Talk:White Anglo-Saxon Protestants

Semi-protected edit request on 12 July 2021

Theories around the self-proclaimed supremacy of the WASP are at the origin of the creation of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, segregationist and racist movements, such as the Ku Klux Klan in the United States or the Orange Order in Northern Ireland and in Canada. The radical ideology of these WASP movements advocates the supremacy of the white race and develops xenophobic theories. Dayyen (talk) 20:07, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:31, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Term or concept?

@Sangdeboeuf: The article currently reads:

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP is a term used in the United States for ...

It is true that "WASP" is a term for a certain category of person, a WASP; just as "banana" is a term for a certain kind of fruit, a banana. The question is whether this article is about the term or about the category, and thus whether WP:REFERS applies.

Most of this article is in fact about the category, not the term. Of course, like many articles, there is a section on the origins and connotations of the term as well. But unlike, say, Swamp Yankee or Redneck or White trash, the term isn't primarily a pejorative or hostile epithet, and the article in fact uses the term repeatedly in Wikipedia's editorial voice as a description. It would be unthinkable to use one of those expressions in Wikipedia's voice to say things like "xxxs tend to concentrate within close proximity of each other".

The word is used descriptively in the titles of books, magazines, and journal articles, both laudatory (The Way of the WASP: How it Made America, and how it Can Save It, So to Speak) and critical (Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America's Power Elite, "The Death of the WASP Elite Is Greatly Exaggerated"); and by political scientists and sociologists (one of whom popularized it). Like many other categories, it is not terribly precise (cf. middle class or elite), but that doesn't make it less of a category.

So, per WP:REFERS, the lead should instead read:

In the United States, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs are white American Protestants, generally upper-class and usually of British descent.

Discussion? --Macrakis (talk) 17:05, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

The important thing is how the sources frame WASP, whether as a term or concept. I haven't read all of the sources cited, but Zhang (2015) introduces the topic as "the acronym WASP" before describing the group in sociological terms. If this is representative of other reference works, then I think it's fair to describe WASP as a term and also use it in Wikipedia's voice. The sources may be using the term as a "lens" through which to view the related sociological phenomena. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:31, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

In fact I may have been wrong in moving the page from the singular White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. If the topic is framed as a term then it may be better at the singular title, even if most of the article is not specifically about the term itself. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:38, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

WASP is certainly an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but I don't see the relevance of that. NASA is an acronym for National Aeronautic and Space Administration, but the article is about the organization, not about the term. If the group is described in sociological terms, it is talking about the group, not the name.

The plural article title seems reasonable; Wikipedia:Naming conventions (plurals) mentions "Articles on religious, national, or ethnic groupings of people", and WASP is often considered an ethnicity. So we have Bretons, Irish Americans, etc. Though we also have Brahmin where the article title is in the singular, though it is given a plural verb, and later the article talks of "Brahmins". Similarly, there is an article on Boston Brahmin which then calls them "Boston Brahmins" in the lead (and mentions that they are considered to be White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). --Macrakis (talk) 21:53, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Once again, the important thing is how published, reliable sources frame the topic. Terms, acronyms, etc. can also be encyclopedic subjects. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:05, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Let's look at some examples from the footnotes of the article:

• Zhang: "From the American Revolution to the 1930s, the WASPs, especially those with a clear ideology of close, upper-class ties, dominated America in all social aspects" -- clearly using WASP substantively, with no scare quotes or other indication that they are talking about the term rather than the concept.
• Allen: title mentions both the concept and the term (as epithet) (I haven't seen the full text)
• Wilton: (I don't have access to this article)
• Kaufmann: uses WASP substantively through the whole article.
• Glassman: Introduces the definition and then uses it substantively in many places ("the general American culture was now WASP"; "...reconceptualizations of WASP culture..."; "...being accepted by WASP America..."; etc etc)
• Champion: uses WASP substantively

Need I go on? --Macrakis (talk) 22:30, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Sources may use the term substantively, but if they also introduce it as a term or acronym, as with Zhang, Glassman, et al., then that seems to be a sign that they are distancing themselves from it somewhat. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:38, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree with that reasoning at all. If an article about the agriculture of avocados starts off with "Avocado, like chocolate and cacao, is one of the few English words that comes from Nahuatl" that does not mean that the article is about the word! --Macrakis (talk) 23:13, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

