Twilight of the WASP

IN AN EARLY issue of NATIONAL review (Feb. 1, 1958), Mr. Morrie Ryskind published a piece entitled “The Dirtiest Word in the Language”: “If you happen to be a white, Protestant American of Scottish, British, Welsh, or even Dutch descent,” said the editorial introduction, “well then, brother, you’ve had it.” Several years ago, Mr. Peter Schrag wrote a book that he called The Decline of the WASP. Mr. Schrag’s great idea is that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, formerly one of the principal wonders of the universe, has proceeded with astonishing celerity from being “history’s pet” to becoming “history’s fool.” All the characteristics—sanity, a “passion against the unreasonable,” devotion to the work ethic, coolness of demeanor— that won him a powerful place in the world and stamped that place as indubitably his, now cripple him, forcing him to default on his “birthright of cussedness and irreverence.” The pioneering spirit of his heyday has metamorphosed into the conservative timorousness of a managerial class of bar-car drinkers: time has finally rescued H. L. Mencken’s premature assertion of a half-century ago that “the normal American of the pure-blooded majority goes to bed every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen.” Like buzzards in a holding pattern over a moribund hyena, the ethnics are ready to drop upon him, and he has neither the energy to beat them off nor the nerve to defy them. If Schrag and a host of similarly convinced observers are to be believed, the WASP is no longer a god in a chariot on a Washington frieze— he is simply another ethnic, to be treated as such both by himself and by others.

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CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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IN AN EARLY issue of NATIONAL review (Feb. 1, 1958), Mr. Morrie Ryskind published a piece entitled “The Dirtiest Word in the Language”: “If you happen to be a white, Protestant American of Scottish, British, Welsh, or even Dutch descent,” said the editorial introduction, “well then, brother, you’ve had it.” Several years ago, Mr. Peter Schrag wrote a book that he called The Decline of the WASP. Mr. Schrag’s great idea is that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, formerly one of the principal wonders of the universe, has proceeded with astonishing celerity from being “history’s pet” to becoming “history’s fool.” All the characteristics—sanity, a “passion against the unreasonable,” devotion to the work ethic, coolness of demeanor— that won him a powerful place in the world and stamped that place as indubitably his, now cripple him, forcing him to default on his “birthright of cussedness and irreverence.” The pioneering spirit of his heyday has metamorphosed into the conservative timorousness of a managerial class of bar-car drinkers: time has finally rescued H. L. Mencken’s premature assertion of a half-century ago that “the normal American of the pure-blooded majority goes to bed every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen.” Like buzzards in a holding pattern over a moribund hyena, the ethnics are ready to drop upon him, and he has neither the energy to beat them off nor the nerve to defy them. If Schrag and a host of similarly convinced observers are to be believed, the WASP is no longer a god in a chariot on a Washington frieze— he is simply another ethnic, to be treated as such both by himself and by others.

II