White Anglo-Saxon Protestant - Culture Attributed To WASPs

Culture Attributed To WASPs

The original WASP elite established the United States, its social structure and significant institutions, existing as the dominant social group beginning in the 17th century when the country's social hierarchy took shape, and lasting into the 1960s, when WASP society gradually began to relinquish national control and retreating amongst themselves, growing reminiscent of a cloistered Aristocracy, in what has been termed the Leisure class. Many scholars, including researcher Anthony Smith, argue that nations tend to be formed on the basis of a pre-modern ethnic core that provides the myths, symbols, and memories for the modern nation and that WASPs were indeed that core. WASPs are still considered prominent at prep schools (expensive private high schools, primarily in the Northeast), Ivy League universities, and prestigious liberal arts colleges, such as the Little Ivies or Seven Sisters. Entry to these colleges is based on merit, but there is nonetheless a certain preference for "legacy" alumni. Students learned skills, habits, and attitudes and formed connections which carried over to the influential spheres of finance, culture, and politics.

WASP families are often stereotyped as pursuing traditional British diversions such as golf, equestrianism, polo, and yachting — expensive pursuits that need both leisure time and affluence to pursue, and which sociologists such as Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class) have pointed to as a marker of social standing. Social registers and society pages listed the privileged, who mingled in the same private clubs, attended the same churches, and lived in neighborhoods—Philadelphia's Main Line and Chestnut Hill neighborhoods; New Jersey's Princeton; Florida's Palm Beach; Fairfield County, Connecticut; the coast of Maine; Manhattan's Upper East Side; Westchester County, New York; and the North Shore of Long Island; Boston's Beacon Hill; Georgetown, Washington D.C.; and Chicago's Lake Forest are all examples.

A common family tradition in WASP families is presenting their daughters of high school and college age (traditionally at the age of 17 or 18 years old) at a debutante ball, such as The International Debutante Ball in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

In the Detroit area WASPs dominated the wealth that came from the huge industrial capacity of the automotive industry. In Chicago, neighborhoods such as the North Shore (Chicago). In The Midwest, WASPs were attributed to Northwestern University, University of Chicago and Lake Forest College.

David Brooks writes that WASPs took pride in displaying "good posture, genteel manners, extreme personal hygiene, pointless discipline, the ability to sit still for long periods of time."