The (Consistently) Gospel-Centered Shepherd
When we’re sitting in our studies with a desperate, beloved child of God, too often the first words that come to our minds have a taproot in our flesh. Instead of drawing up fresh gospel water to soothe parched throats, we offer shots of the burning liquor of the law: “Do better. Try harder. Buckle down. White-knuckle it. Suck it up. Get to work.”
When I was a kid, nothing drove me crazier than rules inconsistently applied. When my older cousins got away with things that would have gotten me in a mountain of trouble, or when my siblings got access to privileges that I didn’t, it frustrated me to no end. I had what we might call a “strong sense of justice” (read: I was the fairness police). Now, while that instinct might have been a bit, say, keenly attuned, there was some reality to what I was feeling. It is tough to be a kid in a world where the rules seem to arbitrarily change.
Pastor, unless we are careful, we can do the same to the precious flock with which God has entrusted us.
Here’s what I mean.
The funny (or, not so funny) thing about human nature is that we’re deeply inconsistent. I need look no further than me to realize this. I speak from the pulpit about the need for holiness, and no later than that afternoon, I’ve fallen into sin. I disciple young believers in the importance of a daily regimen of scripture and go to bed that night with my Bible uncracked. I talk a good game about the importance of gospel-centeredness, but far too often, I’m a law-mind.
It’s that last one that can set us up to deeply injure members of our flock. When we’re preparing a sermon, we have the chance to sift our thoughts and curate our words. This allows us to ensure that what we preach has the gospel as its unshakeable core.
But when we’re sitting in our studies with a desperate, beloved child of God, too often the first words that come to our minds have a taproot in our flesh. Instead of drawing up fresh gospel water to soothe parched throats, we offer shots of the burning liquor of the law: “Do better. Try harder. Buckle down. White-knuckle it. Suck it up. Get to work.”
We ask our people to knock back four or six of these great tips to beat anxiety, sin, grief, financial worries, or marital struggles and send them on their way, staggering drunk on the homemade moonshine of get-your-act-together. We ask exasperated questions like, “Why do you still feel this way?” “How is it that you’re still struggling with this?” “What am I going to have to do to help you finally get past this?” Too often, we cram law-shaped words into gospel-shaped holes.
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A Response to the Notion of ‘Reformed Catholicity’
It would be much more accurate to say, as Calvin does in the Institutes, that arising from under the all-seeing eye of the office of Pope, there had been voices who slowly began to catch visions of the arising theology that would blossom into the Reformation. These voices were not arising because of Romanism, but despite it. Rome was burning Protestant thinkers hundreds of years before term came into use.
In a recent article by Derrick Brite in Reformation 21 “William Perkins on Keeping It Catholic,” he calls for the adoption of what some are calling Reformed Catholicity. For hundreds of years this was an oxymoron. But a bold new world is being revived: “Those who adopt the term for themselves wish to retrieve the best of the catholic tradition, or perhaps seek to confess doctrinal truths with the Great Tradition.”
As someone who was brought to faith in Christ from deep within Roman Catholicism, who didn’t even know what a Protestant was at the time, and only heard the term when the priest cautioned me about reading the Bible, for fear that I might become a (dreaded) Protestant, I find the article by Brite deeply concerning.
There is much I would like to say in response. But I am determined to limit my comments to three problems with Brite’s understanding of Romanism.
First
It is very annoying, and I am suspicious of the motivation, as to why when it comes to the history and theology of the Vatican so many people plead benevolence. This happens within and without those who say they belong to the church. Because even a casual survey of the history of the Vatican reveals a level of corruption and intrigue which is unmatched anywhere in the history of the world. Yet, Brite includes himself among those who “wish to retrieve the best of the catholic tradition.”
So we must assume that the “best” he speaks of within the catholic tradition is not the Crusades. It is not the burning of hundreds of thousands of Christian martyrs. It is not the imprisonment of untold numbers of Bible believing Christians (like the godly Huguenots, Lombards, Hussites, Waldensians, Lutherans, Scots, etc., etc., etc.). this can’t be part of the “best” he wants us to remember. Ignore this.
