The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy

By Michael Knox Beran

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How do you write about flawed people in a scrupulous age? Most accounts of elite establishments are ponderously genealogical (Debrett’s Peerage, the Golden Book of Venice), narrowly sociological (Marx, Veblen, Pareto, C.  Wright Mills), or romantically embellished (Livy’s narrative of the early Roman ruling class, and the not less imaginative accounts of aristocracy in Proust, Lampedusa, Faulkner, and Waugh). What is wanted is a history, like that of the elites of old Israel in the Nevi’im or books of the prophets, which illuminates both the acts of the ruling personalities and their inspirations – the ends and purposes that incited them, and made them a little mad. The modern historian of a patrician class cannot, of course, know the imaginations of his subjects quite so intimately as that; he must be content if, in shifting a mass of gossip and innuendo, he can find here and there the fragment of a higher motive. As for baser inducements, vanity, power, opportunity for sexual malfeasance, and the like, there is never any shortage of that sort of evidence where human beings are concerned. 

The men and women at the heart of this book did much to shape the America in which we live: so much, indeed, that it is not easy to understand our problems without some knowledge of their mistakes. Yet they present those who would understand them with special challenges, beginning with their name. They were, by and large, descended from the well-to-do classes of colonial and early republican America, from New England merchants and divindes, from Boston Brahmins and Anglo-Dutch Patroons. But the Civil War and its attendant changes altered their place in life, and they emerged from the crisis as something different from what their forebears had been: as both a class and a movement, self-consciously devoted to power and reform. What to call them? The term WASP – White (or Wealthy, if redundancy is to be avoided) Anglo-Saxon Protestant – fumbles their background, betraying the sociologist’s inclination to use a term like Anglo-Saxon when the plainer, more obvious English one would do. (In this case, English.) For there is nothing especially Saxon or Angle about America’s WASPs. Insofar as they embody any English strain, it would be the Norman. Like th eNormans, the WASP oligarchs possessed a corrosive blood-pride, one that they could only with difficulty reconcile with their sense of themselves as suffering idealists, groping their way through dark places in the hope of glimpsing the stars. 

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 blood or heredity, but a longing for completeness that distinguished the WASPs in their prime. 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 contribution – the myth of regeneration it evolved, the fair sheepfold of which it dreamt – lost in a haze of dry martinis. 

(Beran 2021, pp.xiii-xiv)

Nothing short of tycoons would do for the girls, and Gogsie was not entirely pleased with Betsey’s marriage, in 1930, to Jimmy Roosevelt. For though the Roosevelts were socially at the top of the heap, their fortune was much smaller than those of their Hudson River neighbors, and the cash was entirely controlled by the family matriarch, Franklin’s mother Sara, a tightfisted old witch. Franklin himself was a charming man, but he was married to the eccentric Eleanor, who omitted to shave her armpits. On the other hand, when Minnie caught the eye of the disagreeable Vincent Astor, Gogsie was delighted at the prospect of a union with the Astor millions; and she all but dragged her daughter (who preferred artists to millionaires) to the drawing room of Heather Dune, her summer house in East Hampton, where the marriage took place in September 1940. 

(Beran 2021, pp.4-5)

The “surface looked so good,” she said, that it was only with difficulty that you saw the unseemliness that lurked beneath. Yet the Greek or Renaissance fantasy of Corral de Quati and Rancho La Laguna, warped though it was, had its origin in ideas that had long animated the class to which Francis Sedgwick belonged. After the Civil War, WASPs reinvented themselves, overcoming a tendency to weakness and breakdown in order to try to raise up a nation sunk in the corruption and crassness of the Gilded Age. They went in for political reform, as championed by the Roosevelts, and founded institutions intended to produce a patrician class that would regenerate America. 

(Beran 2021, pp.9)

The problem, fo more normal WASPs who clung to the ideals of patrician humanism, was that Fuzzy, in his madness – his fetich of blond sleekness, his insistence on the beauty and genius of the aristocrat – laid bare a contradiction at the heart of their ascendancy. Either aristocracy was, a Fuzzy maintained, right, and blood-pride legitimate, or the WASPs themselves, in attempting to erect a patrician order in America while pretending to be adnerents of equalitarian democracy, were hypocrites. In their prime the WASPs could paper over the problem with a rhetoric of service and humility. But now they were too tired. 

(Beran 2021, pp.9-10)

Joe [Alsop], who spent the Second World War in China helping General Claire Chennault use American air power against the Imperial Japanese Army, returned to Washington in 1945 to embark, with his younger brother Stewart, on a newspaper column, “Matter of Fact.” Seeking both to break news and shape opinion,, the Alsop brothers warned of the dangers of Soviet imperialism and made the case for initiatives (among them the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan) intended to counter the Soviet aggression. At its height “Matter of Fact” appeared in dozens of newspapers and reached some 25 million readers; in foreign capitals it was read as a semiofficial voice of the American imperium. 

(Beran 2021, pp.12)

But Joe [Alsop] himself supplied the higher entertainment. His mind was baroque, a thing of devious curves and deceptive concavities, of trompe l’oeil artifices and unnerving chiaroscuros. With odd pauses and interjections – an assortment of “ehs,” “ahums,” and other “learned catarrhal noises” – he would lead his guests through the gossip and innuendo of the day (“gencon,” he called it: general conversation) to the great questions of war and peace. But the luxury and frivolity of 2720 Dumbarton Avenue – the high learning and Bacchic revelry strangely interfused with civic purpose – reflected something more than the whims of an idiosyncratic personality. Joe’s was a late attempt to realize an old WASP dream of human completeness, a developing of all sides of one’s nature to satisfy some longing in the soul. 

(Beran 2021, pp.13-14)

But who were their successors? In 1956 the most prominent WASP statesman was Adlai Stevenson,m the image, Alsop thought, of preppy lassitude and impotent liberalism, “Mr. Eleanor Roosevelt.” Was it any wonder, amid so much weakness and effeminacy (like Fuzzy Sedgwick, Joe mocked Adlai as womanish) that America was losing the Cold War? Only a leadership class deficient in virility would permit the Soviets to outstrip America in the race for warheads. (Joe believed, erroneously, that a “missile gap” had opened up, giving the Soviets a decisive advantage in the arts of thermonuclear destruction.) At Harvard he spoke to the younger generation of a “sickness of the soul – a loss of certainty – a failure of assurance” that was crippling the West. The degeneration was nowhere more evident than in the class to which he himself belonged, the WASPs, who he believed bore a special responsibility, by reason of their training, their knowledge of history, and their intimacy with the state, for the future of the planet. 

(Beran 2021, pp.15-16)

Joe and his fellow WASPs were only too delighted to have Jack and Jacqueline (exotically blooded and nominally papist though they were) reanimate them; Averell Harriman himself, who in his stiffly magnificent condescension might have been a Whig duke, was persuaded to dance the “Twist” with Mrs. Kennedy in the family quarters of the White House. The champagne, the sex, the feeling that they were once again a power in the state – all of this invigorated the faineant WASPs. But it was the lurid ebullience of a narcotic. WASP Washington in the age of Kennedy was morbid; there was a whiff about it of Parisian society in the days before the Revolution of 1789, of dancing in the shadow of the guillotine.

