite, not a local one.
You may be right. I think one of the largest holes in my understanding of the era involves Chicago--I think I need to read a few histories of it before passing judgement, and I have not yet done that.
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis
Since I read a whole book about this :-), I'm going to add to this very interesting and useful overview a brief note about the role of the Episcopal Church as a key binding institution for the Eastern Establishment and almost a de facto US "state church" during the period in question. Members of the Episcopal Church included many (most?) of the key financiers, industrialists, and politicians of the time, including JP Morgan, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor IV, Pierre du Pont, Henry Clay Frick (business partner of Andrew Carnegie), Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford and Edsel Ford, William Cooper Procter (of Procter & Gamble), and Nelson Aldrich (maternal grandfather of Nelson Rockefeller). The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, had aspirations of being the American Westminster Abbey, and even persuaded Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith to have him entombed there (she was an Episcopalian, but he was not).
(edited to add) An interesting question is whether any new institution, religious or otherwise, could serve the same or similar function for the 21st tech elite that the Episcopal Church did for the Eastern Establishment.
Only slightly tongue in cheek here: the "LessWrong/Rationalist" movement, which counts as its intellectual leading lights Scott Alexander, Julia Galef, Gwern, Paul Graham, Zvi Moskowitz, Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and probably some more that I can think of. One might reasonably say that Scott Alexander is a kind of "presiding bishop" for the LessWrong constellation of thinkers.
Of course, precisely *because* LessWrong is an intellectual movement, not a church, I am deeply skeptical that they will be able to perform the role of a glue institution as well as the Episcopal Church did historically. I would personally consider myself a postrat, and I became one when I became a (LDS) Christian. I think one of the big differences between me before and after is that the LessWrong movement offers only very poor substitutes for the kind of eternal transcendence a messianic religion can offer. A lot of rationalists are in LessWrong because they badly crave that kind of transcendental veiled knowledge of the universe, a kind of unspoken telos that they are doomed to not achieve.
A good suggestion, and worth considering how this movement resembles/differs from the Episcopal Church of old. Some key elements I highlighted in my own post: 1) Blesses its adherents as an elect (religious but also social and cultural. 2) But also reminds them of their obligations as an elect to the rest of society. 3) Restricted membership that is nonetheless open to worthy applicants. 4) Regular events where the elect and their families could meet, work together, build ties of friendship and often marriage. 5) Created an associated alternative educational system (I name-checked Alpha School and imitators as a present-day candidate for this).
It's not clear to me that this binding institution needs to be explicitly religious in character; some of the people I mentioned were extremely devout (JP Morgan in particular), some were not (Henry Ford). But of course this is true of all religions and religion-like institutions.
Part of why Religion succeeds as an institution over a Philosophy/Ideology, is because Religion directly promotes child birth. The focus on afterlife prompts worshippers to think posterity. Philosophy less so, especially modern selfish Libertarians. So Ideology has much less of the family-friendly social institution, and thus cannot substitute.
Well there is a rather noticeable split between the "LessWrong/Rationalist" movement and the tech right over the former's AI-doomerism.
A lot of ambitious WASP farm boys from other Protestant sects who moved to New York to seek their fortune joined one particular Episcopalian congregation where JP Morgan was a deacon in the hopes of catching his eye.
The only institution that could is the Episcopal Church. Elites and ruling classes are not fungible.
What's the book, if you don't mind sharing?
Religion, Art, and Money by Peter W Williams
I was introduced to the historical narrative of the Eastern Establishment by a remarkable 1960 book, "Who Killed Society?" by Cleveland Amory. In Amory's 1960, high society has already fallen in its role of gatekeeper and has been replaced by liberality and inclusion as the watchwords of the day.
To me, this makes perfect sense if you think about why that gatekeeping was done in the first place. As Amory puts it, old money kept out new money because new money did not meet their expectations of education, modesty, privacy, taste, and philanthropic service to the community. Race, ethnicity, and religion were only ever included within "taste" for the same reasons that the lowest of poor whites engaged in such discrimination. (I think some Jews and others were more easily included because WASP politicians, recognizing the shallowness of this discrimination, applied it more pragmatically.) World War II, where the nation demanded the sacrifice of all races, dealt a blow to discrimination, not only among the Eastern Establishment but in all walks of life. This wasn't just a WASP thing but with WASPs being in decision making positions, they saw how total inclusion was required for the work of the Manhattan Project etc. as you noted. To fight the Cold War, education and taste now both mandated inclusion and relegated bigotry to the uneducated backwater.