It can’t be the thousand years of darkness Romanism held Western Europe under, so that most people lived hand to mouth under its heavy taxes to support its Holy Roman Empire. Henry VIII complained that the Vatican received four out of every five dollars in taxes from England. The Scandinavian countries took to Lutheranism very quickly, partly because it freed them from oppressive Vatican taxation.
The Pope, and this was strongly supported by Aquinas, said it was very sinful to die with enough money to leave to your offspring. Inheritance was a sign of someone taking the sin of greed to Purgatory with them. Aquinas called it Turpitudo; ugly, deformed, shameful. The Pope railed against it, urging the wealthy to buy his relics to escape the consequences of their greed in Purgatory.
Let’s see, what is the “best” that Brite wants us to think about? Could it be the doctrinal corruption that chained the minds of Roman Catholic subjects in darkness, a darkness from which they could not escape. How could they? Less than 3% could read at all, education was needless, and possessing a Bible illegal. Even most of their priests could not read. John Huss just wanted to teach the Bible to his Hungarian congregation the Bible, and for this he was tortured and executed. His promise of a safe passage was ignored (everyone warned him that they were lying, but he—foolishly—trusted them).
Maybe it is doctrine Brite has in mind? Or one has to ask if Brite ever read The Canons of Trent? These are the unchangeable doctrines of the Vatican. I urge you to read their lawyer-language piece-by-piece condemnation of Reformed theology. They are anathema. Believing even one Reformed doctrine, sends you to the depths of Hell. Alexander Hislop’s book, The Two Babylons, demonstrates that most of the Vatican teachings are rooted in Egyptian and Babylonian religions. So doctrinally, Brite can’t be referring to this.
Secondly
Perhaps by “the best of the catholic tradition” Brite urges us to grasp at is the straw of Rome’s apparent embrace of the doctrine of the Trinity? Brite lets his readers know that Perkins alerted his readers to the many theological corruptions within Rome’s Trent document, but he responds, “Yet there are many other issues (e.g., the Trinity, the two natures of Christ) that we can find true agreement on. These are doctrines that have not been wrecked by Trent’s touch.”
Let’s see if Brite is correct. Does Rome believe the doctrine of the Trinity, like they say they do? It is not hard to discover the answer.
Calvin summarizes the doctrine of the Trinity so well:
Say that in the one essence of God there is a trinity of persons; you will say in one word what Scripture states, and cut short empty talkativeness (Inst.I.XIII.5).
There is one divine essence and yet three persons. Clearly, this is not the same as what is termed monotheism. Jews and Moslems fit that category. Christians do not.
I have the RC catechism in front of me. It says, “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together they adore the one merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day (pt.842).
Similar things are said about the Jewish religions.
But Romanism does not stop at saying they are monotheists, too. It goes on to hold that members of any religion also worship the same deity;
“Those who, through not fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—those too may achieve eternal salvation” (pt.847).
Even there the Vatican does not stop. It also includes the Old Testament Canaanite deity Moloch. In October 2019 the Pope dedicated as huge statue of Moloch and placed it at the entrance of the Roman Colosseum. In the same year he performed the dedication of Pachamama, a South American fertility goddess. One can see a high-ranking Cardinal worshiping it.
In fact, and this is where all this leads, on 6 March 2021, the Pope gathered the leaders of practically all the world’s religions to the ancient ziggurat in Ur, Iraq (they have been rebuilding it since 1999 for the occasion). There he told them that together they were all lights to the world, lights which God referred to when he told Abraham to look up at the stars: saying “so shall your offspring be.”
Therefore, to say that the Vatican holds to the doctrine of the Trinity is slightly true, as long as one realizes that it is but one in its pantheon of deities. Why would Brite not make his readers aware of this?