(Beran 2021, pp.17-18)

“Oh, she’s so bee-you-ti-ful,” Warhol would exclaim. If, as he maintained, art is what you can get away with, Edie was an artist. The mad girl seemed to subsist on caviar and Bloody Marys, and to live much of her life in limousines; once she appeared at a party clothed only in a leopard-skin coat. But she had the assurance of her class and the authority of her voice, the breathy, perfectly enunciated syllables in which she had been bred up. It was “straight Grotonian all the way through,” an acquaintance remembered, a way of speaking she had learned from her father, who had impressed it upon all his children “that they were Sedgwicks.” The “way you pronounced words implied a certain attitude that you took toward life …” “We learned English the way the English do,” Edie’s brother Jonathan said. This was not quite right; anyone who listens to Edie’s talk, as it is preserved in her film and television appearances, will find that is not that of an Englishwoman. It is a Mid-Atlantic voice with ancestral echoes, memories of an age long since vanished, its tone that of forebears like her grandmother Sedgwick (nee Minturn), whose sister Edith (for whom Edie was named) had been famously painted by John Singer Sargent (Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes) and whose sister Mildred had excited the lust of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. 

(Beran 2021, pp.18)

At Johnson’s directive, a group of WASP magnificos that included Dean Acheson, the former secretary of state, and Robert Lovett, the former secretary of defense, were summoned to the eighth floor of the State Department, where amid the eighteenth-century Chippendale of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms they were copiously briefed as to the desperate nature of the situation. There was nothing for it, the experts told them, but to dispatch 200,000 more combat troops to the jungles and rice fields of Indochina. 

Afterward a smaller group went to the White House for a drink with the president. They found him in a maudlin mood. Over cocktails in the Cabinet Room, he complained of the misery of office. Everything conspired against him, “Fate, the Pres, the Congress, the Intellectuals …” Acheson, who with his guards’ mustache and patrician bearing might have been a grandee painted by Velasquez, grew impatient. The dominant WASP in the room, he had run the tribe’s cursus honorum – Groton, Yale, Harvard Law, a Supreme Court clerkship, a successful Washington law practice leavened with stints of public service – before taking command of Harry Truman’s State Department in 1949 to lay the foundation for a postwar Pax Americana. “I blew my top,” Acheson remembered, and cutting short the president’s self-pitying monologue he told him “he was wholly right on Vietnam, that he had no choice except to press on, that explanations were not as important as successful action.”

It was the green light Johnson wanted. Whatever their private misgivings, Acheson and his fellow WASPs assured him that there must be “no question of making whatever combat force increases were required” in Vietnam. A fatal moment, or so Acheson’s son-in-law William “Bill” Bundy, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, recalled: the instant when Lyndon Johnson committed the United States “to land war on the mainland of Asia.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.21)

Bill Bundy and his younger brother, McGeorge “Mac” Bundy, Johnson’s national security advisor, helped to orchestrate the briefings that bedazzled the aging WASPs. It was Mac, in fact, who gave them the name Wise Men, urging Johnson to consider their usefulness in his effort to pursue a hawkish course in Vietnam. Yet even as he manipulated the WASP magi, Mac Bundy admired them and saw himself as in their line, the apostolic succession that descended from Henry L. Stimson, the Andover, Yale, and Harvard-trained lawyer whom Franklin Roosevelt chose to head the War Department in the fight against Germany and Japan. Mac’s father, Harvey Bundy, had been brought into the public service by Stimson, and Mac himself had helped Stimson to compose his memoirs. The cleverest boy Groton had ever seen, the prodigy of Yale and Skull and Bones, the youngest dean in the history of Harvard, Mac seemed predestined to carry on the traditions of his class.

(Beran 2021, pp.22)

Joe was exhilarated by all that he saw and felt; he rather liked the idea, Mac Bundy thought, of having “a little old war” in Indochina on his hands. But Joe saw only what he wanted to see, and he had lost the ability to digest new information. He “didn’t ask questions,” Frank Wisner, Jr., a young foreign service officer, recalled: “his mind was made up.” A heavy drinker from his Porcellian days, Joe on his excursions in Southeast Asia went over the top, routinely getting drunk at both lunch and dinner, and picking fights with anyone who disagreed with him. After one drunken bout in Saigon, his old friend Charles Murray, the veteran Time-Life correspondent, was blunt: “You’re the epitome,” he told Joe, “of the failed establishment.” 

He was hardly the only aging mandarin whose judgment failed him. After another sham briefing of the Wise Men in November 1967, Dean Acheson overcame twinges of doubt to tell President Johnson that the war was one “we can and will win.” It was not until the Tet Offensive in January 1968, when seventy or eighty thousand disciples of Ho Chi Minh carried the fight to the cities of South Vietnam and the precincts of the American embassy itself, that Acheson began to ask the questions he should have asked before. But by then it was too late. 

(Beran 2021, pp.24)

Like Edward Gibbon’s decadent Romans, the degraded WASPs enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury; we are very far, here, from the morality of Endicott Peabody, with his code of self-discipline, patriotic obligation, and modesty in the gratification of the passions. But demoralization was inevitable, when all the deeper purposes of WASPdom were breaking down. Patrician privilege was at the core of the WASPs’ being; but the WASP belief that such privilege could be justified through meritorious public service didn’t wash with the kids in the streets, protesting an establishment with blood and napalm on its hands. Then again the WASPs sought to do justice to all sides of their nature, to live up to an ideal of human potential ordained by God or, failing that, discernible through human reason. But if human beings were, in fact, a freak of evolution, an accident of natural selection – if man, far from being the paragon of animals, was one more quintessence of genetic dust – were they not chasing a mirage? WASPs made a specialty of institutions like the prep school, which used myth, ritual, and a hygienic athleticism to mold character. But those techniques grew out of the belief that there are objectively better and worse ways of being molded; in a postwar Age of Aquarius that had gotten beyond conventional morality, such formative enterprises were suspect, a threat to the authentic, untutored self. In a world of Noble savages, what was the point in being a WASP, with all the painful corrective training the breed required?

As the WASPs lost faith in their verities, much of what remained of their order was ingested in the gaudy, cosmopolite society chronicled in the pages of magazines like Vanity Fair and the Tatler. Brooke Astor directed the New York field office of this insipid, gala-ridden monde; her great chance in life came when Vincent Astor, in search of a third wife, found that none of the obvious candidates would have him. “He was a very disagreeable man,” Louis Auchincloss recalled, and his previous marriages, to Helen Huntington and Babe Paley’s sister Minnie, ended in divorce. He tried to persuade Janet Newbold Bush (George H. W. Bush’s aunt) to take him on, but she turned him down flat. “I don’t even like you,” she is supposed to have said. He pointed out that he was old and likely to die soon. “But what if you don’t? she shot back. 

(Beran 2021, pp.26-27)

WASP families like the Sturgises, the Sedgwicks, the Gardners, and the Roosevelts were all, even at their lowest ebbs, doing quite well out of life. What went wrong? The New England heritage had something to do with it. (Even those WASPs who, like the Roosevelts, identified themselves with other regions were connected by a hundred ties to the land of the Puritans.) The New England soil was rich in neurotic possibility; the early New Englanders had not only, in Henry Adams’s words, to “wrestle with nature for a bare existence,” they had to do it under the burdens of their perfectionist enterprise. The Puritan effort to build a new Jerusalem in the American wilderness was not a formula for sanity; it was abandoned precisely because it did induce lunacy, not least in (the somewhat optimistically named) Salem itself, the center of witch hysteria. Puritanism was supplanted, in the eighteenth century, by a less demanding (and less fulfilling) Yankeeism, with its easier idolatry of moneymaking. But by then it was too late: the older vision had inflicted enduring wounds. 

