An examination of WASP culture through the lives of some of its
most prominent figures. Envied and lampooned, misunderstood and yet
distinctly American, WASPs are as much a culture, socioeconomic and
ethnic designation, as a state of mind. From politics to fashion,
their style still intrigues us. WASPs produced brilliant
reformers-Eleanor, Theodore, and Franklin Roosevelt-and inspired
Cold Warriors-Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and Joe Alsop. In
such dazzling figures as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Edie Sedgwick,
Babe Paley, and Marietta Tree they embodied a chic and an allure
that drove characters like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby mad
with desire. They were creatures of glamour, power, and privilege,
living amid the splendor of great houses, flashing jewels, and
glittering soirees. Envied and lampooned, they had something the
rest of America craved. Yet they were unhappy. Descended from
families that created the United States, WASPs felt themselves
stunted by a civilization that thwarted their higher aspirations at
every turn. They were the original lost generation, adrift in the
waters of the Gilded Age. Some were sent to lunatic asylums or
languished in nervous debility. Others committed suicide. Yet out
of the neurotic ruins emerged a group of patriots devoted to public
service and the renewal of society. In a groundbreaking study of
the WASP revolution in American life, Michael Knox Beran brings the
stories of Henry Adams and Henry Stimson, Learned Hand and Vida
Scudder, John Jay Chapman and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to life.
These characters were driven by a vision of human completeness, one
that distinguishes them from the self-complacency of more recent
power establishments narrowly founded on money and technical
know-how. WASPs shaped the America in which we live: so much so
that it is not easy to understand our problems without a knowledge
of their mistakes. They came to grief in Vietnam and through their
own toxic blood pride, yet before they succumbed to the last
temptation of arrogance, they struggled to fill a void in American
life, one that many of us still feel. For all their faults, they
pointed-in an age of shrunken lives and diminished possibility-to
the dream of a new life.
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