Lastly
We are then scolded by Brite for being so blind as not to see that we owe much of Reformed Theology to Thomas and other Dark Ages Roman Catholic theologians:
“Despite where your sympathies may lie, ignoring the historical reality that a majority of our reformed heritage has appropriated Thomas and other medieval catholic theologians is not an option.”
Brite claims that our refusal to see our debt to Roman doctrine is mere misplaced sympathies. That is, those who hold an opinion other than his, simply do not know their history, nor their theology. Logically, this is beyond absurd and insulting.
For example, literally no one knew church history better than John Calvin. He had memorized most of the writings of the Church Fathers. And in the Institutes Calvin gave credit where credit was due to the smattering of light that emanated out of the thousand years the Christian faith was almost completely corrupted before his day.
But still, the goal of the Reformation movement was not a revitalization of Popish doctrine they saw. Luther tried to do this, then realized that it was hopeless. Rather, all the Reformers saw that Rome was utterly corrupted, so badly that the True Church had to “Re-formed”—meaning started all over again. Any light which was there, was found much clearer in the Church Fathers.
Then, logically, how can anyone claim to have any thing to do with the Reformed faith, and say that Calvin, et. al., missed Brite’s points due to his misplaced sympathies? It was sympathies, and not the Bible and history? God help us from such twists.
Logically speaking, does it make any sense at all to say that “the majority of our Reformed heritage has appropriated Thomas and other medieval catholic theologians.” None whatsoever. Why? Because if that were the case then the anathemas of Trent against practically every point of Reformation Theology would in fact be a self-condemnation! It is ridiculous to think that Reformed doctrines were heavily dependant on Thomas, and that Trent theology, which was also depended on Thomas, then condemned Reformed doctrine. That would mean that Trent was condemning itself!
Brite either does not know what Trent says, doesn’t know Reformed doctrine, or neither of them. Or he has been speaking with a RC priest, and that is who is whispering in his ear.
Jesus told us to how to think as Christian leaders: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore, be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Mt.10:16). Brite needs to be told what the word Vatican means; diving-serpent. (see Rome’s new Vatican Hall The Vatican’s Hell Hall: The Weird Mysteries of the Paul VI Audience Hall – Novus Ordo Watch).
Brite misses his mark when he appeals to pre-Reformation emerging lights (see Theologica Germanica, or the commentaries by—what is his name—which Luther was greatly appreciated). Dark Ages persons who believed what the Reformers later taught are to be thought of, not as representing Roman Catholic belief, but rather as those who tapped into Biblical theology before the Reformation could take hold. Many of these were at least threatened with the stake by the Pope.
It would be much more accurate to say, as Calvin does in the Institutes, that arising from under the all-seeing eye of the office of Pope, there had been voices who slowly began to catch visions of the arising theology that would blossom into the Reformation. These voices were not arising because of Romanism, but despite it. Rome was burning Protestant thinkers hundreds of years before term came into use.
I am now a Reformed pastor, and passionate about the Gospel. To suggest that the deep darkness which Romanism held me and other Roman Catholics I have led to Christ in as being anything remotely like a True Church is deeply disturbing. It must surely be true that Brite has never been used by God to bring someone out of Romanism into True Faith (Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 7), and then sat to listen to their experience.
Charles d’Espeville is a Minister in the Reformed Church in America.
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Job The Suffering Prophet (5): Job Loses Everything
Job has lost everything. He is devastated and grief-stricken beyond words. He has gone from being the greatest man of the east to living on the town dunghill, scratching his skin with pieces of pottery to ease his itchy pain. But despite all of this, nothing can separate him from the love of God, certainly not the scheming of Satan. Despite every appearance to the contrary, Job is more than a conqueror. And so are we, if our trust is in Jesus Christ. For nothing can separate from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Not sickness. Not loss. Not death. God has not promised that we will not suffer. But be has promised that he will turn all evil to good. And this is what we learn from the sufferings of Job, who points us to the suffering and dying of our Savior, that one whose suffering redeems us from our sin, that Savior who knows what human suffering is like, and who promises to restore us and vindicate us in the end.