The Puritan guilts and manias (it is not easy to live in a city on a hill) lingered in New England long after the demise of Puritanism. You sensed them in the dying villages, with their mouldering houses and sapless apple trees, bereft of youth and vitality, for the enterprising children have escaped to seek their fortune in the cities or the West. In the old greens and on the moribund farms, the memory of primeval Puritanism survived, “shrouded in a blackness ten times black,” in tales of wizards and witch-meetings, malignant groves, a shadowed Satanism, the sort of morbidity Nathaniel Hawthorne and (more recently) Stephen King retail in their books. WASPs in the late nineteenth century were drawn to the haunted countryside, and not only on account of its quaintness or its closeness to nature: they found, in the cranks and recluses, the eccentric spinsters and cracked seers, a reflection of their own uneasy souls. 

New England was a tragedy. The ancestors, dreaming first of a puritanical Jerusalem and later (after that project failed) of a Republic of Virtue (or “Christian Sparta,” in the words of Samuel Adams), had sailed too close to the sun, and the descendants suffered for their hubris. The lesson of the degenerate villages was reinforced by the literature the WASPs read. Hawthorne taught them that they labored under a curse, some grievance in the granite, and they had only to look to the asylum in Somerville north of Boston (McLean Hospital), its wards filled with deranged descendants of old New England families, to know that it was so. Behind the black veil of the New England conscience something sinister was at work, corrupting the bloodstock and producing mad or feckless heirs. Henry Adams, looking back on the New England colonists in their prime, saw a long line of Puritans and Patriots who had done much to create America’s culture and institutions. But nearer his own time he found the characteristic specimens weak and dilettantish, “ornamental” gentlefolk subsidized by their forebears’ spadework, spoilt children who could “scarcely have earned five dollars a day in any modern industry.” 

Such energy and purpose as the WASPs possessed found few outlets in a modern economy. They were drawn to the old public virtues, to the statecraft their ancestors had practiced as well as to the sort of “soft” civic work that adorns a place with art and poetry. But politics, as the nineteenth century wore on, came to be controlled by political bosses who were not (in the eyes of WASPs) gentlemen, and art in America was a profession only a shade more respectable than harlotry. Boston was, in its own conceit, the American Athens, yet we have Professor George Santayana’s word for it that in “good Boston society” artists, if they were tolerated, were looked upon as “parasites” and not as “persons with whom the bulwarks of society” could have “any real sympathy.” The Calvinist austerity remained after the Calvinist consolations faded; Yankees, with their zeal for compound interest, were as suspicious of the creative impulse as the Puritans, with their zeal for divine election, had been before them. 

(Beran 2021, pp.32-33)

The children of the Brahmins blamed their weaknesses, their fatigues, their failures – the scruples that prevented them from getting on in the world – on neurasthenia. They actually believed it to be a medical condition. In his 1881 book American Nervousness: It’s Causes and Consequences, the WASP physician Dr. George Miller Beard described neurasthenia as a disease caused by “lack of nerve-force” and productive of such symptoms as, but not limited to, insomnia, bad dreams, mental irritability, nervous dyspepsia, fear of society, fear of responsibility, lack of decision in trifling matters, profound exhaustion, and excessive yawning. 

In fact neurasthenia was a state of mind, one that had a good deal in common with other kinds of soul-sickness that have troubled human beings since the beginning of time. The “black bile” (melancholia) of the Greeks, the acedia or muddy listlessness of the medieval souls who, in Dante’s words, are “sad in sweet air brightened by the sun,” the “spleen” of the eighteenth-century English Sugustans, with its attendant “Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hupochondrical and Hysterical Distempers, &c.,” the ennui of Pascal and the noia of Leopardi, the nausee of Sartre – neurasthenia was another version of the immemorial despondencies. 

(Beran 2021, pp.36)

For out of the neurotic ruins emerged a patrician caste devoted to civic reform and the renewal of society. Caught, as they supposed, between barbarians above and barbarians below – between gilded tycoons and a mass-produced middle class – the children of the Brahmins overcame their debilities and reinvented themselves as WASPs.

The counterrevolution was bold. Like Dante before them, they wanted to reform the corrupt city and at the same time create a stable world order (the American Century). And like Dante, they rebelled against the idea of living an empty life and dying a meaningless (hellish) death. They were driven by a notion of human completeness, one that distinguishes them from the parochialism and self-complacency of more recent power establishments narrowly founded on money and technical expertise. They absorbed Dante’s faith in the humanities and attempted to revitalize liberal education, which was not for them, as it is for us, an antiquated heirloom, practically useless: they believed that it could both unlock human potential and promote the civic virtues, which they looked on as a salve for a variety of psychic wounds. 

(Beran 2021, pp.37)

WASPs are born in the consciousness of a void in their lives, a sense that their shrunken existences are a mockery of life’s promise. In this they differ from those of their own kind who are content, indeed determined, to live in an unchanging tradition – who, like the Apleys, the Beacon Street Brahmins in John Marquand’s novel The Late George Apley, are pleased that their environment has prevented them from becoming anything other than what everyone else in their class is. WASPs, by contrast, are drawn to an old Greek maxim: become what you are. Like Lambert Strether in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, they feel their unused powers rotting within them, but unlike the diffident Strether, they resolve to fight back, to break out of their cages. 

(Beran 2021, pp.40-41)

He returned to America in 1868 determined to make his program of reform real. And who could doubt that such a program was needed? For plainly the Republic was in a bad war. A machinery of “capital, banks, mines, furnaces, shops, power-houses, technical knowledge” had grown up to make an untamed continent habitable for civilized people. But the machinery that so efficiently mined coal and built railroads was overwhelming the country’s fragile political institutions. A quaint eighteenth-century Constitution could never do the work, Adams believed, of a “twenty-million horse-power” nation, nor could it contain the new forms of plutocratic power that were coming into being with the explosion of industrial force. Predatory financiers like Jay Gould, whose net stretched from New York’s Tammany Hall to the Washington of President Ulysses S. Grant, foreshadowed, Adams was convinced, a new Caesarism, in which “mere private citizens” would “ultimately succeed in directing government itself.”* But it was not idealism alone that motivated the emergent WASP in Adams. His program, if implemented, would get the better precisely of those new men who were usurping the place of families like the Adamses in the nation’s hierarchies. (Reform as a way of getting even.) It was with these mixed motives that he went down to Washington to expose the villains whose evildoing “smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption.”

* Tocqueville had long before warned of the inadequacy of the elites that were coming into being with the growth of freedom and democracy – elites that exhibited all the corruption of the ancient aristocracies and possessed none of their higher feelings. When barbarians encounter a higher civilization, they first embrace its vices, and next enlarge upon them. Even so the Gilded Age magnificos aped all that was least attractive in the aristocratic tinsel of the Old World – and made it yet more tawdry. 

(Beran 2021, pp.49-50)

As institutions like Harvard ceased to be communities devoted to the pastoral care of their charges, as they became immense machinelike institutions with little humans warmth, they would, Chapman believed, cease to develop the powers of their students. They would be unable to produce leaders who might make American civilization something more than the gigantic railway station he thought it threatened to become. 

No doubt it was foolhardy for a young man to go out into the world intent, as “mad Jack” was, on doing battle for a handful of notions derived from Dante. But he had the strength of his mutilation. The stump that remained preserved the memory of a defiance that would carry him through the trials he was to endure. 

