WASPs at Water Mill on Long Island
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Cf. WASPs, page 410
WASPS
The Splendors
and Miseries
of an American Aristocracy
Town & Country
Best Books August 2021
“Dissecting one of the most famous acronyms in American history, Michael Knox Beran presents a thoroughly researched exploration of the American upper crust through some of its most notable figures. From Henry Adams to Theodore Roosevelt, from George Santayana to John Jay Chapman, and from Babe Paley to Edie Sedgwick, WASPS presents this small subset of the American population as not just an economic group, but a cultural one.”
After the Civil War, when WASPs sought to get the better of Gilded Age plutocrats who were beating them in the game of power, one of the instruments of their revenge was the New England prep school. In The Rector of Justin, Louis Auchincloss anatomizes the little civic-humanist laboratories in which scions of Boston Brahmins and Anglo-Dutch patroons were toughened up with football and Greek conjugations, the first step (as they saw it) in taking the country back from the barbarians . . .
Five Best on WASPs
The Wall Street Journal
"A history of Mayflower screwballs"
"America's WASP elite is captured in all its outrageous glory," says Paula Byrne in her review. "WASPs is a delight: meticulously researched, exhaustive, slightly bonkers, a smorgasbord of delicious and outrageous details . . . . fascinating . . ."
WASP’s Nest
Terrified by the distinctly WASP-ish hell of lacking a life’s purpose, Cold War columnist Joe Alsop created a setting for his self-protective, civic-humanist fantasy
In 1949, Joe Alsop bought a parcel of land in Georgetown and began to build a house in a style he christened “Garage Palladian.” The cinder-block exterior of 2720 Dumbarton Avenue was unprepossessing—its hideousness led to a revision of Georgetown’s building code—but behind the garage-like façade lay an epicure’s delight, rich with Louis Quinze furniture, curious folios, and jade and lacquer from Asia. The rooms were spacious, their walls painted shades of vermilion and pea- cock green. Gilded birdcages were suspended from the ceiling, and
ancestral faces glowered in their frames . . .
Joe Alsop on his mock-Palladian stage set on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown
The "fluency and command feel like products of full immersion" in the characters' "lives and psyches"
Karen Sandstrom Reviews WASPs . . .
WASPs are “familiar territory for Beran, an exquisitely gifted writer and the author of The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy . . . . Good writers tell us what happened; greater writers make meaning of what happened. Beran is a great writer who seeks to connect dots others wouldn’t see. . . . At the start, Beran mentions how difficult it is to know the imaginations of his subjects with real intimacy, yet the rest of the book makes great use of the historical record to do just that. So it comes as a surprise when, toward the end, Beran introduces an especially beautiful section that follows two of his Groton contemporaries from the late 1970s and early ’80s. ‘Rob’ and ‘the Cid’ experience the best of Groton’s traditions at a time when the boarding school “ceased to be a shaper of the governing patriciate.” We follow as the Cid goes to law school, and then we learn much more about Rob — Robert Bingham, who became a successful fiction writer (his debut collection, Pure Slaughter Value, made a mark with critics) before succumbing to the existential despair inherited from his wealthy WASP forebears. Bingham died at 33 of a heroin overdose. In this section, Beran writes with the intimacy that observation and memory allow. It is a poignant way to drive the history toward closure . . . ."
The figure Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpted to mark the grace of Clover Adams, a mon-ument to the WASPs' neurasthenic hells
F.D.R.’s Tory Pragmatism
The Left and Right Both Get Him Wrong
In a 1936 New Yorker cartoon, Peter Arno depicts a quartet of WASPs stopping before a well-heeled house where fellow toffs in evening dress are dining. "Come along, We're going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt."
F.D.R. was not in good odor with the WASP gentry of the thirties, but he has, if anything, been even more loathed by the modern Right. Yet a conservative today who goes beyond the abstractions in which so much of the debate about Roosevelt is carried on and looks at the actual circumstances in which he acted on will find much to ponder. Nearly a century after the advent of the New Deal, there are good reasons for conservatives not to go to the Trans-
Lux to hiss the thirty-second president.
From politics to fashion, their style still intrigues. WASPs produced inspired reformers—Eleanor, Theodore, and Franklin Roosevelt—and fervent 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 that drove characters like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby mad with desire.