Everyone reading this essay has suffered loss. We have all lost something we prize. Some of us have suffered greatly and must live in constant pain, either physical or emotional, and sometimes both. Yet, no one reading this has lost as much as Job. Like a series of Tsunamis, the bad news of Satan’s handiwork begins to come, wave after wave after wave.
As we continue our look at Job, the suffering prophet, we come to verse 13 of chapter one, where we read “one day [probably that day when Job offered burnt offerings] when Job’s sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother’s house, a messenger came to Job and said, `The oxen were plowing and the donkeys were grazing nearby, and the Sabeans attacked and carried them off. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” The Sabeans are Arab Bedouins, who not only took all of Job’s livestock, they killed all of the servants. But this is only the beginning.
According to verse 16, the earth itself seemed to turn against Job. “While he [the first messenger] was still speaking, another messenger came and said, `The fire of God [probably a reference to a lightening storm] fell from the sky and burned up the sheep and the servants, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” A devastating blow. Yet another wave of bad news was still to hit. “While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, `The Chaldeans formed three raiding parties and swept down on your camels and carried them off. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!’”
But Job’s loss is still not over. Another, even more painful blow was soon to fall. “While he was still speaking, yet another messenger came and said, `Your sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother’s house, when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the four corners of the house. It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!”
In but the span of a few moments, Job learns that all his wealth has been destroyed and stolen. The joy of his life–his seven sons and three daughters–had been taken from him. Only the messengers have been spared so as to bring Job the news that the accumulated fruit of a lifetime of work is now gone. Marauding enemies and the forces of nature appeared to conspire to bring Job to his knees.
The way in which this horrible loss occurred not only conceals the hand of God, but also the hand of Satan. Remember, Job does not know of the heavenly scene, nor the divine permission given to Satan to afflict him. If Job were an atheist, he would have had an explanation for what has just happened. The world is a cruel place, red in tooth and claw. If Job were a polytheist, a dualist, a materialist, or a fatalist, he would have had a ready explanation for his loss–human weakness, the forces of nature, or the eternal struggle between good (spirit) and evil (things material).[1]
But Job believes in the living God, who is sovereign over the forces of nature as well as the enemies to the east. Job knows that his God is supremely good. Therefore, Job knows that these things have befallen him only because the good and almighty God has either brought these things to pass, or else has permitted these things to occur. And this brings us to the mystery of the suffering of the righteous.
Job Praises God Despite All that Has Happened
The knowledge that God is both good and sovereign serves as the basis for Job’s reaction to this horrible news, as recounted in verses 20-21. “At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head,” a common gesture of grief. Overcome with shock at the realization of his loss, Job “fell to the ground in worship and said: `Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.’” Even as the reader’s heart aches for Job, this grief-stricken man still utters words of faith. As one writer puts it, Job knows “that a man may stand before God stripped of everything, and still lack nothing.”[2] Surely, the sentiment expressed in Psalm 73:25 comes to Job’s mind, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.” And yet Job’s faith does not relieve his suffering, it only makes it worse.[3]
The God whom Job loves has brought this to pass. Job has done nothing to deserve what has happened. And still, Job praises God. As we read in verse 22, “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.” Job knows there is a reason for this situation, even if he must wait to discover it. From his now-broken heart, Job pours forth a doxology of praise at news of the loss of everything.
Yet, Job’s ordeal is far from over. Things are only going to get worse as yet another heavenly scene is revealed.
The Second Heavenly Scene
Satan is once again summoned before the heavenly court but this time is strangely silent about the results of Job’s first ordeal. It is the Lord who calls Satan’s attention to what has happened to Job. As we read in 2:1-3, “On another day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them to present himself before him. And the LORD said to Satan, `Where have you come from?’ Satan answered the LORD, `From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.’ Then the LORD said to Satan, `Have you considered my servant Job?
