Mix a dry martini and enter the secret life of WASPs . . .

From politics to fashion, their style still intrigues us. WASPs produced brilliant 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 and an allure 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 aspirations at every turn.

 

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.

 

In a groundbreaking study of the WASP revolution in American life, Michael Knox Beran brings the stories of Henry Adams and Henry Stimson, Vida Scudder and Learned Hand, John Jay Chapman and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to life. They were driven by a vision of human completeness, one that distinguishes them from the narrowness and self-complacency of more recent power establishments.

 

WASPs shaped the America in which we live: so much so that it is not easy to understand our problems without a knowledge of their mistakes. They came to grief in Vietnam and through their own corrosive blood pride, yet before they succumbed to the last temptation of arrogance, they struggled to fill a void in American life, one that many of us still feel. For all their faults, they pointed—in an age of shrunken lives and diminished possibility—to the dream of a new life.