They were creatures of glamour and power, yet they were unhappy. Descended from families that created the United States, WASPs, for all their privilege, felt themselves stunted by a civilization that thwarted their higher higher aspirations.
They were the original lost generation, adrift in the waters of the Gilded Age. Some were sent to lunatic asylums. Others died by suicide. Yet out of the neurotic ruins emerged a group of Americans devoted to public service and the renewal of society.
Mix a Dry Martini and Enter the Secret Life of WASPs . . .
Dean Acheson with Jack Kennedy, on whose vitality WASPs preyed in the era of their decline and fall
How the WASPs won by losing
Samuel Goldman on the legacy of the WASPs
"Outside a few holiday resorts," Samuel Goldman writes in The Week, "authentic WASPs have mostly disappeared from view. Since Gilligan's Island introduced Thurston Howell III, most Americans know them only as comic figures in brightly colored holiday attire.
"In his perceptive new book, WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy, Michael Knox Beran shows that this caricature is deceiving. The WASPs' legacy is still with us even though their accents and rituals have become punchlines. They may have lost much of their privilege and cohesion, but their creations — including the administrative state, elite education, and charitable foundations — remain dominant influences on American life. . . ."
The chapel at Groton
Fate and the
Preppy Ephebos
Reflections on the life and death of an artist, Robert Worth Bingham . . . coming soon . . .
Prize Day 1984: seated, at right, is Rob Bingham
WASPs, Jews, and Elite Failure
Today’s clerisy puts pluralism at risk by failing to mitigate its banality
WASPs and Jews pointed to a despondency at the heart of modernity, one that is the more poignant because it is so intimately connected to the greatest of our modern goods. Pluralism tolerates all poetries, on condition that you keep the music to yourself, because the poetry that works for you might not work for the person in the next cubicle. But shut away in a box, the poetry that the aging Plato thought both the nourisher of the soul and the builder of community can’t help people get through the day: it ceases to be a machinery for organizing experience and transmuting its anarchies into wholeness. Alas, it's not a problem our elites try very hard to solve, perhaps because they think it insoluble.
Felix Frankfurter and Dean Acheson in Washington, D.C., in January 1939
A Scandalous Brew
In WASPs, Lauren Weiner writes in her review in Real Clear Politics, "we meet the John Jay descendant who set fire to his own hand, plus assorted out-of-control poets (such as Robert Lowell), drunks, depressives, embezzlers, payers of bribes, “unscrupulous sharpers,” pill-poppers, sex addicts, neurotics, and hypocrites . . . . This scandalous brew is infused with Beran’s love of great literature, art, and architecture. When gossip-mongering cynic turns Great Books idealist, the effect can be incongruous. A Dead Poets Society emotionalism sometimes wells up: the author would, with De Quincey, “vindicate the power of the soul ‘to dream magnificently,’ to ‘reveal something of the grandeur which belongs potentially to all human dreams.’” Beran specifies the caliber of firearm socialites used to shoot their spouses with the same zest that he recounts what the Episcopalians and Anglo-Catholics really thought of the Unitarians (conceited modernists was the consensus). He has apparently read everything ever written about “the WASP ascendancy” and everything about every other subject, too." An "alarmingly self-indulgent book," Weiner writes, WASPs' "out-of-the-way tidbits are treasures. The book’s virtues extend to its staunch defense of the liberal arts as a search for truth and its unflinching criticism of the in-group’s maltreatment of out-groups (blacks, Jews, Catholics). The narrative, digressive though it is, unfolds in impeccably written prose."
F.D.R. disembarks from Vincent Astor's yacht in the Washington Navy Yard in 1933
The Forgotten Kennedy Matriarch
In his splendidly heterodox The First Kennedys, Neal Thompson shows that before the lurid patriarchy of Joe there was the winning matriarchy of Bridget
“I wonder if the true story of Joe Kennedy will ever be known,” an aging Eleanor Roosevelt said to Gore Vidal, hinting at malevolences undetected even by close students of the diablerie of the Hyannis Port Faust.
Joe’s bargains purchased the White House for the Kennedys, but at a devilish price. With his compulsive sex predation and “second-best is a loser” nihilism, the patriarch warped his offspring: he lived to see the wreckage culminate in the midsummer night’s revels of Ted at Chappaquiddick in 1969.