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Rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell’s Sociology of Elites
Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Baltzell would see the end of the establishment and the collapse of the upper class into an irrelevant rump as a significant underlying cause of many of today’s social maladies, such as the progressive collapse of norms in our political life. This is frequently bemoaned, often with a heavy dollop of blame heaped on one’s opponents, but it was an inevitable consequence of the destruction of an establishment whose values largely defined those norms and whose social cohesion allowed them to be enforced. Without class codes of conduct, only public scandal constrains, and often now not even that. He would see the loss of the establishment along with its class codes of behavior and social enforcement—not such presently popular notions as the weakening of strong political parties or the end of smoke-filled rooms—as decisive in the erosion of political norms.With increasing income inequality and social stratification reminiscent of the Gilded Age, talk of an “establishment” has returned to our political discourse. As in the past, the word is typically used as a pejorative describing an incumbent power structure that needs to be overturned.
Yet today’s sociopolitical regime is vastly different from the establishment that ruled a century ago, the so-called WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment. With that establishment mostly gone from living memory, its chroniclers and scholars have largely faded from view, as well. That is unfortunate, because in some ways the travails of America’s current elite and their institutions cannot be fully understood without comprehending the previous establishment’s history, sociology, self-conception, and demise.
Thus the work of E. Digby Baltzell is due for a rediscovery. Baltzell, the now nearly forgotten sociologist who popularized the term WASP, helps illuminate not only why the previous establishment fell but also many features of today’s world, such as the shattering of norms, declining trust in institutions, and the emergence of charismatic populist leaders like Donald Trump.
Baltzell, the leading authority on the American upper class, was among the WASPs’ fiercest critics. He turned “WASPs” into a household term in a book savaging them for their exclusion of Jews (and also Catholics) from society’s upper ranks. Baltzell believed that an upper class must reflect the ethnic makeup of the country as a whole in order to retain legitimacy. By failing to assimilate worthy new men of non-Protestant ancestry into its ranks, he argued that the WASP upper class had devolved into a caste. If it stayed on this path, the ethnically closed nature of the upper class would eventually cause its ruin. He quoted Aristotle in arguing that “Revolution may also arise when persons of great ability, and second to none in their merits, are treated dishonorably by those who themselves enjoy the highest honors.”
Baltzell, however, did not desire the WASP establishment’s destruction but rather its reform. Heavily influenced by Tocqueville, he saw the existence of an aristocratic upper-class establishment as a bulwark against atomization and tyranny in democratic society as well as an enforcer of sociopolitical norms. An expanded upper class that, among other things, would bring non-Protestants into its ranks was something he hoped to see emerge. That was not to be, however, and Baltzell then became the WASPs’ chronicler and eulogist as the establishment dissolved.
A Gentleman and a Scholar
Born in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, Edward Digby Baltzell was a scion of the upper class that later became the object of his study—though he was, as he put it, among the “impecunious genteel.” He attended boarding school at St. Paul’s, but unlike his classmates he was unable to attend Harvard, Princeton, or Yale because his father had lost employment at an insurance company due to alcoholism. Instead, he enrolled at Penn, where he paid for at least part of his own schooling by doing odd jobs. He also played sports and was captain of the freshman tennis team. Sport and the gentlemanly honor code of sportsmanship continued to influence his work throughout his life.
After graduation, Baltzell served as a Navy pilot in the Pacific during World War II. It was in the service, where he saw men from several ethnic backgrounds serving together in one body, that he first had the idea of an integrated upper class. Discharged from the Navy, he enrolled in graduate school in sociology at Columbia during that school’s heyday, with professors such as Robert Merton, Robert Lynd, and C. Wright Mills.
