Very interesting, thanks for posting it. I always enjoy reading Joseph Epstein, he is a really nice writer.
I think here he is misdiagnosing things a little.
File under: the 60s ruined everything. Along with the WASPs the iconoclasts of the 60s through out honor, self-sacrifice, etc. This was done at the direction of the organized, stalinist Left, and they have gained and continue to maintain a strong grip on the levers of power in this country.
Plenty of true WASPs were complicit in this revolution. And wanna-be WASPs, of whom I offer John “reporting for duty” Kerry as a perfect example.
How can we restore these values to our nation, I’m not sure.
I do remember my mother telling me years ago that FDR was “a traitor to his class”. My mother certainly wasn’t a member of that class, she was a first generation American. But she was a dyed in the wool Republican and I thank heaven she did not live to see our current president, because her head would have been exploding daily!
Miss you mom!
Agreed that it’s not Epstein’s best writing, and much of the good parts are wistfully nostalgic.
My personal family’s WASP heritage ended with my father’s suicide at age 37 in 1974. It’s tough to look back a few generations and not think that something went wrong.
Culturally and academically I blame the acceptance of Marx in the Western Canon for the WASP downfall, personified by the traitorous impulses of Alger Hiss and his cadre.
My favorite movie regarding the subject is Metropolitan.
It wasn’t children who destroyed us during the 1960s, it was the people running the country and media and institutions.
Democrats wrote a law to replace the American voter.
From unionizing government, to Vietnam, to the 1965 Immigration Act, JFK was the end of us.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”