John F. Kennedy and family following Mass in the chapel of Joseph P. Kennedy's house in Palm Beach, Florida, Easter Sunday 1962
But there was another side to the Kennedys. Henry Adams opined that compassionate matriarchy is essential to civilization, and he puzzled over why the notion of “Woman” as a source of life-nurturing sex “force”—business as usual in the Old World—was “unknown in America.” The force lived in Bridget Murphy, a young Irishwoman who in the 1840s sailed to Boston, where she married one Patrick Kennedy, who died young. She went on to raise their children and lay the foundation for a dynasty . . .
WASPs and the Lost Art of Civic Space
The humanism of a now-defunct elite grew out of its virtuous impurity
It is just because the motives of the WASPs were so genuinely mixed—they valued both democratic equality and aristocratic mastery—that their civic humanism fails to impress a purer and perhaps more self-deluding age, one that has little patience with the notion that we are often “much more the better” for “being a little bad.”
Thomas Blaikie reviews WASPs in the Literary Review
“Nobody will ever again memorialise the WASPs so vastly or with such erudition and dazzling cultural range. The book’s bold fragmentary structure and extended philosophical passages make it in places as challenging to read as The Waste Land itself – yes, T. S. Eliot was a WASP. It will perhaps become the definitive work of reference on the subject. . . .”
Above, Helen Hay Whitney with her boy, John Hay "Jock" Whitney, circa 1910. Below, Henry Adams, whose best pal was Helen's father and Jock's grandfather, John Hay, who began his career as Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and ended it as Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State
Liberal Humanism’s
Lost World
How Lionel Trilling resisted an apocalyptic politics at odds with liberty and complexity
Much as Matthew Arnold deplored “this strange disease of modern life,” Lionel Trilling lamented a “fatal separation” between modernity’s narrowly socioeconomic approach to life and the “deep places of the imagination.”
Lionel Trilling in his office in Columbia's Hamilton Hall
Yet both men insisted that they were neither reactionaries nor primitivists, but liberals who drew on humane techniques to strengthen modern liberties. Their humanism seems now quite dead; yet imagination, style, what Arnold calls poetry, is always with us, the desire for comeliness in the ordering of life. If the vision at the heart of Trilling’s thought—it was essentially Coleridge’s idea of a humane “nucleus, round which the capabilities” of particular places might “crystallize and brighten”—is ever to be realized on a large scale, it will not be through a sudden vogue for the prose of The Liberal Imagination, but through a modification of taste, a reaction against glass-and-steel sterility, a craving for playful intricacies of form—all those richer cultural modes from which we are at present estranged.
The Lowell Bequest
Robert Lowell turned New England frigidity and Mayflower-screwball madness into poetry. A part of him deeply wanted to escape the world that shaped him . . .
Opinion is divided as to whether Lady Caroline Blackwood was a succubus who preyed on men of genius or a tragic muse who sacrificed herself to their art. Her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, was moving toward the succubus theory when, in 1954, he painted himself standing pensively behind her in Hotel Bedroom.
After Lady Caroline and Freud divorced, in 1959, she married the composer Israel Citkowitz. But in the spring of 1970, bigger game appeared. She became Lowell’s lover just as he was entering one of those periodic phases of mania in which, she said, he “flipped” and became deeply and even violently mad . . .
Eternal Feminine: Robert Lowell (top right) thought himself a pilgrim on the road to his own Marian moment when Lady Caroline Blackwood bore him a son, Robert Sheridan Lowell, in 1971. Blackwood is depicted (bottom right) with Lucien Freud in Freud's Hotel Bedroom)
The Tech Magnificos Miscalculate
Shakespeare and Spengler warned against elite investment in technopolis at the expense of local culture
Hamlet faces his mother and the ghost of his father. Bas-relief by John Clements Gregory, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington
A century ago Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, a prose poem in which he purported to argue that the life cycle of cultures—Chinese, Hindu, Magian (Near Eastern), Apollonian (Hellenic), Faustian (Western)—corresponds to the life cycle of plants. There are preordained springs (the Vedic flowering in India, medieval monasticism in the West), fruitful summers (Greek Orphism, North Atlantic Calvinism), decaying autumns (Islamic Sufism, English empirical rationalism), and frigid winters (Buddhism, Western technical civilization).