As you mention, the 1930s made gatekeeping itself dubious to the halls of representative politics. You might date the beginning of that transformation even earlier, to the Populist movement -- that was a regional movement but its reforms soon came to the whole country. When you consider the longstanding power of country clubs, though, I think the other values of old money continued to serve the Eastern Establishment as a gatekept power elite, at least through George W's childhood in the 1960s and 70s. Cleveland Amory's idea of liberality must have been inconsistently applied.
Last night I had dinner with a son of the Eastern Establishment who came of age during the Vietnam War and detested the Establishment's hypocritical values. He grew out his hair, and he and resentful Ivy League graduates like him came out to Silicon Valley, determined to create a new society with its own value system. My dinner guest eventually lost his youthful rage and raised a family which still exemplifies WASP gentility, modesty, privacy, etc. Other people went a different way.
Great call out to Amory. His The Last Resorts is also excellent if somewhat less incisive
The tech right is still in wealth-building mode but - I agree - needs to shift to civilization-building, actively shaping the groundwork of the future we want our kids to live in. The Gen X cultural programming of most of these titans emphasizes a more globalized, grandiose humanism ("make humans interplanetary") while sometimes overlooking civic virtue in our own backyard. We must get over this allergy to investing in local and national civic fabric, nonprofits, and institutions. There are indeed many lessons to learn from the Eastern Establishment.
This framework reminds me of the last part of Albion’s Seed in which David Hackett Fisher speedruns post-Civil War politics. He also marks the New Deal as the end of…I guess we can call it English Heritage rule of the country. How useful is it to think about the Eastern Establishment within Fisher’s framework? Or would there be a notable cultural and ideological distinction between, say, elite Quakers and Puritans and the rank-and-file smallholders and poor of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York City?
Similarly, I can’t help but notice that California and Texas still seem to be the economic (and cultural?) center of gravity, even beyond DC. Is there a specific reason for that, or is it more happy accident? My understanding is that the Hollywood exec’s cultural power has long waned, and the pioneers in today’s shale-driven Texas were NOT the old guard.
Well written. I would not that we didn’t jump from antebellum localism straight to today’s deeply centralized unitary order. The post–Civil War headline reform, the National Banking Acts, didn’t create a single command hierarchy; it layered a federally chartered segment onto a still-plural, still-local banking/finance ecology, it was implemented unevenly and neve captured most capital formation. And the the original system change that featured the creation of the Fed was itself federated and decentralized and it didn’t replace the huge amount of credit and capital discretion that lived outside its structures; it should be noted that a national backstop is not a unitary national allocator.
Same story across other spheres, you can have national nodes and still not have a single operating system, policy variability, local autonomy (both geographic AND sectoral local), and institutional plurality persist for decades. And, in my opinion, if we’re talking about “modern West,” Silicon Valley has already had immense cultural and economic influence for a long time.
Big national projects and structures can (and did) occur within a decentralized, federated, and pluralistic regime, national overlays can coexist with a very plural, diversified, and locally federated decision making landscape, with state and local variability and pluralistic institutional redundancy doing most of the real decision making and work
And, in my opinion, I think Vietnam Vietnam is the tell for other reasons. That scale of sustained, system-wide error is what becomes possible only after decision-making concentrates enough to override feedback for years, LT Cols only spending on avg six months with their units, massive rear-base overhead, metric-driven delusions ("hamlet counts"! LMAO), and the biggest bombing campaigns in history which failed the whole time and were essentially campaigns against trees that sucked up a huge amount of material and human resources that could have been used for plans that actually made sense, and several other follies. Under the older federated regime, fiascos happened, but they were far less likely to be so system wide and to keep running for that long.
I thought that national banks were the exception until fairly recently?
