Trego's Mountain Ear

 E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.”

Rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell’s Sociology of Elites – American Affairs Journal offers a brief description of Baltzell’s work on elites.  He coined the term WASP, and wrote of the nation’s elites and their training schools.  His family origins could have been called ‘elites in decline’ – Harvard wasn’t in the cards for him, and it is likely that growing up adjacent to the elites, but with entry closed off, he was more observant of what he couldn’t achieve. 

The end of the WASP elite domination of American leadership might be marked with the death of George Herbert Walker Bush, five years ago, and twenty years after Balzell’s death.  It may have occurred in the 2008 elections.  Baltzell saw the WASP elites as relatively brief:

The structure of the upper class began to shift in the 1870s, driven by several changes in society. The Civil War created a more cohesive American union. Large-scale industrialization, urbanization, and im­migration began to remake the face of the country. As Irving Kristol noted, “In 1870, the United States was a land of small family-owned businesses. By 1905, the large, publicly-owned corporation dominated the economic scene.”7 These firms created vast new wealth, with Gilded Age fortunes dwarfing any that had come before. There were more millionaires in the Senate in 1910 than there had been in the whole country prior to the Civil War.

A more centralized economy and government led naturally to a more centralized upper class. In this new environment, new upper-class institutions came into being, many of them national in scope. These included the elite boarding school—the number of which grew significantly after the Civil War—the country club, the summer resort town, and genealogical societies. The 1880s were a seminal decade in institution building, witnessing the establishment of the first country club in Brookline, Massachusetts (1882), the Groton School (1884), and Tuxedo Park (1885). Of particular note was the publication of the first edition of the Social Register, a directory of upper-class families and their affiliations, for New York in 1887.

Some key upper-class institutions like Exeter Academy, Harvard, and certain clubs predated this period, but they took on increasing importance at this time. Baltzell documents how upper-class families in Philadelphia were more likely to have attended Harvard, Princeton, or Yale and less likely to have attended Penn as generations passed. Similarly, the founders of upper-class families had originally hailed from a variety of religious backgrounds but largely converged on Episcopalianism over time.

Acceptance and participation in these institutions came to eclipse family in importance for defining social status, though obviously being from the right family was also a principal factor in acceptance. “It was, then, one’s club and educational affiliations, rather than family positions and accomplishment alone,” Baltzell wrote, “which placed one in a secure establishment position in the corporate and urban world which America had become by the end of the nineteenth century.” This was particularly the case with schools and the city gentlemen’s clubs. As Baltzell noted, “The circulations of elites in America and the assimilation of new men of power and influence into the upper class takes place primarily through the medium of urban clubdom.” We see this multigenerational assimilation via clubdom in the case of the Rockefeller dynasty. John D. Rockefeller Sr. was a member of the Union League Club of New York, Rockefeller Jr. a member of the more prestigious University Club, and Rockefeller III a member of the most exclusive Knickerbocker Club.”

If we try to integrate Baltzell’s work on elites with our current Elite group, the easy explanation is that we no longer have the same training of responsibility:

“As Baltzell observed, “What an establishment means is that a society is led by a class of men who act according to an agreed-upon code of manners. Certain things are not done.” Without an establishment, anything can, and ultimately will, be done in a country where “money talks, echoing in a moral vacuum.” Without class codes of conduct, only public scandal constrains, and often now not even that. He would see the loss of the establishment along with its class codes of behavior and social enforcement—not such presently popular notions as the weakening of strong political parties or the end of smoke-filled rooms—as decisive in the erosion of political norms. There is little prospect of recapturing a sense of political norms in the absence of the establishment that defined and enforced them.

This erosion of norms and standards goes beyond the political arena as well. Baltzell argued that “One of the major functions of an upper class is that of creating and perpetuating a set of traditional standards which carry authority and to which the rest of society as­pires.” In the absence of an upper-class establishment, those standards would inevitably decline. For instance, some conservatives bemoan the fact that men no longer behave as gentlemen. But our idea of a gentleman was defined by the Anglo-American upper class. When the values of this class were normative or aspirational in society, people sought to live up to them. With that class all but gone and now despised, their values are despised with them.”

The article linked above is worth reading.