(Beran 2021, pp.70)

Only Adams differed from these thinkers in making the Virgin Mary the focus of his medievalism. He claimed to have encountered her at Chartres, where indicating her child she confided her secret: “We are Love!” It was this element of feminine, of maternal grace, expanded into a social ideal, that made the older civilization superior, in Adams’s eyes, to America’s modern and mercenary one. The twelfth century, he liked to say, “never knew ennui,” while his own, which shrank “from the touch of a vision or a spirit,” was swamped in it. He was certain that the Queen of Heaven’s antidotes to dejection – compassion and creative idiosyncrasy in the service of community – were yielding, under a psychologically unbalanced system, to a standardized anarchy. “All the steam in the world,” he said, “could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres,” or the common life that throve about it. For as much as Ruskin or Arnold, Adams was what the historian T.J. Jackson Lears has called an “antimodern vitalist,” one who shuddered at the devitalizing shallowness of soul he saw around him. 

(Beran 2021, pp.89)

His friend Cotty Peabody, a cousin of Alice’s, went at once to see him and “found him wonderfully calm. I never say such strength in my life…” Beneath the calmness was a reluctance to grieve. Grief was allied to neurasthenia, and the only cure for both was frenetic activity. “Get action,” Roosevelt said. “Do things; be sane; don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.” Life had to be lived in the “fellowship of the doers,” in an unrelenting round of different pursuits. “Black care,” he said with a nod to Horace, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”

(Beran 2021, pp.99-100)

The gulf that young women like Vida Scudder and Beatrice Potter felt in the face of the poor amounted to a break both with much contemporary religious opinion (which held that world fortune is a of divine favor) and much contemporary moral orthodoxy (which ascribed poverty to failure of character). Instead of pride in wealth and status, the new penitents were oppressed by a “sense of sin,” a consciousness of defects in their own souls, or so Samuel Barnett, an Anglican priest who ministered to the poor in London’s East End, believed.

But their penance took different forms. Beatrice Potter was drawn to the Fabian Socialism of George Bernard Shaw and of her own future husband, Sidney Webb. Vida Scudder owed more to the Christian Socialism of John Frederick Denison Maurice, and Anglican theologian, and Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, who established Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, a civic and educational community in which university students sought redemption by mentoring the urban poor, a sort of Oxbridge college translated to an East End slum. Under the inspiration of Maurice, Vida became “ardently and definitely a socialist,” a more ardent socialist, indeed, than Maurice himself, who “never questioned the right of private property so long as the owner realized his social responsibility.” Vida went further, and after Lenin and the Bolsheviks established communism in Russia, she would declare that her “delight in the last Russian experiment never wavers.” But the “ultimate source” of her socialist convictions, she maintained, “was and is Christianity.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.111)

What was needed, Vida believed, was a dose of the Middle Ages, of Franciscan charity, of love of one’s neighbor. In the very years during which Henry Adams, “buried,” as he said, “in the twelfth century,” was content to contemplate his social ideal of Chartres, the Virgin and her miraculous Child, in some degree of literary retirement from the world, Vida sought to realize her own vision of agape (compassionate love) through charitable work. She promoted her Settlement Houses and preached the Social Gospel, the mantras of a movement that sought to find Christian solutions to social and economic problems. Visiting Denison House whenever she had time to spare, she was also active in the Church of the Carpenter in Tremont Street, a Christian Socialist mission in which the congregants revived the “agape feasts” (communal dinners) of the early Christians.

She grew more radical. In her private oratory were to be found a crucifix and a red flag, and she made no secret of her aspiration to combine Fanciscan Christianity with the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx. Noting how St. Thomas Aquinas had, seven centuries before, reconciled the philosophy of Aristotle with the theology of Christ, she looked forward to a time when a thinker would “perform a like a service by synthesizing the Catholic faith and Karl Marx.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.113)

She was brave and daring and decent, yet it is not clear how much practical good Vida Scudder did. Marx and Lenin proved false prophets, and the poor whom she sought to help had as little interest in the humanities (the beau ideal of the Settlement House) as most other people do. Santayana, contemplating the labors of another fervidly altruistic Massachusetts woman, Sarah Whitman, remarked sadly but perhaps accurately that our “good works, alas, are often vainer than our vanities.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.114-115)

WASPs, too, sought to recover through neurasthenia what the Romans called otium – the higher idleness, a creative indolence that was rapidly disappearing from the world. The agitation and hurry of life had grown so intense that people no longer knew how to weave the garlands of repose. They were “ashamed of resting,” Nietzsche wrote, and “prolonged reflection” gave them a bad conscience. One thought “with a watch in one’s hand,” even as one ate “one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market.”

Nietzsche resembled WASPs in despising neurasthenic weakness and making use of it himself. For all its liabilities, neurasthenia was a way to escape an age that would “rather do anything than nothing.” “The man who lies ill in bed,” Nietszsche said, temporarily escapes the stupid bustle of the world: he “discovers that what he is ill from is usually his office, his business, or his society, and that through them he has lost all circumspection with regard to himself: he acquires this wisdom from the very leisure to which his illness has compelled him.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.118)

Unlike Walt Whitman, Henry Adams did not hear America singing. Looking out of a club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, he saw only anarchy and chaos, “the air and movement of hysteria.” Prosperity “never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.” The “vigorous and unscrupulous” energies of the plutocrats had tron “society to pieces and trampled it under foot,” while a discontented citizenry perpetually chased a brighter sun that continually eluded it. 

But these were only the symptoms, Adams was convinced, of a deeper problem. His historical studies led him to doubt whether his country was capable of rising, as other civilizations had occasionally done, above mere “physical content” to attain a “higher order” of “intelligence or morality.” American democracy had created a “vast and uniform” society as well as prosperous one, but it had little power to “ennoble” its citizens or uncover their deeper potential. Remarkably enough, Adams traced this incapacity to an insufficiency of light in the very ancestors whom he and his fellow WASPs professed to venerate. In this he was something of a traitor to his class: demoralized WASPs in the decades after the Civil War were finding a dubious refuge in ancestor worship. They might not be as rich as the Gilded Age tycoons who had surpassed them, but they possessed superior pedigrees, the blood-fetishes on which such WASP cartels as th eDaughters of the American Revolution (founded in 1890) and the Social Register Association (which dates from the 1880s) rested. Adams himself, as we have seen, was not above such consolations. “Never in his life,” he wrote, “would he have to explain who he was.” He was an Adams. But the historian in him was, at times, stronger than the snob, and overcoming the “dominion of blood and sepulcher,” he showed that the Puritans and Patriots in his line could not escape blame for the state of the country they had created. The laws and markets they ordained had made possible a freedom and a material abundance that were the envy of the world. The problem, Adams believed, was that these institutions engaged only a narrow spectrum of the passions and the virtues. What the ancestors did they did well: but they did not do enough. In raising the fabric of American democracy on so shallow an emotional foundation, the architects of America’s civil establishments contented themselves with a system that oeverstimulated one or two of the citizen’s appetites, while whole regions of her moral and instinctual life lay fallow. 

Adams’s dinner-party acquaintance John Stuart Mill had similarly broken with a patriarchal faith, and for similar reasons. Mill had, as a teenager, adopted his father James Mill’s philosophy (utilitarian and boring) as his own, and he had discovered in it “what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world.” During several years the young Mill’s “own happiness was entirely identified” with his father’s program. But in time he awakened from his heritage as from a dream, and was plunged into a nightmare:

It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.” In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: “Suppose that all you objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my hear sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again by any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. 