You’re basically right, and that’s a point thats part of the broader point I was trying to getting at. Nationally coordinated and centrally harmonized/directed structures were never the dominant form of banking/finance for most of American history. Even after the National Banking Acts of the 1860s and then even after, even if a bit less so, after the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, state-chartered banks, mutual savings banks, trust companies, credit cooperatives, geographically and sub-sectoraly orientated insurance/pensions based finance, thrifts, and more continued to handle a very large share, often the majority, of lending, deposits, and capital allocation decision making across economics, fiscal, scientific, and cultural matters, especially at the local and regional level, and the local and regional levels were in turn where most decision making across economics, fiscal, scientific, and cultural matters occurred.
Nationally orientated structures mattered quite a lot, and were disproportionately influential and powerful relative to the share of the population involved in their decision making, but they were a but a layer in a plural system, they were not a command center and their share of power and decision making in our system was, even though disproportionally relative to the share of people seriously involved in them, still firmly a minority share of the total power and decision making controls in the country as whole, even for the most important things
We began a multidecadal transformation process after WW2, in the banking/finance/monetary sphere it resulted that sphere becoming that should be labelled (in a centralized vs de-centralized context) a centralized system by the early 1980s and then even more so across the 1990s/2000s with us reaching where we are now during the results of the 2008 event.
We were a flawed and imperfect system, we had major contradictions, but there were indeed actually existing lower case “d” democratic governance structures that while cruelly excluding some from access to them still made for a system whose power and decision making in economic and scientific matters (what the essay above refers to) was widely and deeply federatively distributed and pluralized
Thats the very basic jist, this requires much more space than above
This is outstanding. The only quibble I have is I don’t entirely agree that the World War II defense establishment was entirely or predominantly in the Sunbelt. The MIT rad lab led to the creation of the Route 128 electronics industry, which was defense driven. That was very much an eastern establishment Enterprise, and the first chairman of Raytheon was Charles Francis Adams. That was a mix of old northeastern lineage and the most modern technology. And of course, a lot of of the heavy components of the defense establishment were Midwestern at least during the war. Also, the Navy’s nuclear submarines were built in Connecticut. Nonetheless, you are correct that California was a key center of defense manufacturing. A good book on this is The Rise of the Gunbelt, Markuson, et al. (1991), which is largely consistent with your thesis.
There is a book on this I picked up some years ago From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938–1980 by Bruce Shulman. I recall it has some statistics showing how disproportionately beneficial to the sunbelt defense industry spending was in the '50s and '60s. I might have erred in reading that back into WW2 (though even there I suspect the sunbelt had a much larger % of new factories and shipyards vs retooled factories).
Obviously if I ever do the full, detailed essay version of this I will have to nail these numbers down.
You are directionally, correct. But like all big historical processes the whole thing is barnacled with messy details. It’s a fascinating subject.
An account of the American aviation industry is indeed fascinating. However, the Southwest steadily decreased over the years, despite its perfect test weather. Engineering fortunes ostensibly drove that decline, masked only by the satellite industry. But we have to ask if political and cultural factors are relevant to that decline, even if only as background.
A couple of comments here. First, allow me to take issue with your deprecation of the term "WASP" (full disclosure: one of my first cousins once removed married Digby Baltzell's brother, which I think makes him a first cousin-in-law).
First, I agree that the term "Eastern Establishment" is probably more inclusive (oh, that word!) but at the same time it lacks the cultural sensibility of the original. Sixty years ago, Bill Buckley actually wrote a column on this exact topic, which was called something like "CASPs, JASPs, and NASPs." His argument was that--owing to the assimilative sensibilities of the WASP class--we could now point to people who were clearly part of it while not sharing all of its denotative features.
He suggested--somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I daresay--that we consider the existence of the "Catholic WASP" (e.g. the Kennedy family); the "Jewish WASP" (he gave Justice Arthur Goldberg as a paradigmatic example); and "Negro WASP" (in which category he placed the columnist Carl Rowan).
But his larger point--about the assimilative nature of the WASP class--is important. You have already alluded to it in your discussion of how--like the landed classes in 19th-century England--the "Old WASPs" (for want of a better term) married into monied families from the rising entrepreneurial class.
