Word: wasp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...intuition, not spiteful or malicious, but pervasive: in the minds of most Americans the incoming Nixon Administration seems to represent the comeback of the Wasp: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. True enough, the new President's Cabinet, with three Roman Catholics, is statistically no more Waspish than most in recent decades, even though it stirred comment for including no Negro or Jew. But people sense about Nixon's appointments, and his style, a tone of reassuring Wasp respectability and good manners. The forces that elected Nixon-those who most avidlv supported him-are Wasp to the core...
Sometimes Wasps are treated like a species under examination before it becomes extinct. At the convocation of intellectuals in Princeton last month, Edward Shils, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, announced: "The Wasp has abdicated, and his place has been taken by ants and fleas. The Wasp is less rough and far more permissive. He lacks self-confidence and feels lost." Other observers feel that the growing dissension in American life is a clear sign that the Wasp has lost his sting, that his culture no longer binds. The new radicals and protesters are not in rebellion...
Although it is possible to exaggerate the decline of the Wasp, who has never really left the center of U.S. power, he is indisputably in an historical retreat. The big change came with the waves of migration from Europe in the 19th century, when many of his citadels-the big cities-were wrested from his political control. In a quiet fallback, the Wasps founded gilded ghettos-schools and suburbs, country clubs and summer colonies...
...York Giants' own cast of characters is as varied as Author Asinof's fans; the list reads like a city ward-heeler's notion of the perfect political ticket. The coach is a Brooklyn Jew. The quarterback is a WASP-a Pentecostal minister's son from the Deep South. And the star pass receiver is a Negro. But whatever their differences, the Giants have one thing in common: an unpredictable flair for the dramatic...
Return of the WASP. Though no writer has spoken more disparagingly of the small-hearted WASPs of small-town America, Mailer begins to seem almost sympathetic toward them. "They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous, ruminating government gut of every cow-like Democratic Administration. Perhaps the WASP had to come to power in order that he grow up, in order that he take the old primitive root of his life-giving philosophy-which required every man to go through battles, if the world would live, and every woman to bear...