Only gradually do you see that this pseudo-biological mummery is an elaborate ruse, one that allows Spengler to make the case for humane culture in an age of mechanical determinisms. His heart desired what his theory forbade: a balancing of art and technics.
Even so Shakespeare. Hamlet turns on the renewal the prince experiences when he coaches a troupe of theatrical players, “the tragedians of the city,” who have come to Elsinore to stage a play in the castle. The tragedians’ performance brings Hamlet face to face with makers of living art: and the play itself is (among other things) Shakespeare’s elegy for a culture today’s tech magnificos disdain, in their commercial acts if not in their personal practice . . .
From Profit to Poetry
A new book about the Rothschild women
The nineteenth-century Rothschilds’ London residences were indeed extravagant, but their country seats in Buckinghamshire’s Vale of Aylesbury are positively lurid. Henry James made sport of the “gilded halls” of Mentmore—a Jacobethan château Otto von Bismarck likened to “an overturned chest of drawers”—while Isaiah Berlin dismissed nearby Waddesdon as “moneyed & vulgar.”
Yet the Rothschilds were merely doing the work of their age. No burning with a hard gem-like flame for them; they were prophets not of a higher poetry but of a new elite, one that was neither chivalrous nor devout, but flexible and financial. The liquid character of their fixed-interest bonds required a liquid power esta, and the Rothschild women helped to create it, fashioning a wherever-people-are-rich-together romance of traditionless glitz that, like Esperanto, has the merit of universal vacuousness.
But if Victorian Rothschilds anticipated the banalities of today’s finance-driven technocracy, a number of twentieth-century Rothschild women, among them Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter, found their way back to the poetry that technocracy displaces . . .
More than a “luscious, slinky, black-haired, jet-eyed Circe of high society,” Nica de Koenigswarter, née Rothschild, became a patroness of jazz and the lover and protector of bebop prodigy Thelonius Monk
The Place de la République, Arles
Revenge of the Castle People
The destruction of the civic focal point
Relations between the aristocrat and the common man have never been easy. The antipathy between castle people, who dwell in the manor house, and agora people, children of the marketplace, runs like a fault line through the moral landscape of the West. The chasm is already evident in the Iliad, in the thrashing Odysseus gives Thersites; Proust, in the 20th century, was as conscious of the gulf when he insisted that the “misunderstanding” between the upper castes and their bourgeois inferiors was “complete.”
The marketplace came out on top. Democracy vanquished feudalism. Or so we like to pretend: There are suburbs of New York and Philadelphia in which you might, with only a slight exertion of imagination, fancy yourself in the world of the medieval dukes. The problem is not so much that castle culture thrives in a democratic soil, but that it thrives too abundantly. What is in danger of being lost is the common culture of the market square, what Johan Huizinga called the “play-circle” at the heart of premodern communities.
If the castle has from time out of mind been the seat of aristocratic culture, the marketplace was once the crucible of a no less vital culture of the common man. The standard was pretty high: much of what is democratic in the culture of the West is closely connected to the life of these civic focal points. Go to the Place de la Maison Carrée in Nîmes, or the Piazza del Campo in Siena, or the Place de la Comédie in Montpellier, or any of a thousand lesser forums, and you find, in the buildings, the statues, the paintings, a sort of civic jewel box. And this plastic art is but the remnant of a more comprehensive artistry: It is a skeleton that, in its prime, was clothed by music and poetry. No civilization, even the most bovine, can entirely do without this sort of cathartic machinery . . .
Above: Benjamin Disraeli, afterwards Lord Beaconsfield. When he reached the top of the greasy pole, he abandoned the humane culture he advocated in the mystic trilogy of Sibyl, Coningsby, and Tancred and proposed that the modern state should become our paternal guide, cultural teacher, pastoral almsgiver, and spiritual healer. In the general preface to the 1870 "Hughenden edition" of his novels, he argued that "the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress."