But that's only one aspect: the very existence of the elite Ivy League schools and their connected network of "preparatory" secondary schools (full disclosure #2: I'm an Exeter man myself) were deliberately intended not just as finishing schools for the WASP elites, but as vehicles by which emergent members of the WASP class could be inculturated to WASP values.
This is quite different from the meritocratic approach the Ivies pivoted to in the 1930s and 1940s...and that has implications for the techno elites in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. The dark side of meritocracy is that there's no appeal from its judgment: you either have the necessary talent or you don't. The techno class is far more like a caste than a class in that sense. And of course the problem with that is the obvious one: people in those sorts of environments tend to become cocooned.
I know it's somewhat vulgar to respond to your own post, but for some reason my last two paragraphs are getting cut off:
And in fact that would also be part of the reason that WASP dominance collapsed in the post-War era. Yes...all of the things you suggested were factors, to be sure. But what was at the root of all that? The arrogance of power combined with a sense of infallibility. And of course the pivot to meritocracy played a significant role in that.
But in the end, the WASP class lost its mojo because it ceased being a class and became a caste instead.
But part of my criticism of the term is that it is not *exclusive* enough. Walter Lippmann is thrown out, somehow, but Lyndon B Johnson and the Texas oil barons are in. And that is not accurate either.
...Kidding, right? Lyndon Johnson was never, ever thought of as a WASP, nor were any others from Texas, oil barons or otherwise. Where in the world did you come up with that idea?
Look: I grew up in a WASP household [1]. My parents had WASP friends. We lived on the upper East Side. I went to prep school, then to an Ivy. I have a pretty good idea about this stuff...I'm baffled as to what could possibly make you think of LBJ as a WASP.
Can't speak to the Lippman thing, I know he was a journalist, but I have no direct recollection of what my WASPy parents thought of him. Perhaps it's that very fact that means he wasn't in the magic circle.
[1] Side note: my father was born and raised in Brooklyn as a nice Jewish boy. He went to Brooklyn College and then to Harvard. While at Harvard he was befriended by a well-known Anglican theologian of the era, and decided to convert to Episcopalianism. He and my mother met nearly a decade later, and I came onto the scene another decade after that. I had no idea about my father's Jewish roots until years later: by the time I was growing up he was completely assimilated and no one could have figured him for anything but a WASP. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I mention the assimilative aspect of WASPdom.
No this is my point. LBJ was not a WASP, and no one thought he was part of the Eastern Establishment... even though he was White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. "WASP" is a bad descriptor of this class of people when it does not explicitly exclude Johnson et al from it.
People do regularly get confused about this. Google "WASP presidents" and you get dozens and dozens of articles that start like this following one, from Reuters in 2011:
"White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) men are supposed to hold the reins of power in the United States. All but two presidents have been WASP males; almost all Supreme Court justices; most leaders of the House and Senate.
Today everyone knows America has a black president for the first time. It’s also the first time in American history that neither the president nor the vice president are WASPs. Of the six apparent frontrunners for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination to oppose Barack Obama, just one is a WASP. Of the four leaders of Congress, only one is a WASP. The Supreme Court not only has no WASP, it has no Protestant.
Consider the absence of WASP males at the top of public life. The president is African American, the vice president is Catholic. Current favorites to top the Republican 2012 ticket are Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, Mormons; Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, women; Newt Gingrich, a Catholic and Tim Pawlenty, a Baptist....."
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/twilight-of-the-wasps-idUS1656619742/
So that is the problem with the term "WASP." People take it to mean ANY white, Anglo-saxon Protestant man, regardless of whether they have ever been to Upper East Side or stepped foot on an Ivy campus.
And actually this is not even a new thing--here is Time in 1969:
"The Federal Government has always been the domain of the Wasp. Until John Kennedy, every U.S. President was a Wasp, and so was every Vice President except Charles Curtis (1929-33), who was the son of an Indian. Last fall's candidates, Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, were quite predictably Wasps. Although the civil service has been a traditional path of advancement for non-Wasps (half of Post Office workers in the large cities are Negroes), the prestigious departments, such as State, are still run by Wasps. Congress is a Wasp stronghold: the newly elected one consists of 109 Catholics, 19 Jews, 10 Negroes, 3 Greek Orthodox, 4 Orientals and almost 400 Wasps. Committee chairmanships are largely in the hands of Wasps. Enlisted men in the armed services are an ethnic mix, but the officers are heavily Wasp. Even in the cities they no longer control politically—Chicago or Cleveland—Wasps have much behind-the-scenes power. In several cities, Wasp business leaders have mobilized to aid the blacks, including the militants in the ghettos. Other ethnic politicians fear the erosion of their own power as the result of Wasp-Negro deals. "
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,838862-2,00.html
Well, the problem is, the guys writing those things are wrong. I mean...seriously...Nixon? Humphrey ?? WALLACE ??? Nuh-uh. Not even close.
