Word: wasps
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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...
Lately, the non-Wasps have pursued them even there. A few years ago, Grosse Pointe, a Wasp suburb of Detroit, was notorious for rating prospective homeowners by a point system based on personal characteristics; Jews, Italians and "swarthy" persons almost invariably got so few points that they could not buy houses. Now all that has been abandoned, and Grosse Pointe has many Roman Catholic and Jewish residents. Downtown private clubs remain bastions of Wasp exclusiveness, but doors are opening. One recent example: Jews gained admission to the Kansas City Club in Kansas City, Mo., after an uproar over exclusionary policies...
...Wasp groups are far better represented in Ivy League schools than they used to be: Jews, for instance, constitute about 25% of the student bodies. So traditional an Episcopal prep school as Groton now includes some 25 Roman Catholics, a dozen Negroes and three Jews. Jews stand out sharply in the nation's intellectual life, and Jewish novelists are beginning to overtake the fertile Wasp talent. Scarcely a single Wasp is a culture hero to today's youth; more likely he is the bad guy on the TV program, where names like Jones and Brown have replaced...
...Proper Wasps still rule in tight little enclaves of high society that are rarely cracked by newcomers. Yet anyone with a will-and money-can find a way to outflank Wasp society, which is often haunted by a sense of anachronism. Such is the hostility to the Veiled Prophet parade, an annual Wasp event in St. Louis, that the queen and her maids of honor last year had to be covered with a plastic sheet to protect them from missiles tossed from the crowd...
...Wasp retreat has by no means gone so far as to destroy his basic power-particularly strong in business and finance, considerable in politics, battered but tenacious in the social and moral field. Irishmen, Italians and Jews may have established themselves in construction, retailing, entertainment, electronics and light manufacturing, but big business and big banks belong to the Wasp. Almost 90% of the directors of the 50 largest corporations are Wasps. Similarly, about 80% of the directors of the ten largest banks are Wasps...