Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Federal Government has always been the domain of the Wasp. Until John Kennedy, every U.S. President was a Wasp, and so was every Vice President except Charles Curtis (1929-33), who was the son of an Indian. Last fall's candidates, Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, were quite predictably Wasps. Although the civil service has been a traditional path of advancement for non-Wasps (half of Post Office workers in the large cities are Negroes), the prestigious departments, such as State, are still run by Wasps. Congress is a Wasp stronghold: the newly elected one consists...
...Wasp's moral authority, it is clearly waning, but he still has an inimitable asset: the inner security inherited from his Protestant background and his expansive American experience. "If you are a Wasp, you have the confidence that the Establishment is yours and that you are on the top," says Novelist Herbert Gold. "There is the feeling that the love of a horsy woman comes to you as a birthright," Hollywood may be filled mainly with non-Wasps, but they still usually take Wasp names and act out Wasp fantasies in films. In Jewish novels, the central character...
...Wasp power is obscured by the divisions natural to a majority, which keep Wasps from coalescing into the kind of cohesive blocs that other groups have formed. The Republican Party is preeminently Wasp; yet it has been rent for generations by deep-seated disagreements. Norman Mailer characterized the alienated delegates lusting for liberal blood at the 1964 convention. In a typical Mailer caricature, he evoked a "Wasp Mafia where the grapes of wrath were stored. Not for nothing did the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have a five-year subscription to Reader's Digest and National Geographic, high colonies...
...well-bred Wasp who rebels against the snobbishness and starchiness of his background is an almost classic figure in American life. Prominent Wasp families have contributed to the ranks of the current youthful revolutionaries...
Ultimately, Waspism may be more a state of mind, a pattern of behavior, than a rigid ethnic type. Some non-Wasps display all the characteristics normally associated with the most purebred Wasps. Consciously or not, they are Waspirants. Many people were surprised to learn that Edmund Muskie, who talked and looked like a Down East Yankee, was actually of Polish descent. Edward Brooke, who was successfully promoted for the U.S. Senate by civic-spirited Wasps, has all the attributes of a well-bred Wasp, as does Whitney Young Jr. One doesn't have to be white, Anglo-Saxon...