Look. The term was--as you well know--coined by Digby Baltzell. And in his works--and by extension in the sociology profession--everyone uses it because everyone knows what it means, because Digby Baltzell casts a pretty long shadow.
When I still subscribed to The Economist, at some point they started having an obituary page. Exactly one person who had died since the last issue was featured. The week Digby Baltzell died, he was the guy The Economist featured.
So when it started, "WASP" was what they call in the professions a "term of art." You couldn't necessarily understand it unless you were familiar with the jargon. Of course this was less true among the actual WASP community, among whom I number myself and which as I described earlier, I grew up in.
In those precincts, everyone knew what the term meant and how to use it correctly. But of course, like all such terms, it eventually passed into a broader environment and then people started to use it in ways it had never been intended to be used. So when Time writes that, they're, shall we say, overgeneralizing .
Think of it this way...in those days, to be a WASP defined you as part of a specific socioeconomic community. You also had the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Jews, e tutti quanti. Nowadays, all of those groups are lumped together as "white." And I'm sure you can find plenty of articles that use the term "white" in that obviously indiscriminate fashion.
Does that make it correct usage? Well, not to me.
Look...I don't want to beat this horse any more than necessary. I've already said I'm OK with the term "Eastern Establishment," although to me that's the equivalent of calling a bunch of separate and distinct ethnic groups "white," as if there were no meaningful distinctions among them.
For what it's worth, if waspness inherently leads towards enlightenment ideals (on a winding path), then reducing the culture into demographics is about as poetic as it gets.
Solid analysis of the definition of WASP, and of an often overlooked point: Catholic and Jewish elites could marry and assimilate into WASP culture (many of whom later became Episcopalian).
Interesting that no one talks about The Social Register when analyzing the rise and fall of WASPs (a big clue to who was in the big club), but maybe many cultural writers aren’t familiar with it.
Anyways…
I especially relate to this point: “But that's only one aspect: the very existence of the elite Ivy League schools and their connected network of "preparatory" secondary schools (full disclosure #2: I'm an Exeter man myself) were deliberately intended not just as finishing schools for the WASP elites, but as vehicles by which emergent members of the WASP class could be inculturated to WASP values.”
A lot of people without insider knowledge (I was an SPS student) don’t fully grasp this. Starting the day with chapel every morning, honor codes, seated meal, etc.
The schools also pivoted in their purpose from educating the sons and daughters of the elite WASP families (a nepotistic system), to trying to justify themselves as the credentialers of merit in an emerging meritocracy (“we are the most rigorous schools out there and anyone who gets in and succeeds in our system is deserving of elite status, scholarship student or legacy”). This is why east coasters are all so obsessed with where they went to school (less important in the South for example other than in pointing to football team allegiances) when it comes to being qualified for jobs.
The thing is, good grades in elite schools don’t always translate to leadership competence even if they do often require hard work and smarts.
"The thing is, good grades in elite schools don’t always translate to leadership competence even if they do often require hard work and smarts."
Yeah...you said it. If anything it becomes--what is that phrase I've heard?--a "self-licking ice cream cone." <eyeroll>
Funny story: after college (Columbia...or as we used to call it, tongue-in-cheek, "SUNY-Harlem") I moved to Northern Virginia and went to work for the Navy Department. At my first annual performance appraisal, my supervisor tells me--completely casually, not as an insult--that the organization are relieved that I really dug into the work, since (I quote) "...we don't always see that from people we hire from those elite universities like Columbia."
I don't mind telling you, that was a bucket of icewater to the face: for the first time in my 22 years of life, someone had suggested--in the most matter-of-fact way!--that maybe being an Exeter and Columbia man wasn't all that.