No one said it did. But if it were in an etymological dictionary, then it definitely would. I don't think there's always a sharp distinction between terms and concepts; certain words are used as a "lens" through which related concepts are examined. That may be the case here. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:19, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, if the cited articles were about the etymology or usage of the term "WASP", that would be one thing. But they are not -- except of course for several cited in the "Naming" section. They are about the category, not the name of the category. And the Wikipedia article reflects that clearly, consistently using WASP to talk about a category of person. --Macrakis (talk) 14:40, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

At least three of the chosen sources also discuss WASP as a term. I think that's significant. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 19:25, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Sure, it's perfectly normal to discuss the term as part of the discussion of the topic. And there's no question that "WASP" can be used both as an analytical term and as a loaded epithet. But that's true of many terms, especially about social and ethnic groups. Heck, there's a whole article on Names of the Greeks, but the article on Greeks does not say "Greeks is a term used...", even though many Greeks vociferously prefer the term "Hellene". --Macrakis (talk) 22:40, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

What counts is how sources for this article frame the topic, not how any other article is written. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:18, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

I didn't say that the Greek situation was the same as the WASP situation. I was just giving an example of another case where there are both terminological issues and substantive issues.

At this point, I don't think we're converging, so it looks like it might be time to ask for a third opinion. --Macrakis (talk) 01:00, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

See the Third Opinion request 03:12, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Response to third opinion request:

Having spent some time looking through this article's references, I'm mildly in favor of changing the lead to talk about the category rather than the term. Clearly the term is somewhat charged, and some authors do feel the need to talk about it explicitly, define it, treat it with some distance, etc.. However, (a) those authors seem to me to to be very much in the minority, especially among the more contemporary sources, and (b) are predominantly writing in academic contexts (e.g. Kaufmann, Zhang) where it's especially important that they define their terms clearly, even terms that are used without much question among the general public. In contrast, there are many articles from the popular press cited (NYT, Time, Chicago Tribune, etc.) that use WASP fearlessly to refer to the category without feeling any need to define it or focus on it as a term at all. Even some academic authors (e.g. Champion) use it in this fashion, and many of the academic authors that do focus on it as a term initially (including Kaufmann and Zhang) often go on to discuss the category primarily rather than restricting their focus to the term overall. Naturally there are some sources that do focus primarily on the term, which justifies the existence of the "Naming" section. That said, WP:REFERS implies to me that if an article is going to introduce its subject as a term as opposed to a category, the focus of the article ought to be on the term itself more-or-less overwhelmingly. That isn't currently the case for this article, and I wouldn't think would be appropriate if it was given the pool of evidence that already exists here. Mesocarp (talk) 14:23, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I will revert the lead to the "category" formulation. --Macrakis (talk) 15:54, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

Two groups

I have started a new section for the comment below, which is on a different topic than the discussion above on "term or concept?". --Macrakis (talk) 14:36, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

I have a problem with the suggestion that opens this section: "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs are white American Protestants, generally upper-class and usually of British descent." There are two groups --by far the most common usage deals with a small powerful white Protestant elite. The term is also used less often to cover 100 million plus Protestants of British descent. Rjensen (talk) 23:43, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

anglo saxons are english.

Anglo-Saxon refers to the ancestry of ENGLISH people: literally explained in the entry for "Anglo-Saxon". Britain is made up of 4 nations. The Welsh, Scottish and Irish peoples of Britain are not Anglo-Saxon, and no one ever called Irish-American people, even the protestant ones, WASPs. The term specifically excludes Americans of Irish ancestry, yet the Irish immigrants came from "Britain". This article should be more honest. 98.202.5.27 (talk) 07:45, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Article contents are based on published, reliabe sources. Feel free to present additional sources to support any desired changes. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 08:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

