The Protestant Establishment Revisited.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

Why the new meritocracy is bad for America

Almost at the same time that E. Digby Baltzell published his best-known book, The Protestant Establishment, in 1964, his title character began to go to seed. This came as no surprise to Baltzell, whose book, though remembered as a paean to the Establishment, was actually more of a jeremiad. Though Baltzell certainly believes there should be an establishment (or better yet, an aristocracy) running the country, he was upset about the conduct of the establishment we had; its narrow-mindedness and ethnic prejudice, he believed, were transforming it from a ruling class into a ruling caste. Taking his cue from his idol Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the French Revolution, Baltzell predicted that once the class-to-caste transition took place, the elite would fail to admit into its ranks the best products of the lower orders and would therefore lose its vitality and authority. An anarchic frenzy of social equality would be the inevitable result. In his new book, The Protestant Establishment Revisited* which sounds like a sequel but is actually a collection of essays), Baltzell quotes a famous line from Marx-"The more a ruling class is able to as-late similate the most prominent men of the dominated classes, the more stable and dangerous its rule"-and then suggests that, by his lights, "dangerous" could be changed to "desirable."

Baltzell today treats the Protestant Establishment as if it were obviously dead, and I think he's right. It will be objected (stay your hands a moment, Washington Monthly letter-to-the-editor writers) that today the president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of the treasury are all White Anglo-Saxon Protestants born to secure upper-class wealth and educated at boarding schools and Ivy League colleges-a WASP Trifecta not achieved at any other time in the past half-century-and that Ralph Lauren has gotten very rich helping the middle class to acquire a hint of the old WASP style. All true, but the Protestant Establishment is dead nonetheless. George Bush is president only because the completely unestablishment Ronald Reagan, who beat him soundly in the 1980 presidential campaign, then picked him as vice president; and Bush campaigns as a born-again redneck, not a patrician.

To be precise, what has died is the social world described in the novels of John O'Hara and John P. Marquand, and in some of Baltzell's essays about Philadelphia, his lifelong home: a world where power was held by local barons to a much greater extent than today and where you could not enter the local barony in older communities could not run a big business or a bank or a law firm or a hospital-unless you had been born into the right family, grown up in the right neighborhood, attended the right private schools, and married the right woman. Baltzell reminds us that Philadelphia, which is usually thought of by outsiders as Rocky Balboa's hometown, was an extreme case: As late as 1955, the two candidates for mayor were named J. Richardson Dilworth and Thacher Longstreth.) There is a tremendous difference between the notion that some upper-class WASPs are very powerful, or the notion that the WASP style is popular, and the notion that a small, cohesive group of WASPs runs the country. It's this last notion that Baltzell correctly assesses as having become ridiculous.

I suppose you could argue that in a handful of venues, people still want to know what your mother's maiden name was, and traditional upper-class social credentials certainly don't hurt anybody's chances for success. But having gone to Groton or belonging to the Country Club in Brookline or possessing a last name like Cadwalader is today only about a 15-percent advantage. As recently as the early sixties, having such credentials was a necessity if you wanted certain positions (most of them in local gentries) and was an enormous advantage in the big-time world of Washington and New York. Even Gatsby-style, self-invented big shots now feel free to pick their mates (rather than their mistresses) on the basis of achievement, looks, and personality, instead of on inherited social position. This is a new development: Recall that in the fifties, John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy all felt impelled to marry Catholic society girls from families more respectable than their own. Of course ambitious young men still "marry up," but "up" today means being less ethnic, better educated, and more prosperous by background, rather than possessing a Social Register name or being a post-debutante.

The institutions that were the bastions of the Protestant Establishment-local banks, law firms, and substantial family businesses-have been subsumed into national corporations, or have become less important. The Southwest and West, to which much power has shifted, never worked up much of a Protestant Establishment in the first place. The rise of the media has had an inevitable erosive effect on the ethic of deference on which the Protestant Establishment depended: The current establishment secretary of state, James Baker, is a master press-handler, but imagine how poorly it would serve him to strike the majestic, heyday-of-the-establishment pose of his predecessor Dean Acheson, a man who (tautologically, but undeniably) was formidable...