These days, a nonfiction book’s subject tends to be broken into pieces to cater to the short attention spans of the screen-addled. In biographies, this can manifest as an alternation between individuals. The format has been prevalent for some time, at least since Deborah Scroggins’s “Wanted Women” (2012) toggled between the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and that of a Pakistani terrorist. The latest H.W. Brands biography toggles between John Brown and Abraham Lincoln.
What happens when a prosopographist uses this method? That interesting word crops up in “WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.” Originally a term applied to scholars of the Roman Empire’s ruling class, it denotes researching a group of people with common characteristics. Michael Knox Beran’s prosopography can be overwhelming. It moves among veins of interconnected White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – what used to be thought of as our ruling class – at a pace that feels like narrative fracking. The shards that fly at the reader sometimes enlighten; sometimes they even thrill. Frequent breaks will be needed to cope with this dizzying array of oligarchs, Brahmins, and Anglo-Dutch patroons.
This is a book in which chapter divisions barely divide. If a chapter happens to be entitled “Teddy,” it doesn’t mean that all or even most of the book’s material on the Anglo-Dutchman Theodore Roosevelt will be found there. As Beran roves from Dean Acheson to Endicott Peabody to Edie Sedgwick to Henry Adams to Jane Addams to Louis Auchincloss to Learned Hand (I've randomly selected from the crowd) and back again, he also glides among different approaches to the writing of prosopography. At times the book is McCulloughesque – a mainstream and dignified tour of eminent Americans – but then it turns lurid a la the true crime genre. Then it dives deeply into the intellectual and religious sources on which U.S. institution-builders drew.
Is it indecision? Could it, more creditably, be a bid for comprehensiveness? Comprehensiveness would be a worthy aim. But surely there is something questionable about trying to cover the lives of the East Coast elite from “bloody effluvia” (has to do with Averill Harriman’s second wife) to Bretton Woods.
In these pages bursting with 19th and 20th century WASPs, one does pick up an overarching idea. The men and women with colonial pedigrees acted like the in-group, the masters of us all, but this clubby, privileged, and accomplished set was full of rogues and misfits. Nathaniel Hawthorne “exposed the morbidities of a dying Puritanism” nearly two centuries ago, writes Beran, and he tries to collect as many morbidities as will fit in 530 pages. They offer quite a collection of “Mayflower screwballs,” a phrase he nabbed from a Robert Lowell poem. We meet the John Jay descendant who set fire to his own hand, plus assorted out-of-control poets (such as Lowell), drunks, depressives, embezzlers, payers of bribes, “unscrupulous sharpers,” pill-poppers, sex addicts, neurotics, and hypocrites (repeatedly the wife of the socialite and pundit Joseph Alsop is referred to as Alsop’s “beard”).
This scandalous brew is infused with Beran’s love of great literature, art, and architecture. When gossip-mongering cynic turns Great Books idealist, the effect can be incongruous. A Dead Poets Society emotionalism sometimes wells up: the author would, with De Quincey, “vindicate the power of the soul ‘to dream magnificently,’ to ‘reveal something of the grandeur which belongs potentially to all human dreams.’” Beran specifies the caliber of firearm socialites used to shoot their spouses with the same zest that he recounts what the Episcopalians and Anglo-Catholics really thought of the Unitarians (conceited modernists was the consensus). He has apparently read everything ever written about “the WASP ascendancy” and everything about every other subject, too. The text is replete with footnotes, a postscript, and end notes in tiny print that are often hundreds of words long; he cites scores upon scores of biographies along with works of theology, ecclesiology, sociology, literary criticism, cultural criticism (in English and in foreign languages), art and architectural criticism, geopolitics, classic novels, ancient and modern poetry, and histories of the Greeks and Romans.
To get an idea of the sheer busyness, consider the discussion of Ernest Hemingway and his novel “The Sun Also Rises.” Beran has a real sense of what WASPs like Hemingway, Henry James, Isabella Gardner, and T.S. Eliot were seeking from their sojourns in the Old World. The riff on the festival of San Fermín in Hemingway’s 1926 bullfighting novel would have been great if it were not studded with references to Ruskin’s “The Stones of Venice,” Burkhardt’s “Griechische Kulturgeschichte,” and a Dutch historian’s observations on the degeneration of festivals in modern times. From there the author expatiates on WASP literary titans Hemingway and Henry Adams, also mentioning Proust in Venice, Baudelaire, Picasso, “the appearance of the printing press,” and Balzac’s “Illusions perdues.” Then a leap to “five or six centuries earlier” and the Florence of Dante, a favorite poet of the WASPs’ and also of Beran’s. The next page begins a new chapter, which leads off with Eleanor Roosevelt’s discovery that her husband Franklin was having an affair with Lucy Mercer.
Floating through the book is a notion of WASP influence rising, falling, and rising again over time. The ups and downs are meant to give the story historical sweep. These folks are a “feeble” and “burnt out” breed, then “newly emergent,” sometimes on the same page. These purported peaks and valleys, fleeting as they are, never overtake the conventional view (which Beran also endorses at many points) that it’s been pretty much downhill for the WASPs since Lexington and Concord.