"But in fact WASPs were not an English but an American phenomenon, and it was not their English blood that particularly distinguished them or, for that matter, their Protestant religion. A large number of Americans who were of English descent, who were communicants in a Protestant church, and who might even have been rich, were nevertheless not WASPs. On the other hand, people who were not of English extraction or were only partially so (the Roosevelts, for example, and the Jameses) figure largely in the WASP story’. For it was not blood or heredity, but a longing for completeness that distinguished the WASPs in their prime..1. Yet the acronym we have fixed upon them is, in its absurdity, faithful to the tragicomedy of this once formidable tribe, so nearly visionary and so decisively blind, now that it has been reduced in stature and its most significant" [1]

The complaint is like saying the word anti-Semite means anti-Arab. Doug Weller talk 10:29, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

In a British Isle context you'd have a point: "Anglo" is used exclusively in Britain and Ireland to describe all things English, and is never applied to the Irish, Welsh or Scots. But this article is about the term "WASP" in a US historical context - which had initially evolved to describe a caste that had formed during the Gilded Age, and then came to represent social stratification in the World War 1 period. The European origins of these WASP families span many places other than England (the Astor family, for example, had roots all over Europe, including the Italian side of the Western Alps).

What distinguished these families, who in some cases had mixed and vague European backgrounds, from other Americans, and what inspired sociologists like Baltzell to single them out for special treatment, was that they occupied a unique social niche, attended the same boarding schools (finishing schools for women) and universities, were members of the same social clubs (eg the Union Club), and dominated the upper echelons of American political, financial and industrial institutions for several decades of US history. They also shared peculiar mannerisms (like speaking in a fake British accent), obsessions (genealogy, having perfect posture etc), and social etiquettes. In plain English, these families were all upper class Anglophiles in a country that was and had always been Anglophobic since the Revolutionary War (read about the Astor Place Riot for more insight into this 19th Century class dynamic).

There were indeed upper class families with Irish ancestry, and I'm not talking about the "Scots-Irish". Some obvious examples are the Kane family, the Carroll family, and the Iselin family. Arthur Leary was president of the Union Club and made Ward McAllister's 400 list, despite being the grandson of an Irish immigrant and a Catholic (his mother's family came from Dutch immigrants). Thomas Fortune Ryan was also cited by Baltzell in his Gilded Age WASP directory. You will find many other Irish family names in the Social Register directories for the period in question, particularly in New York and Boston (I counted dozens).Jonathan f1 (talk) 21:24, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Hacker, 1957

The statement that Andrew Hacker used "WASP" in 1957 with the "w" meaning "wealthy" is entirely false. The Hacker usage clearly used "w" to mean "white." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:192:80:99D0:708C:7B9C:AF86:4166 (talk) 15:08, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

The quote from Hacker is right there in the article:

First of all, they are 'WASPs'—in the cocktail party jargon of the sociologists. That is, they are wealthy, they are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and they are Protestants [...]

—Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:58, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

WASP presidents.

It seems that the whole list should be deleted or simply renamed to "Catholic presidents" leaving JFK and Biden. Everyone else descends from white anglo-saxons per extant wikipedia articles. 2603:7000:8E01:2B47:3595:F77C:F0A9:4EB6 (talk) 22:04, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

yes delete -- WASP means upper class (like Washington, Jefferson, Kennedy and the Bushes). That disqualifies poor boys like Truman, Ike, Clinton, Carter, Reagan Ford, Obama, Biden. WASP means British--and not Irish (like Kennedy and Biden) or German (like Trump or Ike or Hoover) or Dutch (Van Buren, both Roosevelts). As the article mentions, Theodore Roosevelt was strenuous in insisting he was Dutch and "not Anglo-Saxon)" -- so in the last century we have only Coolidge & the two Bushes who meet the criteria. Rjensen (talk) 02:23, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

With all due respect Jensen, but your insistence on excluding the Irish, Germans, Dutch etc from this category is tantamount to imposing an artificial division within this class when none existed. These are not even discrete categories: Is anyone seriously denying that the Astor family had German ancestry or that they were WASPs (ie upper class Americans)? This would've been news to anyone living in the Gilded Age much less the Astors themselves (who named their hotel the Waldorf Astoria, after their ancestral home).

