Mark
McGinness
To the brownstone born: WASPS, by Michael Knox Beran,
reviewed
A sweeping study of the WASP assembles a cast of
characters from Astors and Auchinclosses to Whartons and Woodwards with chaotic
exuberance and zip
From
magazine issue: 4 September 2021
To the
brownstone born: WASPS, by Michael Knox Beran, reviewed
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/to-the-brownstone-born-wasps-by-michael-knox-beran-reviewed
It was only
in 1948 that the term WASP was coined — by a Florida folklorist, Stetson
Kennedy. Yet White Anglo-Saxon Protestant never satisfactorily defined this
all-but-extinct breed of American Brahmin. In his sweeping, teeming study of
the WASP, Michael Knox Beran concedes that the acronym fumbles its origins. For
one thing, it excludes the Celts and Anglo-Dutch Patroons, several of whom lent
gravitas and grit to the term and tribe. For this reason too, ‘Wealthy English
Episcopalians’ does not work. It may extract the sting but it is belittling, so
why tinkle with it?
It is
sufficient to say that to be a WASP one should have been descended from the
well-to-do classes of colonial and early republican America. Beran’s six pages
of genealogical charts underscore the potency of descent and that sense of
family.
In his
great sweep — at times it seems more like a swipe — Beran has fun with a huge
caste (yes, caste) of characters from Adamses, Alsops, Astors and Auchinclosses
to Whartons, Whitneys and Woodwards. We meet good doughty souls, such as
Eleanor Roosevelt, and gentle ones such as Amory Gardner. There is T.S. Eliot,
Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson, the beauteous Babe Paley and the brilliant Bundys.
Beran’s
knowledge and research are prodigious. He has mined a rich seam of material and
unearthed some gems. With acerbic asides and witty one-liners, he paints a
vivid picture that praises or punctures these superior persons.
That titan
and voracious collector Pierpoint Morgan, although from Hartford, ‘came to
embody the brownstone virtues of New York’s WASP aristocracy’, but in pillaging
the old places and appropriating their plastic and painted beauty, Morgan, like
[Henry James’s Adam] Verver, only intensified the country’s philistinism,
making art into a roped-off, Sunday-best sort of thing, incapable of
brightening the prosaic day.
Bernard
Berenson described one of Morgan’s houses as ‘a pawnbroker’s shop for
Croesuses’.
There is
the Bostonian Isabella Stewart Gardner. ‘Her tactics were outrageous, even
vulgar, but in a city whose leading citizens had been bled dry by Puritanism
and frugality, ostentation was poetry.’ To Henry James ‘she was not a woman,
she was a locomotive — with a Pullman car attached’.
Lunching
with Teddy’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth was, according to the last of
their salonistes Joe Alsop, ‘like breaking bread with a scorpion’. The
voluptuous Marietta Peabody Tree is described — again by the drawling, droll
Joe — as a case of ‘beautiful bosoms beating for beautiful causes’. And,
although all Irish, John F. Kennedy was the most WASP-oriented of the American
presidents, more respectful of WASP mores than the maverick Roosevelts or the
transplanted Bushes pushing their fortunes in the alien corn of Texas. Seeking
to unwind, he unwound with WASPs.
In fact,
Beran’s first book, The Last Patrician (1998), was a study of Bobby Kennedy.
His theme: that RFK was steering away from the liberalism of FDR and his
brother, taking a more conservative course. Beran’s occasionally chaotic
arguments undermined his thesis. But the book’s liveliness and spark made it
stimulating and illuminating.
And so it
is with WASPS. It is chaotic, yet even the subtitle, ‘The Splendor and Miseries
of an American Aristocracy’, reveals an exuberance and zip. Beran might have
chosen ‘The Aspirations and Absurdities…’ but that would have discounted the
achievements of imperfect yet noble giants such as the two presidents
Roosevelt, Endicott Peabody and Henry Adams — pivotal patricians who dominate
the narrative, striding through most of Beran’s 37 random chapters.
There is
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, histrionic, flamboyant and ‘too rococo,
and in some ways too great a character to be a true WASP’. Peabody was the
seminal figure, the founding rector of Groton, the little school that shaped
and primed generations of WASPs. Teddy Roosevelt thought him ‘the most powerful
personality he had ever encountered’. Louis Auchincloss had never met a man
‘who radiated such absolute authority’, inspiring his classic, The Rector of
Justin. As for the sphinx-like Franklin, ‘the greatest of the WASP reformers…
ever the master of the manor’, after the old rector’s visit to the White House,
the 32nd president murmured: ‘You know, I’m still scared of him.’
Henry
Adams, ‘the unofficial pontifex Maximus’, great-grandson of the second
president and grandson of the sixth, is one of the book’s heroes. Beran regards
his The Education of Henry Adams as in some measure inventing the WASPs: ‘The
tribe’s foremost primer.’
A century
later, Beran, a fellow Groton-ian, has written their obituary. His first
sentence is: ‘How do you write about flawed people in a scrupulous age?’ Well,
it seems you do it with gusto. His premise? The WASPs simply failed to
regenerate, and while Beran believes that their most significant contribution
is ‘lost in a haze of dry martinis’, they did ‘generate places in which
different aspects of the soul could ripen’.
If the
fictional chronicler of the WASPs is Louis Auchincloss and its memoirist Henry
Adams, they have found their historian in Michael Knox Beran.
WRITTEN BY
Mark McGinness
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