WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy, by Michael Knox Beran, (Pegasus Books: 2021), 416 pages. 

There is nothing overconfident midwits love more than informing anyone who will listen that, aaackshyually, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. They are, of course, wrong on all counts; but that is beside the point, for now.

Something similar could be said about the WASPs—the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite who are supposed to have dominated American society until some time in the middle of the last century. But contrary to the common narrative, they never really fell; they’re still around—they’re just not Anglo-Saxon or Protestant anymore. (They are, with notable exceptions like the very waspish Barack Hussein Obama—whose family tree includes such delightfully obnoxious names as Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, Sr.–still for the most part white.)

Michael Knox Beran, author of a book on Bobby Kennedy and another on the 1860s, has produced a new study of the class from their rise in the 19th century to their apparent downfall around the time of the Vietnam War, with a particular emphasis on the vices and failures that led to their collapse, dramatically manifested in the hubristic misadventure—championed by nobody more than WASPs like Joseph Alsop—in the jungles of Indochina.

WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy contains much to be admired. Its ambitious scope does not detract from the author’s knack for detail, and a great many eminent WASPs are brought to life in intimate portraits weaved together into a century-spanning epic. Beran takes the story in some interesting and unexpected directions—Whittaker Chambers, for example, is dealt with at some length. The chronicler of the old elite’s fatal flaws has enough sympathy for his subjects to at least make the takedown interesting.

But the book, like the clique it examines, is hardly without its shortcomings. The writing, perfectly decent at some points, is confusingly clumsy at others, and never nearly as elegant as the writer clearly thinks it; less performance would have served him better. The way Beran jumps between families, eras, and narrative threads can be disorienting at times; this is certainly, in part, a function of the wide-ranging subject matter, but one cannot help thinking that it could have been navigated along a straighter path.

There are substantive concerns, too, on top of the structural ones. One of the most interesting dynamics Beran observes is that WASPs in decline latched onto and leeched off of energetic outsiders. Edie Segdwick modeled for the blue-collar Catholic artist Andy Warhol; Babe Paley hobnobbed with the eccentric writer Truman Capote; and the entire WASP establishment lived a vicarious last hurrah through the Boston-Irish politician John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But Beran grants surprisingly little weight to the flip side of this coin: The power of the WASP establishment on such looped-in outsiders was surely every bit as powerful as the inverse. Kennedy is even recognized, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as “the most WASP-oriented of the American presidents,” but the long-term implications of this fact are not explored in much depth between the covers of WASPs. The consequence of this oversight is immense.

Maybe a line is drawn here simply to provide a sharply bookended narrative—the book, meant for a popular audience, already clocks in just short of 450 pages. Or perhaps Beran fails to follow this thread because he fails to recognize the elasticity of even his own definition of “WASP”—he includes, for instance, the Dutch-descended Roosevelts as some of his major players. If a Dutchman can be a WASP, why not an Irishman? And if he can, then that opens a whole, rich line of historical possibility: Namely, that Kennedy and his heirs carried on the torch of WASP society even after its original elite fell from grace.

And this is the key: Rome never fell, and neither did WASPdom. Sure, it was sacked a couple times, a few decades apart; we’ve had sacks of our own—first under the WASP-by-status Franklin Roosevelt, then under the WASP-by-blood George W. Bush. Its population hit a plateau, and then came down the other side; we know how the first part feels, and we’ll learn the second before long. Its culture and government over long decline lost their vitality and strength, leaving only a shadow of what had once been a great civilization. But it would not be long before the Roman West rose again, albeit in a vastly altered form.

From the first days of the Gilded Age the WASPs saw decline all around them. Uncultured plutocrats—the robber barons are a very distinct class from the Brahmins and the WASPs, a point Beran highlights well—had taken control of the economy. Calculating technocrats had taken control of the government. (It may be worth considering how very little has changed.) The WASPs at their best sought a restoration of humane society in the face of such dehumanizing progress. Beran, meanwhile, is at his best when he contemplates that restorative vision and the social pressures that summoned it.

But in their arrogance, their decadence, their vain attempts to wall out the barbarians, the WASPs resemble most closely those last, foolhardy Romans who never quite saw that they were only fighting entropy. (Who remembers the name Aetius anymore?) They were never able to realize a renaissance because they were never able to see, much less accept, their actual place in time and in the world.

Our position is different. We have a little more self-awareness. We know (most of us, anyway) that whatever golden age lies in our past is going to stay there. But we also know there is a great deal of value in the things handed down to us, and even in things abandoned; that the best way forward may be simply to take hold of the apparatus of the past and build it up anew. This is not a particularly original idea—ambitious outsiders have been infiltrating WASP institutions and aping WASP habits and manners since long before the days of William F. Buckley—but it is the key to a future that upholds the virtues of the past without degenerating into nostalgia or wallowing in decadence.

We are not exactly waiting for the barbarians. We are waiting for one barbarian in particular: a Charlemagne to reclaim old glory for a new age and to tell us—whether or not it is technically true—that he is the new king of the WASPs. Or maybe he’s already come; it’s worth remembering that the restoration didn’t really take root until long after Charlemagne himself had died.

Maybe it was Jack Kennedy—a Celtic Catholic who ran the cursus honorum to the pinnacle of WASPdom, but who was not quite (despite his critics’ fears) crowned by the pope in St. Peter’s Basilica. Maybe it was Donald Trump—a half-German, half-Scottish barbarian emperor whose most sincere vocation has always been at the temple of low WASP culture: the country club.

When the elder Bush died in 2019, many mourned the end of the era of the WASPs (and many more scolded them for doing so). But the world the WASPs built is not so simple that it could die with the last of its leaders, just as Rome did not end with the inglorious reign of Romulus Augustus. WASPdom is not just the cocktail parties of Georgetown or the sitting rooms of Beacon Hill, and it is not just inhabited by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants any more than Rome was the sole province of Romans.

The world the WASPs built is our world, a vast, diverse, complex civilization that has outlived all of the people who built it, and will perhaps outlive even any of the particular things they built. This is not to overpraise the flawed elite of the last century. Quite the contrary: Our inheritance from the WASPs is far from perfect, and there is a reason they are no longer in power.

But now, as then, the barbarians have been here, waiting, for a while—and are, in Cavafy’s haunting words, a kind of solution.