I am also unaware of any reliable source that claims the population of British America was strictly "British" -predominately British Isles, sure, but that also includes Ireland. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity defines Anglo-Americans:

"Men and women from the British Isles predominated, but the group summarily called Anglo Americans were highly differentiated: the ethnically and linguistically diverse English-speakers included Anglicans and Dissenters, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Highland and Lowland Scots, Scots-Irish, and some Welsh..... These many-cultured English -and Gaelic-speakers needed to learn to get along with each other and to form a culture and institutions that would be called Anglo-America." (p. 37 [2])

So now we have a recent reliable source defining Anglo-Americans beyond the narrow category of "British", to include essentially all English-speaking Europeans that populated British America. Those who emerged from this population as upper class were certainly WASPs.

Note I am not claiming someone like Trump is a WASP -he isn't upper class ('class' and 'wealth' are different). I am challenging this whole practice of excluding people by ancestry. Jonathan f1 (talk) 18:20, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

this article is about how the term "WASP" is actually used, according to reliable sources. The source you cite The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity does not discuss the term or use "WASP." Rjensen (talk) 22:28, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Yet the empirical fact remains that the ancestries of the WASP class were far more diverse than you acknowledge (in a European, or Northwestern European, sense). It isn't hard finding an RS that broadens the scope: "Kennedy is the only president to lack WASP (Dutch, British or Irish Protestant) ancestry." p.7[3] Jonathan f1 (talk) 04:11, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

a few sociologists (like Kaufman) use "wasp" to refer to hundreds of millions of Americans, while this article focuses on wasp-as-top-elite. It's the difference between Harvard and the local high school. Kaufman notes that "there is very little work on ethnic ideal-types " so he's something of an outlier. Rjensen (talk) 21:35, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

He was referring to ethnic ideals in contemporary US culture, but that's really beside the point. The "wasp-as-top-elite" did not have ancestry only from Britain, and this can be demonstrated by a cursory look at the family names that appeared in the blue books from the period[4]. I'll choose the Boston blue book for the year 1924: 1924 because it was something of a golden age of wasp dominance, and Boston because I'll assume this city's upper class would skew more 'Brahmin' or 'English' than what you'd find in New York or Baltimore society, much less San Francisco [5]. And yet even here we find, at least, dozens of names that are Irish, German or some other European. I started compiling a list of the names that were unambiguously Irish, but there were too many of them and it wouldn't be worth the time. Jonathan f1 (talk) 00:38, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

that would be forbidden as original research--we need to stick to published reliable secondary sources. Rjensen (talk) 03:39, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

In any case the usual source is the "Social Register" not the Blue Book. The Blue Book explicitly lists prominent Catholics (including mayors James Curley and John F Fitzgerald). These Irish Catholics are not in the "Social Register" (which is here for Boston 1922) Rjensen (talk) 03:58, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

If there's a paucity of genealogical research on the American upper class, then it would appear that sociologists and social historians have spent the last 50 odd years parroting Baltzell's claims as fact without bothering to scrutinize them. In The Protestant Establishment Baltzell himself cites Thomas Fortune Ryan and Thomas Dolan as two of the founding members of the American aristocracy (pp. 9 -11[6]) -both of Irish background, while one of them, Ryan, was a practicing Catholic. Baltzell also described F. Scott Fitzgerald as "half a WASP" -not because his father was Irish, but because he was brought up Catholic (although, bizarrely, he had no reservations about listing the more pious and dogmatic Catholic Ryan as a full-blooded WASP, probably because his status within the American establishment was beyond dispute).

It isn't just the blue books either. Even the Social Registers turn up an interesting assortment of non-British surnames, such as this New York SR from 1917 (Great Gatsby era[7]). I'm encountering numerous Irish names like Brennan, Callahan, Carroll, Coogan, Daly, Murphy, O'Donohue, O'Bryan, O'Connor etc. Interestingly I even came across a couple of Italian last names (Baltazzi, Catalani), and several of German or French origin.

Granted, with few exceptions (T. Ryan, Arthur Leary), these Irish names belonged to people who were almost certainly mainline Protestant. The trope that 'all Irish are Catholics' was an invention of nationalist Ireland, historians writing in the Whig tradition (ie -projecting the present onto the past). Jonathan f1 (talk) 23:19, 8 May 2023 (UTC)