He sensed that his upper-class background made him unusual in the sociology field, which was dominated by people of middle-class origins. He also realized that the upper class was an understudied area. He considered the work of the most famous analyst of that class, Thorstein Veblen, inadequate. Veblen, in his view, had given the world the mistaken impression that the upper class was a “leisure class,” not the functional class that Baltzell knew from lived experience.1 Balztell did his dissertation on the American upper class, and for the rest of his life remained the world’s foremost authority on it.
Rejecting a Marxist framework, Baltzell’s theory of class draws heavily from Weber and Tocqueville. His analysis leans on several related but distinct concepts: elite, upper class, aristocracy, authority, establishment, and caste, each of which has a specific meaning in his work.
Baltzell’s elite is the collection of people who occupy the most senior positions in the key domains of society: politics, business, the professions, science, the arts, religion, etc. Elites are individuals and elite status is based on achieved position and accomplishment, not on criteria such as breeding, high intelligence, moral character, “worthiness,” and the like.
His upper class is a collection of extended families at the top of the social status hierarchy who are descended from elites of one or more generations past. (The merely wealthy are not themselves a genuine social class, and are generally assimilated into the upper class at a lag across multiple generations). Children of the upper class are born into a secure, ascribed status, freeing them from the type of status anxiety and competition faced by other classes.2 An upper class is generally raised together, intermarried, and maintains unique folkways such as its own vocabulary or accent. (You might say tomayto, but WASPs of the era when that famous song was written said tomahto.3) The elite, the wealthy, and the upper class are thus related but distinct entities, rarely distinguished today within America’s declassed elite.
Baltzell defines an aristocratic upper class as one which justifies its status and privileges through service to the nation, both by assuming leadership roles and by being open to assimilating the families of new men of merit among the elite. An aristocratic upper class will also be a bearer of traditional values and authority.
Authority is legitimized, institutionalized power. Baltzell uses the term to specifically refer to traditional or class authority that produces a popular deference to upper class leadership and respect for American institutions. That is, not only did the WASPs take the lead in public affairs, but the public also saw that as a right and proper thing and followed willingly. He wrote, “Class authority is a mysterious blend of sentiment and myth, of love and loyalty, and the graceful charm of quiet leadership. It is, above all, a product of faith bred of ancient traditions and long continuing organic relationships between the leaders and the led.”
An establishment exists when members of an upper class hold a significant share of the elite positions in key sectors and institutions, and when their traditional values are dominant among the elite and society at large. An establishment is thus a ruling class, but one which governs through authority as defined above, not by force or through authoritarian methods.
An upper class becomes a caste rather than an aristocracy when it retains its social status and privileges but ceases to either provide leadership or to assimilate new worthy men into its ranks, especially for reasons of race, religion, or ethnicity. Baltzell thus follows Tocqueville’s description of the French aristocracy as a caste.4
Finally, the term WASP itself refers specifically to the American upper class, not just anyone who is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Jimmy Carter was not a WASP. George H. W. Bush, the scion of an upper-class Connecticut family, was.5
Thus, beyond distinguishing between the elite, the wealthy, and the upper class, Balztell also provides a guide for distinguishing between well-functioning (aristocratic) and poorly functioning (caste) upper classes, and between well-structured (establishment) and poorly structured (declassed) elites. Throughout his career, he explored these concepts in analyzing the history of the American upper class.
An upper-class establishment was necessary, in his view, to a healthy and functional society. Without it, a democracy would devolve into bureaucratic despotism, corporate feudalism, charismatic Caesarism, or some other undesirable state as a result of runaway social atomization. This upper-class role came from its status and wealth, to be sure. But it also arose, crucially, from the fact that—in contrast to economically or functionally defined groupings, such as the working class or the elite—it was an actual social community. As Balztell’s student and collaborator Howard Schneiderman summarized it, the upper class maintained “a sense of gemeinschaft-like solidarity.” This social solidarity is what made it a counterweight to social atomization and an independent power base that could act as a check against excesses in business, government, or a charismatic populist leader.
