The Way of the WASP
Brookhiser, Richard
THE WAY OF THE WASP: HOW IT MADE AMERICA AND HOW IT CAN SAVE IT, SO TO SPEAK Richard Brookhiser/The Free Press/171 pp. $19.95 Francis X. Rocca Tf America had been settled and founded by...
...use giving industry its tasks...
...The way of the WASP," as he calls it, "explains why we are richer than Russia, though we have fewer natural resources...
...But Brookhiser is not writing about name changes or nose jobs: The process is more than a matter of recognizing that life here is better than it was at home...
...And accordingly, as Americans look to recover their lost virtues, they turn to the elite to take the lead...
...After some clumsy attempts to suppress socialism, Freudianism, and modernism in general, WASPS have adopted them all...
...Maybe WASPS are, as others complain, "bad dancers and lousy lays...
...the word connotes insincerity and humiliation...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991...
...In his postmortem, Brookhiser finds that WASPS themselves are the culprits...
...The President is urged to take these initiatives knowing that they will earn him "storms of disapproval" from many quarters...
...Brookhiser himself says as much, and he is consistently sensitive to the role of religion in the lives of WASPS and non-WASPs...
...The immigrant knew that when he arrived, sometimes before he arrived...
...Yet when he decrees that "what American Protestantism needs, for its own good and everybody's, is a period of religious warfare," we hear unmistakably the voice of the unchurched...
...But increasingly, Brookhiser laments, WASPS lack all conviction...
...The arts for them are merely instruments of moral uplift or social climbing...
...conscience watching over everything...
...promote tuition tax credits on the grounds of "use," and justify restrictions on arts funding by renouncing the latter-day "god" of creativity...
...Most have never heard that, a year before the Pilgrims even arrived there, colonists in Virginia had already celebrated their own version of that singularly American holiday...
...Now, there is nothing peculiarly WASPs, even in this book's terms, about being a good father, a war hero, a loyal public servant, or a generally affable fellow...
...that follows from Calvinist doctrine...
...19.95 Francis X. Rocca Tf America had been settled and founded by Frenchmen or Spaniards," Richard Brookhiser muses, "it would be a different place now...
...In the end he is concerned not with contemporary demographics but with the cultural influences summed up in those four letters...
...A free market of faiths is an intriguing concept but not a pious one...
...The demise of the WASP character has led to insider trading, underclass demoralization, compromised national security, teenage pregnancy, and atrocious manners, among other disasters...
...Plymouth, which was intended to be the New Jerusalem, looms vastly larger in our national historical consciousness than Jamestown, which was a profit-making venture...
...This is a vision tinged with nos- talgia—yet not with nativism...
...This suggests whence the inspiration for the way of the WASP first arose, and where its redemption would have to be sought...
...The elegiac sense seems the stronger, and not merely because Bush has been poorly cast as the Great WASP Hope...
...The now-famous acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant was popularized, if not invented, by E. Digby Baltzell almost thirty years ago in The Protestant Establishment, a study of the American patriciate...
...The social elites draw the greatest blame, commensurate with their responsibility as custodians of the universities and churches...
...The WASP character traits are all vestiges of Puritanism...
...Is this a realistic expectation of a politician whose greatest talent is for reaching consensus through compromise...
...Of all the unfashionable concepts Brookhiser re-examines, the least fashionable is that of assimilation, anathema to both multiculturalists and the few remaining believers in the Melting Pot...
...Never mind the facetious subtitle...
...Catholics and others who have adopted the WASP character have become "the only kind of WASP that counts: WASPs by conviction...
...Assimilation occurs when the outsider intuits the character traits that make life here better for him...
...G eorge Bush was elected, according to Brookhiser, "because the public had a hope, based in part on what it gathered from his private life, that he could bring WASP virtues to bear on them...
...The administration could, for instance, push the capital gains cut by referring to industry and success...
...But never mind that: more serious is Brookhiser's suggestion of howthe President can minister to our moral needs...
...The WASP character is the American character," Brookhiser claims, and he describes it with a circular diagram of six mutually reinforcing "traits": . success depending on industry...
...Brookhiser, who once wrote speeches for Bush, now offers him a primer on "the politics of a renaissance," a strategy for advancing an agenda of cultural reform by appealing to the nation's deeply held WASP sympathies...
...Use" is simply Brookhiser's awkward term for practicality...
...And a worse one...
...Conformists out of civic-mindedness, they have no tolerance for "charlatans and maniacs...
...By "success" he means respect and desire for earthly success as "the outward and visible sign of grace," an idea Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...Every year at Thanksgiving, Americans commemorate a seventeenth-century feast celebrated by Puritan settlers in what is now Massachusetts...
...The American character as Brookhiser describes it cannot be revived for the reasons Brookhiser wants or in the ways that he suggests...
...It is fundamentally a matter of character...
...calmer than Lebanon, though we have more sects...
...In The Way of the WASP, he makes a sketchy but persuasive case that democracy, the free market, religious liberty, and this country's material wealth are the legacy of John Locke, John Wesley, and other English Protestants...
...As an example Brookhiser offers an entire church: Roman Catholicism, which "arrived as the one true faith, outside of which there was no salvation, and . . . became a denomination...
...Anyone who has heard a nun reverently recount to her students the stirring epic of the Pilgrim Fathers—who held her Pope to be the Antichrist —will grant Brookhiser this point...
...Neglectful of history because it does not seem useful, they forget "grudges and festering hatreds...
...Yet, while WASPs are neither epicures nor aesthetes, they are good neighbors, even by virtue of their shortcomings...
...the main title itself is ambivalent, suggestive of both life ("the way of the West") and death (The Way of All Flesh...
...T he Way of the WASP bills itself as I a plan for saving America, but it hardly inspires much hope...
...Here "diffidence," the obscure term in this new list, means "the cumulative effect of multiple acts of deference—to other standards, cultures, even species": an "insecurity, uncertainty, sheepishness...
...Crudely, they "drink to get drunk...
...In general, it is true, their cooking is insipid...
...Brookhiser is chary of the term's tony connotations and construes it as widely as possible...
...The character described above has been vitiated: conscience replaced by self, industry by ambition, success by gratification, civic-mindedness by group-mindedness, use by diffidence, and antisensuality by "creativity...
...Brookhiser is a persuasive apologist for these unfashionable ideas, arguing that they have led men to be productive, tolerant, considerate, and lawful, if a bit dull...
...The only alternative to drunkenness is temperance...
...Four of these terms speak for themselves, but two stand out for not being character traits at all, strictly speaking...
...As soon as religion is reduced to an instrument of social change, piety is lost, and religion proves ineffectual for the purpose...
...believers should take his skepticism of ecumenicism as a mark of respect for denominational integrity...
...freer and more just than either...
...civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and anti-sensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