Henry Adams – a poster child for the downward WASP trajectory – is mentioned throughout. Being the great-grandson of John and grandson of John Quincy, Henry is a misfit you wouldn’t think would feel like one. His perverse stance of not feeling rooted in a nation where his roots went deep sets the pattern for a large contingent of people under consideration. Adams “adopted the pose of a neurasthenic weakling oppressed by his New England heritage,” writes Beran. “Neurasthenia, [Adams] maintained, was the natural response of gifted natures to an environment unsympathetic to their gifts.” While duly noting Adams’s snobbery and resentments, Beran puts much stock in Adams’s attitude and searches for it in others. Paraphrasing Edmund Wilson, he writes: “When even fortunately situated souls have difficulty in doing justice to their gifts, something is rotten in the res publica.” Of Whittaker Chambers, he writes: “As much as Henry Adams and George Kennan, [Chambers] was convinced that America’s contemporary culture stood in the way of . . . human fulfillment.” Whether voiced by Wilson, Chambers, Richard Henry Dana III, George Cabot Lodge, William James, Henry James, or others in Beran’s hectic network of personae, complaints of feeling stymied in a burgeoning industrial democracy “founded on too narrow a conception of human flourishing” are widespread.
The haven for sensitive souls in a land of philistines is school. Or more specifically, a school set up to nurture those souls on the wisdom to be found in the Great Books. Or more specifically, Groton. Among the elite educational institutions that figure in “WASPS,” this Massachusetts middle and high school – the alma mater of Franklin Roosevelt, a place beloved by Teddy and Edith Roosevelt (whose son was enrolled there), the contributor of 440 men to the Allied fighting forces in World War I, “this diminutive Sparta” in Beran’s words – dominates. Beran attended Groton, a circumstance that, at the mention of the school in the main text, prompts highly personal and autobiographical end notes that constitute the most self-indulgent aspect of this self-indulgent book.
Endicott Peabody, one of Groton’s founders, is also one of the author’s admired WASPs. Bad optics there; still, “Cotty” Peabody does deserve to be admired. The Rector, as he came to be known, fought off the Adamsian neurosis and doubt by throwing himself into the cause of broadly educating youth. “Humane education at its lowest ebb had little purpose other than to preserve distinctions of class,” writes Beran. By Peabody’s design, Groton at its highest ebb made room for boys (and later girls) of merit regardless of their parents’ level of income.
Institutions such as Groton pride themselves on shaping future leaders. Answering the call to public service is presented here, understandably enough, as a noble alternative to working on Wall Street. Henry Stimson left a “white shoe” law firm to serve U.S. presidents, a choice portrayed as spiritual and psychological balm: he “needed the inspiration of a higher purpose to make his life at all bearable.” Lawyering on behalf of banks and holding companies was giving him “insomnia, poor digestion, bad nerves, the whole ships catalogue of neurotic fatigue.” The self-help aspect adds an interesting wrinkle, for it complicates our facile idea that a businessperson feathers his or her own nest whereas the public servant’s efforts are directed toward the welfare of others. Stimson solves a personal problem by choosing the public over the private sector.
In Beran’s reckoning, many patricians pursued careers in the pulpit, the lecture hall, or the higher reaches of government to escape “the bruised and aching inner life so many WASPs dreaded.” Even famously strong-minded WASPs such as Teddy Roosevelt, whose “neuroticism forced him to make a man of himself,” fit this pattern. The author’s admired WASPs are virtuosos of sublimation, fighting off decadence, ennui, and self-doubt through projects of cultural renewal or political reform of the philistine America their ancestors made. Whether he thinks these projects succeeded is a separate question. When it comes up, he tends to put on his cynic’s hat and recur to the thoughts of Henry Adams, or of his other declinist role model, T.S. Eliot. His attitude toward free-market capitalism isn’t completely cynical, mind you. For every rapacious mogul whose “sole ambition was to make money,” there is a J.P. Morgan. The banker is lauded for his “sense of civic obligation” and his sincere Episcopalianism (if not for his artistic taste, which was apparently pretty bad).
The author identifies different socioeconomic levels within the WASPs. Henry Adams was at “the higher verges of WASPdom,” Edmund Wilson in “the respectable middle,” and the family of Whittaker Chambers, who in 1948 identified Alger Hiss as a spy for the Soviet Union, “belonged to its ragged lower fringe.” We gain by considering Chambers’s brooding alienation in this light.
Hiss is always pegged as the suave and well-bred State Department man in contrast with Chambers, the unprepossessing lumpen prole with bad teeth. Both, in fact, were born to dysfunctional families that had fallen from respectability. Chambers was taught “grace of conduct” by his cultured mother. After he left the communist underground, the newly conservative Carroll County farmer rooted his family in the soil, but it emphatically was not, Beran points out, a blood-and-soil conservatism to which he turned. “Pipe Creek Farm owed nothing to Maurice Barrès or Charles Maurras,” he says. Why had Chambers ever been attracted to the Marxist-Leninist ideas that animated Hiss and the rest of his former underground comrades? “It was the attempt of a neurasthenic WASP . . . to bridge the gap between his own cultivation and the different backgrounds of most of his fellow citizens.” Surely this must be so; I had never thought of it.
Not just the treatment of Chambers but some of the more out-of-the-way tidbits are treasures. The book’s virtues extend to its staunch defense of the liberal arts as a search for truth and its unflinching criticism of the in-group’s maltreatment of out-groups (blacks, Jews, Catholics). The narrative, digressive though it is, unfolds in impeccably written prose. Still, the author was indulged to an alarming degree by his editors. (Judging from online information about Pegasus Books, the operators of this Manhattan press are preppies who could have stepped out of a Whit Stillman movie, which is fitting.) Panning for gold in this volume paid off, but the process should not have been so difficult.
Lauren Weiner is a writer in Baltimore.