Mill fell into a “dry, heavy dejection” that he carried with him “into all companies, into all occupations.” The cloud grew thicker; Coleridge’s poem “Dejection: An Ode” exactly described, he said, his state of mind:

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, 
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, 
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear …

(Beran 2021, pp.120-122)

* Together with memories of color (sitting “on a yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight”), illness and taste (coming down with scarlet fever and his aunt “entering the sickroom bearing in her hand a chaucer with a baked apple”), and displacement (being “bundled up in blankets” and carried from his family’s house in Hancock Avenue to a new, larger one in Mount Vernon Street), some of Adams’s most vivid early recollections are of filial resentment: of his grandfather John Quincy Adams for making him go to school, and of his great-grandfather John Adams for being a dull writer whose work he was forced to help his father edit. How mortifying, for Henry, that these forebears, with all their faults, should have had, by any worldly measure, so much greater success than he! It must have been an unconscious satisfaction to him that the Republic they founded was inadequate.

(Beran 2021, pp.122)

fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
Ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza …

you were not made to live as brutes,
But to follow virtue and knowledge …

– Dante, Inferno

(Beran 2021, pp.124)

It would be difficult to say whether Amory Gardner was more enamored of the medievalism of his age – the passion for Gothic that Ruskin and Pugin helped to arouse – or its Hellenism, the “sweetness and light” that Matthew Arnold, following a hint from Jonathan Swift, thought the essence of Greek culture. This Hellas of the Victorians has been described as “a shimmering fantasy,” quite unfaithful to the historical facts, and it is easy to detect, in Arnold’s rhapsodies on the “aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy” of the Greeks and Pater’s effusions on their “flawless” beauty, an element of romantic escapism. But Gardner was working in a somewhat different vein, and he insisted that the Greeks knew what they were about when they used literature and poetry to stimulate the mind. The sort of liberating teaching that found its way into the 1989 film Dead Poets Society had its origin in teachers who, like Gardner, believed with the Greeks that a certain kind of education can inspire in a young person a higher idea of what a human being might be. 

It was possibly the most radical aspect of the experiment. The humane education invented by the Greeks, so powerful in intention, was by the nineteenth century almost a dead letter – a thing being carried on mechanically, a rote exercise in learning dead languages with little appreciation for their living power, an often abysmal grind. Amory Gardner wanted to recover its original purposes. He knew that when, as Plato says, the Athenian grammatists “set the works of good poets before the children on their desks to read and make them learn by heart,” their object was not, in fact, to torment the young. They believed in their bones that art and literature could change the soul, that a “poet was in the broadest and deepest sense of his people.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.129-130)

It was the paideia of Billy Wag, an immersion in the best that has been thought and said in the world, with the object of opening students’ minds, and it did something to make up for what was lost in the larger school Groton became. With his practical medievalism and his revived Hellenism, Gardner was, his student Ellery Sedgwick said, a lusus naturae, a freak of nature, a benign Harlequin. With “Aeschylus or Homer doubled back in his pocket to keep the place, he would hover about the school he loved beyond all earthly things, kindling the brains of the intelligent to a pure flame …” 

(Beran 2021, pp.131)

He resisted the urge; better to help the country by bringing his boys “into contact with high ideals of life” and “helping them to see the vast possibilities of their country.” But could he really make them into citizens devoted to something larger than themselves? He was beset by now familiar doubts. His favorite poem was Matthew Arnold’s “Rugby Chapel,” in which the poet depicts his father, Thomas Arnold, as the “faithful shepherd” who extends a loving hand to save his straying sheep. It was Peabody’s ideal of what a headmaster should be. But how could he be such a shepherd himself, when his own illumination so often failed? “I have been so selfish and so sinful,” he lamented. “There is so little of Christ in my own life that I fear I can bring but little to others.” “My religious feeling,” he confessed, “is spasmodic and dependent on occasions. … At times I seem to get a glimpse of the Beatific Vision and then all is earthly and my thoughts as selfish as ever.”*

* In his spells of dejection, Peabody was consoled by his friend Theodore Roosevelt. “You say that at times you feel depressed,” Roosevelt wrote him, “It is the penalty of doing hard and active work, old fellow.” “I fairly laughed,” he said, “when I came to the line where you said that you sometimes longed to be in the larger world of men. I don’t think you understand how much good you are doing. You are in the larger world, in the very highest and best service, and I can say quite conscientiously I don’t know any one of our generation who I think is making so permanent a mark for good.”

(Beran 2021, pp.142)

If Learned Hand had little talent for the unreflective hurry of Wall Street practice, he had precisely the kind of intelligence that would do much to build up a power in its own way as formidable as the stock exchange, the mandarin state. His work on the bench brought him into close touch with the obstacles that judges sympathetic to Wall Street had erected against the emerging welfare state. In 1905, in the landmark case of Lochner v. New York, the Supreme Court struck down a law regulating bakers’ hours, reasoning that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protected liberty of contract. A law that interfered with the freedom of bakers and their bosses to make contracts that called for long hours was, for the justices in the majority, unconstitutional. With wit and learning Hand argued, in the Harvard Law Review and other forums, that the justices’ doctrine – in the jargon of the law it is known as “substantive due process” – had no basis in the language of the Constitution and was instead a reflection of the “prejudices of that economic class to which all the justices belong.” He went on to warn that if the justices insisted on reading their personal economic preferences into the Constitution, they would transform the court into a super-legislature in which unelected lawyers acted as arbiters not simply of law but also of policy. 

Hand opposed Lochner on constitutional grounds, but he also believed in the regulatory and administrative state. In “a vast multitude of cases,” he argued, “the State must and should regulate the conduct of individuals for their own welfare …” He deplored what he saw as the self-interest and class-bias that led jurists to argue that the due process clauses of the Constitution embalmed the “individualistic doctrine of a hundred years ago.” Yet the mandarin state to which he pledged himself had its own class biases. It too would empower a particular social type, and for many years senior appointments in the mandarin establishment would go disproportionately to WASPs who had the same sort of background, training, connections, and even sense of humor that Hand himself did. 

(Beran 2021, pp.161-162)

Exhibiting himself, bodily and acrobatically, on the national stage as warrior, blood-sportsman, and family man (sire of six), Theodore Roosevelt prided himself on his ability to fight and to breed. “Work – fight – breed” became, indeed, one of his mantras; those who did not “breed well or fight well” were “cold and selfish and timid,” as well as disposable. Yet in retrospect Roosevelt’s ethic of fighting and breeding appears to have been as much a hothouse growth of his age as the foppery of the “mollycoddles,” the “tame cats,” whose moral decay he deplored. His portrayal of the fighter-breeder as a man of action, the “man in the arena” – a gladiator at the mercy of sadists, his face “marred by dust and sweat and blood” – is as characteristic a specimen of fin-de-siecle overripeness as Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings and Oscar Wilde’s epigrams; it is bathed in the violet glow of the Mauve Decade. 

Give a man a mask, Wilde said, and he will tell you the truth. Wehn, as a boy, Roosevelt discovered that he was an asthmatic weakling, he willed himself to courage. Yet even after he put on the mask of command, all the nervous sensitivity of the child remained, and through a freak of development he carried into adulthood a boyishness undiminished. “The misfortune of man,” Nietzsche says, “is that he was once a child.” Roosevelt escaped the misfortune; if he posed as the embodiment of an extravagant manliness, he did so by evading many of the complications that beset the grownup. Beneath the masquerade of the warrior-breeder lay a child’s exuberance that was seldom abated by the adult’s anxious preoccupations. He passed from one thing to the next, his friend Sturgis Bigelow observed, with the unselfconsciousness of a child, and “was just as much interested in the next thing as if the last one had never existed.” Woodrow Wilson thought him “a great big boy,” as did Cecil Spring Rice. “You must always remember,” Springy said, “that the President is about six.”

