Word: anglo
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...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...
...problem of definition. Wasps are not so easily characterized as other ethnic groups. The term itself can be merely descriptive or mildly offensive, depending on the user and the hearer; at any rate, it has become part of the American idiom. In one sense, it is redundant: since all Anglo-Saxons are white, the word could be Asp. Purists like to confine Wasps to descendants of the British Isles; less exacting analysts are willing to throw in Scandinavians, Netherlanders and Germans. At the narrowest, Wasps form a select band of well-heeled, well-descended members of the Eastern Establishment...
...program, where names like Jones and Brown have replaced the Giovannis and O'Shaughnessys. The banker who made Skull and Bones is no model for undergraduates, writes Sociologist Nathan Glazer in FORTUNE. "Indeed, often the snobberies run the other way-the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, generally from a small town or an older and duller suburb, is likely to envy the big-city and culturally sophisticated Jewish students...
...Wasp fantasies in films. In Jewish novels, the central character is often driven to live a Wasp-like life. Herzog finds his ultimate solace in a little bit of land he owns in the Berkshires: "symbol of his Jewish struggle for a solid footing in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America...
...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 and arthritis, silver-rimmed spectacles, punched-out bellies and that air of controlled schizophrenia which is the merit badge for having spent one's life on Main Street. Indeed, there was agreement...