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.

Bernard Berenson described one of Pierpoint Morgan’s houses as ‘a pawnbroker’s shop for Croesuses’

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.