The Decline of the WASP?: Anglo-Protestant Ethnicity and the American
Nation-State
The question which this seminar raises concerns the link between the
American nation-state and its often hazily-defined dominant ethnic group. Anthony
Smith argues that nations tend to be formed on the basis of a pre-modern ethnic 'core'
which provides the myths, symbols and memories for the modern nation. (Smith
1986) Thus the French flag, anthem, 'hexagonal' sense of territory and many historical
myths and memories were based on pre-Revolutionary symbols. In the United States,
by contrast, many have been keen to stress the nation's Revolutionary ideological
origins and trans-ethnic character. However, I maintain that the American nation
possessed a dominant Anglo-Protestant ethnic group from the outset, though the
cohesion of this ethnie waxed and waned over time depending on the volume of
immigration, ideological threats and sectional splits.
Ethnicity has been a focus of American scholarly interest since the Progressive
era, but Anglo-Protestants always remained hidden from view since most students of
ethnicity were WASPs who were more curious about the exotic 'other' than their
familiar selves. However, there are a few exceptions. The issue of the link between
Anglo-Protestants and the American nation was central for a number of Jewish writers
like Horace Kallen, Will Herberg, Milton Gordon and Peter Schrag, who could
speculate about the WASPs from a position of detachment. (Kallen [1916] 1924;
Herberg 1955; Gordon 1964; Schrag 1973) Indeed, it took a Jew, Saul Bellow, to coin
the term 'WASP' in a novel in the mid-1950s. These figures knew that in order to
understand what it meant to be American, they needed to understand the WASP.
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