This sense of community also created powerful mechanisms of social control, including the threat of class ostracism, to enforce standards and norms of class behavior. Thus, a man who repeatedly violated the Anglo-American code of the gentleman (by, for example, cheating at sports) risked painful social exclusion. As a real-life example of the WASP social code, divorce was heavily frowned upon. Until the 1960s in Philadelphia, anyone who was divorced and remarried was automatically excluded from receiving an invitation to the socially exclusive Dancing Assembly, no matter who he or she was. In contrast to the upper class, the elite “is not a real group with normative standards of conduct . . . there is a code of honor among thieves and [Boston] Brahmins that does not exist among people listed in Who’s Who or Dun and Bradstreet’s Directory of Directors.”
In their day, the WASPs were a culture-setting class for America, meaning that many of their moral and behavioral codes were normative, or at least aspirational, for all classes. In addition, because WASPs themselves held a substantial number of key elite positions in the era of the Protestant establishment, this allowed them to enforce les règles du jeu and to ensure that not just the letter of the law but also the unwritten rules and norms were followed by all. As Schneiderman put it,
A moral force within the putatively amoral world of politics and power elites, an establishment of leaders drawn from upper‑class families, is the final protector of freedom in modern democratic societies. Such an establishment of political, business, cultural, religious, and educational leaders succeeds in its moral function when it sets, follows, and enforces rules of fair play in contests of power and opinion. . . . Hegemonic establishments give coherence to the social spheres of greatest contest. They don’t eliminate conflict, but prevent it from ripping society apart. . . . The genius of an establishment lies in its capacity to put moral brakes on power by applying an upper‑class code of conduct and responsibility to it.
But an establishment was also something of a contradiction in America. The idea of hereditary upper-class leadership was at odds with the country’s egalitarian and democratic aspirations—even if, without it, a successful, healthy democracy was not possible in Baltzell’s view. The country needed to live within that tension to succeed, perhaps even to survive as a society. Baltzell wrote, “No nation can long endure without both the liberal democratic and the authoritative aristocratic processes.” Only a genuinely aristocratic upper class, one that both served the nation through leadership and was open to new men of merit, was capable of sustaining this tension. Such a class could bring needed balance and prevent “the atomization of society, fostered by the fanatic forces of egalitarian individualism,” which he saw as “the greatest threat to political freedom in our time.”
Yet Baltzell also saw that the upper class was failing to meet that challenge, causing an emerging leadership crisis for the country. Increasingly, the WASPs were choosing to withdraw rather than to lead, and they categorically refused to open a number of their institutions to those outside of their own ethno-religious community, excluding Jews, Catholics, and blacks. Whether the WASPs could have survived the forces converging on them is debatable, but Baltzell believed their decision to act as a caste rather than as an aristocracy doomed them. During the 1960s, the establishment fell, and the upper class devolved into a hollow shell that receded from the public consciousness. The consequences of that fall continue to bedevil America today.
Baltzell authored three major books on the American upper class, each looking at it through a different analytical lens. Philadelphia Gentlemen described the formation and socioeconomic history of the upper class. The Protestant Establishment detailed how the WASPs failed the openness test of aristocracy. And Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia examined the roots of the WASPs’ failure to meet the leadership test of aristocracy. Baltzell continued returning to this subject in essays until his death in 1996.
The Rise and Fall of a National Upper Class
Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class, published in 1958 (also published in paperback under the title American Business Aristocracy), looks at the upper class through the lens of material or economic forces. Baltzell traces the transformation of the American upper class from roughly 1870 to 1890, then analyzes the development of the newly formed national upper class until World War II.
Prior to this late nineteenth-century transition period, the American upper class had been local and familial. Each city or state had its own local upper class with its own culture. A national upper class, to the extent that it existed, was a federation of local upper classes. These local upper classes were familial: social status was determined almost solely by the family a person belonged to. Cities were growing rapidly at this time but still comparatively small. Philadelphia, for example, only had 121,000 people in 1850. Boston only had about 25,000 people in 1800. Thus, there was no need for upper class directories like the Social Register. Everyone knew who was upper class.