Lol. This tracks.
I went to Tulane for college and then went to an ivy for grad school, but after grad school I was living and looking for permanent work back in New Orleans, as I had grown pretty attached to Louisiana and wanted to settle down there.
Few east coasters seem to realize that southerners aren’t really that impressed with elite east coast schools, and many assume you are rich, not smart, if you attended one. People I worked with were definitely skeptical of the Yale on my resume, so being a Tulane alum was more useful. Tulane still screams rich kid, but I’m one of “their” rich kids, if that makes sense. They are just as nepotistic in New Orleans as they are in New York, but in the South they are more transparent about it.
I like the EconHist focus here; though I would disagree with this:
"It is unlikely that the fantastic economic growth of the post-war South would have been possible without this interregional transfer of wealth."
The economic rise of the South was due to the spread of electricity and the automobile.
Counterpoint: electrification required an immense amount of institutional capital, and auto ownership required an immense amount of retail credit.
That money had to come from somewhere.
The roads as well. With what money was the interstate paved?
Your periodization reads thoughtfully enough to have excluded the Whigs, who clearly manifested a national self-understanding. Four presidents and an eternal Speaker of the House feels pretty establishment. How do you fit them into the history?
Here is how I treat it in the American Affairs essay:
"This vision of techno-nationalist development has a long American pedigree. Alexander Hamilton described its essential elements more than two centuries ago. Hamilton predicted that American independence would last only if the thirteen American states fused their economies into one national market governed by an energetic executive. This government would spur industry, uphold American credit, and deter foreign predation. This was an explicitly industrial vision. He believed that “not only the wealth but the independence and security of a country appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of [its] manufactures.” Industrial development, in turn, required the security and scale that could only come from a large and unified nation. Hamilton argued that the U.S. Constitution would create this nation. By “bind[ing] together [our states] in a strict and indissoluble Union,” the constitution would “erect one great American system . . . able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.”
The Hamiltonian program for “one great American system” of growing integration, advancing industry, and rising power was not realized in Hamilton’s lifetime. While the U.S. Constitution laid the groundwork for a technological republic, it was not enough to bring one into being. What the new republic required was a national elite resolutely committed to their nation’s technological ascent. But it would take decades before a class with such techno-nationalist inclinations came to helm the American state and economy....
The wealthiest elite groups of the antebellum era thus resembled Karp’s picture of the contemporary tech elite: they were suspicious of executive power, distrustful of American nationalism, insulated from the American public, and focused their investments in whatever field promised the highest returns, regardless of the political consequences for doing so. Many were localists; some were Atlanticists. Almost none were nationalists. Their favored politicians, men like Franklin Pierce, William Marcy, Howell Cobb, and James Henry Hammond, dismantled America’s system of centralized finance, slashed its tariffs, vetoed internal improvements, shoved industrial policy down to the states, and maligned the rising class of industrialists.
America’s most powerful regional elites simply had no material stake in a technological republic, and they lacked the nation-spanning institutions or social networks needed to lead one. The handful of antebellum statesmen who, with Daniel Webster, urged Americans to become “one people, one in interest, one in character, and one in political feeling,” were rewarded with a lifetime of political disappointments."
The whigs should be given their due but they were the minority party the majority of their existence, and not all of them were as strongly nationalistic as Henry Clay. For every Clay you had a John Tyler, who was driven to the whigs less because he bought into the premise of Whig style whiggery and more because he was a commercially minded anti-Democrat.
We must take issue with a few of Greer’s points.
First, this class's influence was not “outsized” but rather coextensive with their position in the long period of American economic expansion. It therefore lasted well into the 1970s, and was eclipsed only by the final triumph of those gauche arrivistes from the sunbelt. In other words, the influence of this class was appropriate to their economic position—indeed, how could it have been otherwise?
Greer mentions Dubya Bush but fails to grasp his significance. W was not merely an echt preppie, he was also a prime exemplar of a social type most are completely unaware of, the Texas Preppie. That is, Wasp hegemony worked its fingers into the sunbelt (as it did into Hollywood) and not the other way round.
