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.
Read More
Related Posts:

Ordained Church of England Clergy have repeatedly made dubious statements in the public domain, the Bishop doesn’t care and believes facts are debatable and merely opinions (except, of course, those facts which suit him). The one person who might have steered the Bishop to a different conclusion has used his own belief in climate change nonsense to uphold the Bishop’s decision. As the Church of England descends into a woke hell of its own making – and its absurd fixation on climate is just one manifestation of this.

At the last count, fewer than a million people worship regularly in the Church of England. I am one of those, having so far resisted the almost overmastering desire to extract myself from the Church’s increasing wokeness and ever closer conformance to – and infiltration by – the secular society it is meant to serve. My frustrations are usually vented by strident comments on social media and the occasional email calling individuals to task, but the straw which really threatens to break the camel’s back in my case is the Church’s obsession with ‘climate change’.
Why the Church of England is so vocal on a subject about which it clearly knows nothing is beyond me, but when it makes completely unsubstantiated statements in the public domain, easily capable of being refuted by facts, it is time to take action. One source of the Church’s outlandish statements in this regard is the Community of the Resurrection (CR) in Mirfield, West Yorkshire.
Most people – even many churchgoers – think Religious Communities died out forever in the Reformation, but they actually staged a comeback in the 19th Century and to this day there are vowed monks and nuns, many ordained to the Priesthood, living in Communities as part of the Church of England. I came to know the one at Mirfield and it was therefore a great disappointment to witness CR jump on the woke climate bandwagon and promulgate in its official publication, CR Review, what appeared to be climate facts but which, in reality, were nothing more than personal opinions – although this was never once made clear.
I endeavoured to call CR to account and the Community was gracious enough to include in its publication my rebuttal of one offending article, although radically edited. I hoped this would be an end to the matter but no, CR continued to pump out articles and videos making outrageous climate assertions. Each time these appeared I contacted the Community with detailed facts, evidencing the untruthfulness of the statements, but, unlike on that first occasion, the Community became unyielding, refusing to publish any retractions even though the Superior later admitted to me “we are not climatologists”.
Matters came to a head earlier this year when yet another article appeared in CR Review full of inaccuracies and clearly written to scaremonger and possibly to influence voting (the local elections were just around the corner). Yet again, I provided detailed evidence disproving each assertion and once more CR refused to recede from its position. Having reached deadlock, I decided it was necessary to escalate matters.
My initial approaches were to those holding some degree of responsibility for the Community, its doings and its members. However, neither the Archdeacon of Halifax nor the Bishop of Blackburn, Chair of the Advisory Council for Religious Communities in the Church of England, had the courtesy to reply. The Bishop of the Diocese in which CR resides, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds, responded claiming that the Community was “not accountable” to him and making it apparent that his sympathies were entirely with the climate alarmists (unsurprising, given his own actions and public proclamations on climate matters). The appointed ‘Visitor’ to CR (a kind of overseer for the resolution of disputes), the Bishop of Lichfield, replied saying the matter lay outside his area of responsibility. Thus, the buck having been well and truly passed, the only route left to me was to raise a formal complaint against CR under the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM).
With whom does such a complaint have to be lodged? The Diocesan Bishop. Yes, that meant the Bishop of Leeds, who originally said he had no accountability! Of course, I asked that he recuse himself because, in my view, he had already prejudged the matter. It appeared obvious to me, when he summarily dismissed my initial communication to him asking for help, that this Bishop is part of the Church’s groupthink on climate.
Read More
Related Posts:

In days to come, Southern Baptists will have a decision to make. Will Scripture be sufficient to determine how Christ’s church should function, or will feminists win the pulpit and destroy what’s left of their churches?

As culture wages war against God’s design of a man and woman (males and females), the casualties from this battle are piling up. Any observation of the latest headlines exposes the damage this confusion brings. New storylines appear every day, from transwomen (biological men) destroying women’s sports to a confirmed Supreme Court Justice pretending she could not define her gender, which was why she was nominated for the position.
Once again, with a brand new week, we witnessed the successful impact of feminism on full display in two of the most unlikely places. While both sources were seemingly unpredictable and unrelated, a closer look revealed the opposite was true.
What Is a Woman?
Recently, audiences experienced the DailyWire movie, “What is a Woman?” While critics ignored the film, it received high praise from the massive audience who watched the documentary. If you haven’t watched the movie, you should. The movie provides a unique glimpse into the world of gender theorists, transgender surgeons, and gender identity experts, as Matt Walsh (the documentary’s focus) asks the question, “What is a woman?”
With this one simple question, viewers witness the verbal gymnastics, obfuscations, and outright cosmic interruptions in the vortex of reality, which initially serves as the movie’s charm. However, the seriousness of this dangerous ideology is on display toward the movie’s end as viewers learn about the long-term impact of puberty blockers and double mastectomies on girls as young as 15.
For the feminist proponents of transgender identities, the tactics required to hold such views are simple:

First, they ignore the meaning of words. In this instance, this is accomplished by decoupling the word gender from sex. I will address this in greater length in an upcoming blog article.
Next, they redefine the meaning of the word(s) they ignored. For example, feminists will redefine gender as a social construct so that they can abandon all of the traditional feminine roles attached.
Then, they declare autonomy, apart from the God who created them. The declaration of autonomy allows them to determine what they will be.
Finally, they require the world to accept their position as truth. Any opposition to their view will be shamed through name-calling (bigot, sexist, transphobe) or legal action.

What Is a Pastor?
In the next unlikely place, the Southern Baptist Convention demonstrated feminism’s slow creep through the church doors and into the pulpits of the largest evangelical convention in the world.
In May 2021, after ordaining three women as pastors, Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, came under fire as images from the ordination service appeared on social media. By June 2021, during the annual Southern Baptist Convention, calls to disfellowship Saddleback Church had reached the convention floor. The Credentials Committee, which reviews such requests, was set to respond during the 2022 convention in June.
In addition to three women pastors, Rick Warren has selected a husband and wife pastoral team as his successor at Saddleback Church. The growing concern is that Saddleback is not the only Southern Baptist Church engaged in this practice. Internal reports suggest that a number of churches have women with the title of pastor or co-pastor alongside their husbands in leadership. Furthermore, studies suggest that many Southern Baptists would welcome a woman pastor.
Read More
Related Posts: