Though only part-Jewish, I see myself in this tradition - trying to get a grip on the
essence of the majority group and its culture (in Canada in my case).
These issues were also uppermost in the minds of some insiders. Two
important historians of northern WASP ancestry have contributed to this debate. E.
Digby Baltzell, a Philadelphian who began writing in the early 60s, and John Higham,
a New Yorker who penned his classic Strangers in the Land in 1955. Both grew up as
members of the small WASP minority in their respective cities - a group which
nevertheless remained dominant at the national level. They mused extensively about
what it meant to be American and to be WASP, and how their two identities were
related. More recently, political scientists like Ted Wright, who is speaking on this
panel, and Samuel Huntington, both rare WASP New Yorkers like Higham, have also
addressed the subject. What is interesting is that the WASP writers pay somewhat
more attention than the Jews to the WASPs as a discrete ethnic group with its own
experiences to work through - rather than simply as an ideal type shining from on
high.
Two strands of thinking are thus apparent in this literature. First is the line of
work that looks at the WASP as the ideal-type or template to which others assimilate.
Will Herberg, Milton Gordon and Peter Schrag all make reference to this ideal. From
their perspective, it is not the concrete existence of an Anglo-Protestant ethnic group
that matters, but rather the WASP imago which defines what is an archetypal
American. In terms of surname, religion, race and ancestry, the WASP provides the
Weberian 'ideal-type' around which others orient. This holds even though the WASP
element has lost its preponderance and largely blended into the American melting pot.
In effect, the WASP is the 'ethnic' side to the 'civic' American nation of Flag,
Constitution and Creed. This tension informs the more recent work of scholars like
Convention