Nor is “decadent” the correct term. While Anglicans may not be aggressively Calvinist they are nevertheless Protestant. Had this class embraced decadence in any real way they would never have achieved their dominant position in society. As Weber well noted.
Nor were their cultural attitudes, modes of dress, etc. “pretentious”. It would of course be pretentious for an arriviste to ape the manners and habits of Groton old boy, but the old boy himself is not pretending.
you must be a very pleasant at parties.
I have never met anyone under the age of 60 who isn't Ghanaian, Jamaican, Hong Kong etc who was legitimately born and raised Mainline Protestant. I actually have one Hispanic friend who was raised Episcopal but she's 70+. Most people are Evangelical.
Here in NYC, you find the same division in religion as you do in China. You're either a "Christian" meaning Fundamentalist, Evangelical and Pentecostal in a storefront box or house church, or you're a Catholic, meaning just that. Its the same in Spanish, Cristiano means Evangelical/Pentecostal.
People here in NYC will openly repeat the Chinese maxim that Christians worship Jesus and Catholics worship Mary.
Thanks.
Excellent stuff.
I wonder, though, about the rise of Progressives well before the New Deal. One reason New Dealers were pretty competent is because many of them had prior government experience under Woodrow Wilson or the Republican presidents Taft and Teddy.
My vague impression is that pre-New Deal progressives tended to be from the same class as their Big Business opponents. For instance, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which the Supreme Court finally authorized in 1911 by breaking up the Standard Oil monopoly, was sponsored by Senator John Sherman, the brother of General William T. Sherman of Civil War fame.
I can recall Harvard historian and Navy admiral Samuel Eliot Morison writing about how a formative experience for his generation of Democratic Progressives was serving on Wilson's staff at Versailles.
The Eliots were one of the most famous Boston Brahmin families -- e.g., poet T.S. Eliot and Harvard president Charles Eliot. Morison said the Eliots had gotten rich enough by the 1820s that they left business and went into the profession of "uplift."
So, perhaps the Progressives tended to be WASPs who had done well in business while the big business Republicans tended to be WASPs who were doing well in business?
I think that last sentence is a good one. Must ponder on it more--but note this paragraph in my American Affairs essay:
"Consider the composition of Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet. Before he served as Roosevelt’s postmaster general or the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Henry Clay Pyne worked as both an electricity and railway executive. He was not the only railway or electricity executive in the cabinet: Roosevelt’s vice president, his first secretary of the interior, and two of his Navy secretaries had been railway men, while his first secretary of commerce and second postmaster general both served as the presidents of electric utilities.
The cabinet also included several accomplished industrial lawyers, among them Victor Metcalf, Elihu Root, and Philander Knox, who began his career representing Andrew Carnegie. Before he led the State Department, Robert Bacon managed J. P. Morgan’s steel and railroad interests; Lyman Gage, in contrast, would leave the administration to serve as the president of U.S. Trust. Even the literary-minded John Hay, who never held a corporate job in his life, was thoroughly enmeshed in the world of industry by way of marriage: his wife was Clara Stone, daughter of Ohio railroad mogul Amasa Stone. During the Second Industrial Revolution, the families that governed the United States and the families that captained its industries were one and the same."
Another thought: progressivism had WASP defectors but I think of it first and foremost as the brainchild of Germans and Nordics, 1st and 2nd generations. There is a reason the progressive governance project really starts as "the Wisconsin Idea" and wins over the Midwest long before it wins over the Northeast.
To some extent Germans and Nordics played a role in American progressivism c. 1900, but looking at the big names of the progressive movement, their surnames are highly WASP.
I've never really figured out a way to predict whether a member of the Eastern Establishment in 1890-1930 will side with the laissez-faire conservatives or with the big government progressives (other than obvious ones like: Does he have a financial tie to Standard Oil?).
Even David Hackett Fischer's four Anglo sub-ethnicities model doesn't seem to be much help. My impression is that the leadership of both political tendencies tended to be disproportionately descended from New England Puritans.
One interesting question is whether the Eastern Establishment bifurcated into endogamous wings over its ideological split during the Progressive Era.
Offhand, I don't think so. It seems like by the 1960s or 1970s, "country club Republicans" tended to be seen by Catholic conservatives like W.F. Buckley as excessively moderate.