Flight of the WASP : The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class

Fifteen families. Four hundred years. The complex saga of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite inAmerica’s history.

For decades, writers from Cleveland Amory to JosephAlsop to the editors of Politico have proclaimed thediminishment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who for generations were thedominant socio-cultural-political force in America.

While the WASP elite has,in the last half century, indeed drifted from American centrality to theperiphery, its relevance and impact remain, as Michael Gross reveals in hiscompelling chronicle. From Colonial America’s founding settlements throughthe Gilded Age to the present day, Gross traces the complex legacy of American WASPs—theirprofound accomplishments and egregious failures—through the lives of fifteeninfluential individuals and their very privileged, sometimes intermarriedfamilies.

As the Bradford, Randolph, Morris, Biddle, Sanford, Peabody andWhitney clans progress, prosper and periodically stumble, defining aspects inthe four-century sweep of American history emerge: our wide, oft-contentiousreligious diversity; the deep scars of slavery, genocide, and intolerance; thecreation and sometime mis-use of astonishing economic and political power; anenduring belief in the future; an instinct to offset inequity withphilanthropy; an equal capacity for irresponsible, sometimes wanton, behavior. “American society was supposed to be different,”writes Gross, “but for most of our history we have had a patriciate, anaristocracy, a hereditary oligarchic upper class, who initiated the Americannational experiment.” In previous acclaimed books such as 740 Park and Rogues’Gallery, Gross has explored elite culture in microcosm; expanding thecanvas, Flight of the WASP chronicles it across four centuriesand fifteen generations in an ambitious and consequential contribution toAmerican history.