(Beran 2021, pp.168)

Franklin had, at this time, a much less elaborate social conscience. Under the Rector’s inspiration he had taught Sunday school and worked with the poor, but he had no burden of neurotic guilt to expiate. (The seed planted by Peabody, who sought to develop in his boys a Christian social conscience, would not bear fruit in his most famous pupil until later, when pain and polio changed him.) The distinctive element in Franklin’s approach to life, at the time of his marriage, was a pragmatic expediency. Pragmatism was in fashion: Eleanor’s Uncle Theodore, with his constantly evolving domestic program, was a pragmatist; so too, in a different way, was William James, who judged the truth of an idea not through an appeal to immutable principles but by the conduct the idea “dictates or inspires,” its “cash-value in terms of practical experience.” Franklin seems to have experienced nothing of James’s personal influence at Harvard, nor was he likely to have read any of his books, but already he was working out for himself a version of James’s “romantic utilitarianism,” in which you believe what you want to believe if it helps you get through the day,” and in which a sublime indifference to past thinking and superseded dogmas, together with an enthusiasm for novelty and experimentation, will lead to greater material and spiritual goods. 

(Beran 2021, pp.180-181)

Wilson set forth his vision in the January 8, 1918, address to Congress in which he elaborated his Fourteen Points. The worldly Clemenceau was appalled. “Fourteen? The Good Lord had only ten.” The commandments Wilson brought back from his own sojourn on Mount Sinai were in a vatic style, apparently simple and clear, yet on closer inspection painfully ambiguous. The famous phrases – “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,” “absolute freedom of navigation,” equality of trade,” “national armaments … reduced to the lowest point consistent with national safety,” the “autonomous development” of suppressed nationalities and ethnic groups – amounted collectively, Theodore Roosevelt said, to a “visionary” muddle, being couched “in such vague language” that they might “mean anything or nothing …” Colonel House, closer to Wilson than any other man at the time, was negotiating the Armistice with the Germans when he summoned Walter Lippmann to ask what the master’s prophecy actually meant. “You helped write these points,” he said to Lippmann. “Now you must give me a precise definition of each one.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.219)

He was discharged at Christmas, and coming home to Sagamore Hill he took to his bed in a spare room that looked to the south and west and the afternoon sun, low in a winter sky. He was by this time dying, and his old valet, James Amos, was summoned to tend and bathe him. The next day he was a little better, and as the sun sank, he lay on a sofa before the fire, watching the flames. He was given morphine, and as the night wore on his breathing became labored. Edith was wakened and came to his side. “Theodore darling!” He was dead.

Many years later Walter Lippmann, when he was himself close enough to death to tweak its nose, would tell Arthur Schlesinger that presidents “in general are not lovable. They’ve had to do too much to get where they are. But there was one President who was lovable – Teddy Roosevelt – and I loved him.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.230)

* The integration of archaic poetry and modern experience in The Waste Land gives the reader the sensation almost of reading a foreign language, one with which he is not very well acquainted. This was in keeping with Eliot’s belief that “that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” It is, he thinks, easier to experience a “direct shock of poetic intensity” – to come closer to the “objective ‘poetic emotion’” being expressed – if there is some barrier between the reader and the literal meaning of the poem’s words: the reader is forced to grapple with the strangeness, the unconscious mysticism, that inhere in the words themselves, a quality, indeed, of all words, but one that familiarity makes us overlook. Elizabethan poetry stirs us in part because we do  not fully understand it: and the familiarity and remoteness in a phrase of Horace or Virgil may speak to a reader who has only a little Latin. “I was passionately fond of certain French poetry,” Eliot said, “long before I could have translated two verses of it correctly.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.257)

In his books Public Opinion, published in 1922, and The Phantom Public, which appeared in 1925, he had been perplexed by the problems of democracy. “My own mind has been getting steadily anti-democratic,” he wrote Learned Hand in 1925. “The size of the electorate, the impossibility of educating it sufficiently, the fierce ignorance of these millions of semi-literate, priest-ridden and parson-ridden people have gotten me to the point where I want to confine the actions of majorities.” He toyed with the idea of an elite: superior souls capable of correcting the passions of the “bewildered herd.” This, of course, was a longstanding WASP preoccupation, and Lippmann himself was something of a WASP in spirit: “through his marriage, his social life, his professional contacts,” his biographer Ronald Steel observed, he saw himself as part of the “dominant white Protestant culture.” In Public Opinion he envisioned a “specialized class” of mandarin experts capable of managing problems too complicated for the mass of misinformed citizens to grasp; in The Phantom Public he spoke of intelligent “insiders” whose access to superior information would allow them to make the complex machine work. These benevolent “insiders” had more than a little in common with the class of public-service preppies WASP educators like Endicott Peabody were trying to form; the Harvard and New Republic liberal Bruce Bliven pointed out how much Lippmann’s insiders resembled, too, the “new order of samurai” proposed by H.G. Wells in A Modern Utopia, “an aristocracy of mind and character” whose members were “dedicated to making democracy work for the best, whether the populace wants it or not …”

(Beran 2021, pp.266)

At the same time he believed, much as Michael Staight and Vida Scudder did, that “a fundamental ‘breakthrough’ had occurred” in Soviet Russia, and “that nothing in our human history would ever be the same again.” It was the old WASP dream of regeneration, only with a new sheepfold as its object. The Soviet Union, Wilson contended, was creating a society “which will be homogenous and cooperative” in a way “our commercial society is not,” a way of life that would make possible the “first really human society” in history.* In the 1932 election he voted not for Roosevelt or Hoover but for the communist ticket; around the same time, as he was walking in the East Fifties in Manhattan, it occurred to him “that nobody had ever presented in intelligible human terms the development of Marxism,” the philosophy to which he looked to replace what seemed to him America’s outmoded ideals of private initiative and individual liberty of action. 

* Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution, envisioned the foundation of “the first truly human culture” on socialist principles. 

(Beran 2021, pp.290)

This passionate oratory did not, however, foreshadow an equally impassioned policy. The New Deal had crested the previous year with the passage of the Labor Relations Act of 1935. Better known as the Wagner Act, it altered the balance of power in America by endowing labor with new bargaining leverage – a “good democratic antidote,” Roosevelt said, “for the power of big business.” It is true that after he was reelected (in a landslide) he made a bold attempt to defang the Supreme Court – which had held various New Deal programs to be unconstitutional – with a proposal to enlarge the number of justices. Walter Lippmann accused the president of being “drunk with power,” and in his 1937 book The Good Society he pointed to the dangers of the mandarin state for which the New Deal seemed to him to be laying the groundwork, the very sort of state he himself had once advocated in the pages of the New Republic. 

The attempt to pack the court failed, and Roosevelt himself seemed to sense that he had gone far enough. Ever the sailor, he tacked again. After an effort to forestall inflation led to another downturn – the recession of 1937-38 – he worked toward a compromise between private initiative (favored by Wall Street WASPs) and government mandarins (advocated by WASPs in the Theodore Roosevelt mold). It is a compromise that in some measure prevails to this day; a safety net or welfare state as embodied in the Social Security Act; the enforcement of antitrust law (as pioneered by trust-busters like the New Deal lawyer Thurman Arnold) to prevent anti competitive monopoly; fair dealing in financial markets as policed by various regulatory bodies (staffed mostly by once or future Wall Street people); and Keynesian fiscal policies which, in Roosevelt’s words, use the “public wealth” to “help our system of private enterprise to function” in time of distress.

The Rooseveltian compromise between capitalism and socialism has been much criticized. But whatever else it might have been, it was a retreat from the days when New Dealers such as Rexford Tugwell dreamt of “doing America over,” of nationalizing the banks and corporations, of regimenting the economy along the lines of the Soviet Gosplan. Roosevelt sought not a true revolution but a middle way between those who, like his fellow WASPs Vida Scudder, Edmund Wilson, and Michael Straight, wanted a socialist state, and those who, like the WASPs who booed him at Steen Valetje, were pledged to an unregulated market. 

(Beran 2021, pp.293-294)

“The voices around me in my early childhood,” Whittaker Chambers remembered, “were all gentle voices. Outright rudeness or meanness were unthinkable. Ours was a highly decorous life.” Laha insisted as vehemently as Endicott Peabody ever did on grace of conduct. So thoroughly did she impress her code upon Whittaker that he was, he said, 

never quite able to shake off is rigors. She began by explaining to me that a gentleman, or , as she would say, “a man of breeding,” is known not so much by what he does as by what he will not do. First and foremost, he never imputes a base motive to anyone else. IF someone is rude to him, he assumes that the rudeness is unintentional. If he knows that it is intentional, he acts as if it were not. He ever insulted anyone himself except by intention. He never met anger with anger …

(Beran 2021, pp.299-300)

In his third form year Foodenough underwent an awakening. He came to realize “that the words of the prayer book with which I had become familiar carried a meaning that was hidden from me.” He was baffled by Leviticus 19:2. (“Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy.”) Then he “realized that holiness is a word that cannot be defined; it must be experienced.” He decided to be baptized in the hope that baptism would “lift the veil” between words and their meaning, but although the Jordan’s water brought him into a new community of spirit, “it did not reveal the meaning of the symbols and metaphors” that perplexed him. Next he was confirmed and experienced the sacrament of communion, but still he remained confused. Then, in his fifth form year, he had a dream. A series of ancient images appeared before him, and at each one he cried out, “That’s not God!” At last the head of a hound appeared, and again he cried, “That’s not God!” the “hound smiled; behind the smile was a warm light; and I cried out, ‘God is Love!’”

(Beran 2021, pp.316)

On December 7, 1941, Stimson was lunching in Washington when he was summoned to the telephone. Franklin Roosevelt sounded “rather excited.” “Have you heard the news?” the president asked. Stimson thought he was referring to Japanese advances in the Gulf of Siam. “Oh no,” Roosevelt replied, “I don’t mean that. They have attacked Hawaii. They are now bombing Hawaii.”

His “first feeling,” Stimson wrote in his diary, was one “of relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.” At the same time the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made his task in building the American war machine that much more urgent. When, in July 1940, he became secretary of war, the army of the United States, with some 174,000 soldiers, was smaller than Portugal’s. (It was a little larger than Bufaria’s.) He was charged with turning this tiny force into a phalanx of more than ten million men and women capable of defeating the Axis powers. The challenge would have staggered a much younger man, but not only was Stimson not young, he continued to suffer from insomnia and gastric complaints that would once have been described as neurasthenic but were now put down to the vagaries of infantile sexuality. His solution to the problem was to limit himself, so far as possible, to formulating the general objectives to be pursued by the War Department while leaving talented subordinates to undertake the laborious business of implementing them. He generally left his office in the old State, War, and Navy building next to the White House early enough in the day to ride on horseback with Mrs. Stimson at Woodley, his estate in the neighborhood of the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and Anglican edifice better known as Washington National Cathedral. (WASPs were so bold in those days as to envision their microscopic Episcopal communion as the national church.) On other days he would swim and play golf at Chevy Chase, and there were frequent long weekends at Highhold, as well as occasional expeditions to South Carolina to hunt quail or to the Ausable Club in the Adirondacks to fish and trailblaze. 

(Beran 2021, pp.320)

Conscious of the momentousness of the event that was about to take place – the largest seaborne invasion in history – Roosevelt in the days before D-Day took up his prayer book. Studying the Elizabethan language of Thomas Cranmer, he wanted to find a way to talk to his fellow citizens that would do justice to the gravity of the occasion. As news of the landings reached America, church bells rang, and Rooseevelt, drawing on the inspiration of Cranmer, addressed the nation in words of prayer. “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity …” 

(Beran 2021, pp.327)

“To a doctor’s eye, the President appears to be a very sick man,” said Lord Moran, the physician who attended Churchill. “He has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries of the brain in an advanced stage, so that I give him only a few months to live.” In the courtyard of Livadia Roosevelt sat for photographs with Churchill and Stalkin; in his gauntness and elegance of style, the dark cape with velvet collar, the voluble cigarette, he was the image of an American patrician. But too little blood was now flowing through the thickened arteries to the patrician brain. The statesman who had so astutely perceived the evil of Hitler failed to discern the truth of Stalin. The master of the Kremlin was, Edmund Wilson had come to be believe, “The most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars.” But Roosevelt insisted that Stalin “doesn’t want anything but security for his country,” and that “if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he will not try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” Bill Bullitt pointed out to Roosevelt that Stalin was not “the Duke of Norfolk” but “a Caucasian bandit, whose only thought when he got something for nothing was that the other fellow was an ass.” But it was in vain; the president was determined, in his words, to “play my hunch.” 

(Beran 2021, pp.331)

Older methods of separating the wheat from the chaff were, he saw, either haphazard and amateurish or biased. (Even a great natural genius had little hope of performing well on the old Harvard entrance examinations if he had not studied under a capable teacher of Greek and Latin.) The public schools from which novel talent might be derived were so various in their standards that it was not easy to tell the really intelligent student from the mediocre one. Chauncey, who followed his father to Harvard and later became an assistant dean in the university, found a solution to the problem in standardized tests that allegedly measured raw intelligence with a much greater degree of accuracy than other methods. He went on to become one of the founders of the Educational Testing Service, which gave America the Scholastic Aptitude Test or S.A.T.

The result was a meritocracy that did as much as anything (other than the New Deal wealth tax) to undermine the WASP ascendancy, for it broke the WASPs’ near monopoly of schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The new regime was decidedly fairer than the old one, but it had the unintended effect of hindering those salutary projects which WASPs, for all their shortcomings, had long cherished. Henry Adams and John Jay Chapman believed that America’s hysterically competitive society was destroying the very things that made existence something other than an organized bore – the old civic artistry of place, techniques of learning that broadened the soul and developed its latent possibilities, all that moral and spiritual refinement which constitutes the unbought poetry of life. The new science of merit, by contrast, seemed to exacerbate the rat race, to reduce life to a mechanical checking of boxes, a crude Pavlovian system of rewards that, so far from developing human potential, seemed to stunt it. A present-day critic of meritocracy, Danel Markovits, has gone so far as to cast a languishing glance at the world in which children of people like the WASPs once grew up, so different from the life of “meritocratic children” today who must relentlessly “calculate their future – they plan and they scheme, through rituals of stage-managed self-presentation, in familiar rhythms of ambition, hope, and worry.” Professor Markovits has, I suppose, no wish to revert to the old system that allowed a few privileged souls, a Henry Adams, a Franklin Roosevelt, a certain margin in life in which their deeper character could ripen. His point is that Chauncey’s system has its own drawbacks. 

Yet for all that, Chauncey and his tests did something to forge the broader, ecumenical elite that governs America today. With changes in admissions policies at the more selective schools, much else changed, and changed fast. A WASP of the old school might have had reservations about the young Harvard man of doubtful provenance who was courting his daughter at Radcliffe. But he soon enough relented; he walked his daughter to the altar, and afterward was not about to try to keep his son-in-law out of the yacht club or the country club. WASP blood-pride died hard, but it did die, and soon enough novelist John P. Marquand Jr., the son of Ellery Sedgwick’s niece Christina, was inviting Norman Podhoretz to the old Sedgwick house in Stockbridge. The visit was not without its awkward moments; Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, were said to have felt as though they had entered Cossack territory. But that the visit happened at all was a sign of change. 

(Beran 2021, pp.340-342)

* It is anachronistic, where agora civilization is concerned, to speak of the artist in our modern sense of the word, since there was under the old regime no rigid demarcation between the artistic and the civic personality. The ordinary citizen, in Athens, had a role in maintaining the artistry of the community, its myths and its cultic life. Whether the citizen sang in the choirs, judged the dramatic competitions, or contributed to the festivals, he (and to a lesser degree she) was in some sense a poet, a maker and imaginer of order. Hence Pericles’s insistence, in the Funeral Oration, that the citizen be sufficiently eutrapelian to perform a wide variety of tasks. 

(Beran 2021, pp.396)

* Jefferson, too, had been perplexed by the narrowing of the American mind. Concerned that his fellow citizens, foregoing the higher possibilities of their nature, would “forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money,” he entertained various ideas about how the eutrapelian ideal (which he, in his eighteenth-century way, sought to live up to) might flourish in America. He toyed with the idea of dividing America into communities called “wards” or “hundreds,” after old English models. Each ward or hundred, he said, would be “a small republic within itself, and every man in [these little republics[ would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties.” “As Cato, then, concluded every speech with the words, ‘Carthago delenda est,’” Jefferson wrote, “so do I every opinion with the injunction, ‘divide the counties into wards.’” The same civic vision underlay the University of Virginia: he wanted the school to be an “academical village,” a civic humanist experiment in making a college resemble a town, a marketplace, a Greek agora, with the buildings grouped around a central lawn. Making ingenious use of the arts of classical Greece and Rome, he created one of America’s more memorable common spaces, one that he hoped would foster the “Attic” (Athenian) forms of interconnection he had known in his own student days in the College of William and Mary. 

(Beran 2021, pp.413)

That the “most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear” was a puzzle to Adams, though of course he exaggerated religion’s demise. If he heard only “long, withdrawing roar” of God, the sea of faith was in fact quite real to many of his fellow WASPs in the first innings of the twentieth century. Isabella Stewart Gardner, Vida Scudder, Endicott Peabody, and Franklin Roosevelt, to name only a few, declined to be mourners in what Thomas Hardy called “God’s Funeral.” (Adams himself, we have seen, flirted with Catholic conversion in his dotage, spurred on by his friendship with Father Cyril Sigourney Fay.) The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer were still part of the fabric of WASP life, but as the century wore on, God for many WASPs – probably indeed for most of them – ceased to be a faith and became instead a whimsy, an exercise in keeping up the forms.

(Beran 2021, pp.419)

What, then, of the fair sheepfold the WASPs sought, the image of theri idea of regeneration? Was such a thing possible without God? T.S. Eliot, following Dante, said no. Henry James said yes: he does not portray Hyacinth Robinson’s conversion, in Venice, to humane culture as a religious awakening. Santayana took a position that differed from that of both. He did not believe in God, but he nevertheless believed that religion, as poetry intervening in life, had a part to play in a well-ordered community. “Always bear in mind,” he told his friend Daniel Cory, “that my naturalism does not exclude religion; on the contrary it allows for it. I mean that religion is the inevitable reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties of a truculent world. It is normally local and always mythical, and it is morally true.” He was himself partial to the liturgies of Catholicism and high Anglicanism, poetries sufficiently rich at once to engage the imagination and to pacify it, reconciling it to life’s limitations even as it genially obscured life’s horrors.

(Beran 2021, pp.420)

I say that a man should be serious about that which is serious, and not about that which is not serious. For while God is the natural and worth object of our most serious and blessed endeavors, man, as we said previously, is a plaything created by God, and this playfulness really is the best thing about him. It follows that we should play the most beautiful games, every man and woman, all through life, and be of another mind from what we now are.

– Plato, Laws, 803c

(Beran 2021, pp.437)

WASPs have been studied, usefully but imperfectly, through the prism of sociology: which is to say in the light of that which they tried to resist, a way of looking at things that has little room for many of the things they cared about. I have tried to look at them instead in the light of the poets and philosophers who shaped them. Their masters, particularly Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare, have been for me indispensable guides, interpreters of the experience of people whom they never met, but whom they understood – understood as souls frustrated by their failure to do justice to themselves, as though unfaithful to some deeper music. 

(Beran 2021, pp.437)

The artistry of play. For all the vastness and variety of the modern leisure economy, what is most striking about it is its psychological crudity. Almost all the higher intelligence of the civilization goes into work, leaving play to the dunces. The delicate apprehension that led Plato to see that in our games we are God’s playthings, the depth of spirit that moved Dante to find in play a memory and an apprehension of paradise – all this refinement is for the most part absent from our soarser entertainments. Paradise is for Dante a feast of giochi and canti, of games and songs: a recovery of what was lost when, after the expulsion from the earthly paradise of Eden, man exchanged laughter and games (onesto riso and dolce gioco) for tears and anguish (pianto and affanno). We think of WASPs as traditionalists, ritualists, in thrall to complicated etiquettes, from the proper manner of dressing for dinner to the right way of mixing a martini. In fact their manners were so much stylized playacting. In frowning on their stuffiness, we ourselves lose in playfulness. Why does the judge don her robe, the priest his surplice, the scholar her gown, the barrister his wig, the queen her crown? It is all a piece of (perhaps not very impressive) stage acting, yet it has its effect in endowing life with the quality of play. 

(Beran 2021, pp.439)

This was going too far for most people, but in a curious twist, the irrationalists of counter-Enlightenment who followed Nietzsche rather than Plato found allies in Enlightenment thinkers who had as little use for the old moralities and their attendant poetries. According to these lumieres, notions of good and evil have been superseded by a new scientific understating of man: a conception of human beings, not as playthings of God, but as puppets of biology, reducible to so many biological drives and urges. A way of looking at things that works up to a point – the point where it fails to account for the distinctively human. When a cat torments a rodent, it is true to its biologically evolved nature; when a human being tortures a living thing, it betrays its human nature, however much biology may have gone into the act. But the human difference goes deeper. Each year a number of books appear explaining that we do this or that because natural selection has selected this or that trait of our nature. But if biology can explain why we sing and why we build, it cannot account for the distance between , say, the Muzak in the supermarket and the late quartets of Beethoven, between the local community center and Chartres. And yet that space – the gulf that separates Colley Cibber from Keats, Disney World from the Parthenon – is part of the mystery of what it is to be human, the striving for ends that transcend biology. It is the human difference, and none of our modern masters can really account for it; some of them were quite miserable over it.

(Beran 2021, pp.442-443)

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References

Beran, Michael K. 2021. WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy. N.p.: Pegasus Books.

ISBN 9781643137063