Disraeli’s Ghost
The shade of the primrose has never ceased to haunt Anglo-American conservatism
In his 1845 novel Sybil; or, The Two Nations, Benjamin Disraeli criticized the first Reform Act in the language of Coleridge: “Has it cultured the popular sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? Has it proposed to the people of England a higher test of national respect and confidence than the debasing qualification universally prevalent in this country since the fatal introduction of the system of Dutch [modern capitalist] finance?”
Disraeli pointed to the deterioration of cultural institutions that once exercised a pastoral care over particular human flocks and fused man's chaotic, fragmentary existence into something approaching wholeness. “There is no community in England,” Stephen Morley, a character in Sybil declares, “there is aggregation, but aggregation under circumstances which make it rather a disassociating than a uniting principle.”
When, however, after the election of 1874, the Conservatives came in with an absolute majority in the Commons for the first time in a generation, Disraeli, who kissed hands as prime minister a second time, did nothing to advance a “Young England” program which, fanciful as it had been in the 1840s, was by the middle ’70s positively antediluvian. But rather than give up his ambition to improve “the moral and physical condition” of the people, he performed the brilliant sleight of philosophic hand that has inspired and bedeviled right-of-center politics in England and America ever since. . .
The Tory Imagination
On Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion and the Limits of Whiggery
Francis Bacon practically invented our modern Whig world of progress and commodity, yet he saw that the new empire of inductive truth would have vexations of its own. Truth, he wrote,
is a naked and open day-light, that doth not shew the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that sheweth best by day, but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that sheweth best in varied lights.
If truth, for Bacon, lay in the “naked and open day-light,” he associated shadow and candlelight with the “mixture of a lie" that underlay the deceptive allure of the imagination. For all his genius, he never rose to Edmund Burke’s apprehension that the imagination, if it is often a source of delusion, is also sometimes an agent of truth.
It is precisely because of its fantastic qualities that the imagination is essential to any humane effort to regulate life, for it alone can cover the demoralizing truth of “our naked, shivering nature.” A deception, to be sure, this imaginative act of clothing our nudities—but a deception Burke believed necessary if we were to grasp what was for him the higher truth that man is something more than a chance concatenation of atoms.
In my own mental shorthand, I think of this apprehension of truth by means of the imagination as the Tory way. I do not mean, by Tory, the English conservative impulse narrowly construed, but the broader instinct that led John Ruskin to profess himself “a violent Tory of the old school;—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s.”
This is the Toryism that habitually cherishes old usages not simply on account of their utility, their antiquity, or their beauty, but because they are hedged with images and symbols that so enchant our imaginations that we take them to be avatars of a high and venerable, though cryptic wisdom—a wisdom that was brought home to me one spring during a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion . . .
Top right: Sir Francis Bacon, afterwards 1st Viscount St. Alban's. Bottom right: Johann Sebastian Bach.
Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol
The Stones of Washington
A cautionary lesson
Dostoevsky thought St. Petersburg the most “premeditated city in the whole world.” Perhaps it is; but if the former capital of Russian autocracy is a consummate expression of the Enlightenment’s faith in rational order, so, too, is its democratic twin—that other capital sprung full blown from an eighteenth-century masterplan, Washington D. C.
Washington has sometimes been called the American Paris, and it was a Parisian, Pierre L’Enfant, who came up with the city’s original design. But L’Enfant was a fanatic rationalist who did not understand his native city. The Euclidean Paris he admired was never the whole city, and indeed it emerged quite late. Its showpiece, the Axe Historique—the line of the Champs-Élysées—was laid out only in the seventeenth century, half a millennium after the ground was broken for Notre Dame; Baron Haussmann’s Cartesian boulevards did not emerge until after L’Enfant’s death, in the reign of Napoleon III. These renovations modified but did not destroy the medieval city; the geometrical boulevards and étoiles of modern Paris are everywhere counter-balanced by the irregular artistry of the back streets, the crooked passages the poet Villon knew, little plazas and culs-de-sac that form a humane counterpoint to the city’s rational and monumental splendors.
Washington is different. When you stray from the Euclidean thoroughfares, you are not, as in Paris, refreshed by a less rigorous approach to urban order: you are caught up in the monotonous perpendicularity of a Cartesian grid, so many numbered and alphabetized streets. Even the most ardent patriot, going up one of these anonymous wind tunnels in the teeth of a winter night, is likely to conclude that Washington, if it has much grandeur, has little intimacy. . . .