White Anglo-Saxon Protestant - Fading Dominance

Fading Dominance

It was not until after World War II that the privilege and power in the old Protestant establishment began to decline. Many reasons have been attributed to the decline of WASP power, and books have been written detailing it. Self-imposed diversity incentives opened the country's most elite schools. The GI Bill brought higher education to new ethnic arrivals, who found middle class jobs in the postwar economic expansion. Nevertheless, white Protestants remain dominant in the country's cultural, political, and economic élite.

In the federal civil service, once dominated by those from a Protestant denomination (WASPs), especially in the Department of State, Catholics and especially Jews made strong inroads after 1945. Georgetown University, a Catholic school, made a systematic effort to place graduates in diplomatic career tracks, while Princeton University (a WASP bastion), at one point lost favor with donors because too few of its graduates were entering careers in the federal government. By the 1990s there were “roughly the same proportion of WASPs and Jews at the elite levels of the federal civil service, and a greater proportion of Jewish elites among corporate lawyers.”

With the 2010 retirement of John Paul Stevens (born 1920), the U.S. Supreme Court has no White Protestant members. The University of California, Berkeley, once a WASP stronghold, has changed radically: only 30% of its undergraduates in 2007 were of European origin (including WASPs and all other Europeans), and 63% of undergraduates at the University were from immigrant families (where at least one parent was an immigrant), especially Asian.

A significant shift of American economic activity toward the Sun Belt during the latter part of the 20th century, and an increasingly globalized economy have also contributed to the decline in power held by Northeastern WASPs. While WASPs are no longer solitary among the American elite, members of the Patrician class remain markedly prevalent within the current power structure.