The upper class consisted of the descendants of personages of historic importance such as colonial-era leaders like John Winthrop of Massachusetts, military leaders like Revolutionary War general John Cadwalader of Philadelphia, and wealthy businessmen in various stages of status assimilation. In many cases, such as the Adamses of Massachusetts or the Harrisons of Virginia, multiple generations of these families became men of eminence in politics and other fields. It was through this type of multigenerational service to and leadership of the nation that the upper class justified its continued existence.6
The structure of the upper class began to shift in the 1870s, driven by several changes in society. The Civil War created a more cohesive American union. Large-scale industrialization, urbanization, and immigration began to remake the face of the country. As Irving Kristol noted, “In 1870, the United States was a land of small family-owned businesses. By 1905, the large, publicly-owned corporation dominated the economic scene.”7 These firms created vast new wealth, with Gilded Age fortunes dwarfing any that had come before. There were more millionaires in the Senate in 1910 than there had been in the whole country prior to the Civil War.
A more centralized economy and government led naturally to a more centralized upper class. In this new environment, new upper-class institutions came into being, many of them national in scope. These included the elite boarding school—the number of which grew significantly after the Civil War—the country club, the summer resort town, and genealogical societies. The 1880s were a seminal decade in institution building, witnessing the establishment of the first country club in Brookline, Massachusetts (1882), the Groton School (1884), and Tuxedo Park (1885). Of particular note was the publication of the first edition of the Social Register, a directory of upper-class families and their affiliations, for New York in 1887.
Some key upper-class institutions like Exeter Academy, Harvard, and certain clubs predated this period, but they took on increasing importance at this time. Baltzell documents how upper-class families in Philadelphia were more likely to have attended Harvard, Princeton, or Yale and less likely to have attended Penn as generations passed. Similarly, the founders of upper-class families had originally hailed from a variety of religious backgrounds but largely converged on Episcopalianism over time.
Acceptance and participation in these institutions came to eclipse family in importance for defining social status, though obviously being from the right family was also a principal factor in acceptance. “It was, then, one’s club and educational affiliations, rather than family positions and accomplishment alone,” Baltzell wrote, “which placed one in a secure establishment position in the corporate and urban world which America had become by the end of the nineteenth century.” This was particularly the case with schools and the city gentlemen’s clubs. As Baltzell noted, “The circulations of elites in America and the assimilation of new men of power and influence into the upper class takes place primarily through the medium of urban clubdom.” We see this multigenerational assimilation via clubdom in the case of the Rockefeller dynasty. John D. Rockefeller Sr. was a member of the Union League Club of New York, Rockefeller Jr. a member of the more prestigious University Club, and Rockefeller III a member of the most exclusive Knickerbocker Club.
During the late nineteenth century, the upper class also began migrating to the suburbs or outlying neighborhoods. Where once the elite of Philadelphia had lived in Rittenhouse Square, they subsequently moved to places like Chestnut Hill and the Main Line.
Thus the life of a Philadelphia WASP might go something like this: He would start out being raised in Chestnut Hill, proceed through high school at a local elite day school like Episcopal Academy or a boarding school like St. Mark’s, then move on to college at Princeton, where he would join an exclusive dining club like the Ivy. Returning to Philadelphia, he would live in Ardmore, join a prestigious firm such as Drexel and Company or a family enterprise, assume membership in a city club like the Philadelphia or Rittenhouse Club, and be engaged in various charitable endeavors. He would play tennis at the Merion Cricket Club, attend annual Assembly dances, and spend summers in Cape May. He probably met his wife at her debutante, and would proceed to have a larger-than-average number of children with her, staying together for life. Their children would in turn marry the children of other upper-class families or the children of newly minted wealth as a means of assimilating them into the upper class.
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