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This section presents several notes about the book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America by E. Digby Baltzell.

This section presents the conclusion of the book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America by E. Digby Baltzell. This book has been an attempt to analyze the decline of authority in the U.S. in the course of the twentieth century. Its central theme has been that authority in any society is always in danger of degenerating into cynical and manipulative power struggles whenever persons of great ability are treated dishonorably by those who enjoy the highest honors. While this book have concentrated on the dishonorable treatment of Jews by members of the establishment, the same problems of caste exclusion and prejudice extend to the members of other minority groups as well. Moreover, the author have assumed throughout the book that one of the major functions of an upper class is that of creating and perpetuating a set of traditional standards which carry authority and to which the rest of society aspires. Furthermore, this book has not argued for the abolition of upper-class institutions in the interests of creating a more egalitarian and homogenized society. This has purposely not focused its main attention on the nature of the Jewish community or on the qualities and personal characteristics of Jews. Rather it has assumed that anti-Semitism and ethnic prejudice in general are due to the values and attitudes held by the members of the dominant group.

This section discusses the concept of club in the U.S. Lacking the communal solidarity which older structures have inherited from their feudal pasts, the U.S. society has always been faced with the consequences of individualism. Atomized individualism always tends to degenerate into anarchy and more or less extreme forms of centralization on the other. At the upper-class level in the U.S., the club lies at the core of the social organization of the accesses to power and authority. It is the anachronistic admission policies of the leading upper-class clubs in the U.S., which lie at the very basis of the decline of upper-class authority and the resulting confusion in communal and national leadership. Along with the business and suburban boom, the country-club movement went through its period of most rapid growth. By 1929, there were some 4,500 clubs in the nation. The boom in suburban clubs since the war has come about for several reasons. Of most importance is the fact that the policies of country-club admission committees are one of the main ways of perpetuating caste divisions in an age when both the suburban and elite leadership positions have been greatly democratized. Country-club membership then was largely a reflection of community opposition.

This section discusses the aristocracy on university and colleges in the U.S. The brains in the universities and the brains in business are used for different purposes and operate from different value premises. These differences are due to the ethnic composition of the membership in two communities as well as their differing convictions regarding racial and ethnic equality. The faculty communities in the U.S. are much less likely to represent ethnic ivory towers in than is the case in most executive suites. The aristocratic assimilation of talented individuals from all segments of society into the faculty elites of the nation is one of the most important contemporary witnesses to the power of ideal equality of opportunity. Perhaps of even more importance than the changing composition of the faculty elite since the war is the fact that the American student community is changing in the same direction. The university community in the U.S. has since the Second War become one of the most important elite-setting and elite-producing institutions in the whole free world. Moreover, corporations are now depending on universities for the selection and training of their future managers.

This section discusses the issue of caste and corporation in the U.S. The caste line continuous to be drawn as far as elite Jews are concerned. This is the case in the third generation and are unusually talented and successful in many important and strategic occupations and professions. An often overlooked phenomenon has further emphasized the dysfunctional aspects of elite anti-Semitism. Jews then, make up an important and influential and indispensable part of the contemporary American leadership community. This section will attempt to show how vital U.S. institutions, the corporation and the club, systematically exclude Jews from top leadership positions in the former and from membership in the latter and how these policies of caste work against the translation of conservative communal authority into Republican political power. This will also try to show how the aristocratic assimilation of Jews into the contemporary educational community contributed to the continuing political power of the Democratic Party and is slowly changing traditional anti-Semitic attitudes among members of the younger generation regardless of whether they be Democrats or Republicans.

This section discusses the quest for a new aristocratic establishment during the 1960s in the U.S. The new generation of Democrats differed in almost every way from the generation of former U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt. The Democrats then were different men, bred in a different world. Coming to maturity in an urban manipulative struggles for power, they were far removed from rural and republican where aristocrats were called to serve the nation in time of need. While elites are composed of talented individuals, an establishment is always rooted in the family. The Kennedys may very well take their place in the tradition of the great political families of older stocks. The family founder was the late U.S. president John F. Kennedy. The Kennedys are also important because of the fact that their extended family includes representatives of a wide variety of contemporary elites in the country. There is probably a close correlation between the structure of an establishment at any given time and the tempos of leisure-time social activities. Thus, a caste society will produce a formal and low-pressure society. In assimilating aristocracy, the temperature of social life is bound to rise and even to get out of hand.

This section discusses the postwar status revolution. According to author Walter Bagehot, his point was that economic and social reforms are usually accomplished more through generational change than simply through political enactments. Similarly, it is also true that the economic reforms of one generation tend to produce status conflicts in the next. Thus, the class revolutions of the Depression years have been translated into the status revolutions of the age of affluence. The class conflicts of the thirties produced a radical Left while the case conflicts of the forties and fifties have produced a radical Right. Moreover, there are many indications of this change in generational interest. There were also examples of emphasis on civil rights. Furthermore, the U.S. democracy has always been too prone to accept the conspiracy theory of history. The use of the term Hundred Per Cent Americanism implies a suspicion of conspiracy among U.S. citizens. The rise of McCarthyism was a test case for the theory of the establishment. The manipulative society which made McCarthyism possible was a tragic symptom of the schizophrenia which first split the establishment during the New Deal years and which widened during the age of conspiracy after war.

This section discusses the abandonment of the caste establishment by intellectuals in the U.S. The radicalism of the early thirties and the intellectual's break with the values of the old-stock establishment came in the final days before the execution of two immigrant anarchists for murder. The central issue of legal justice was lost sight of in the course of the world-wide and partisan ideological argument which the case aroused. It is not a question of whether justice was done. What is relevant is the fact that the case became a matter of social justice centering around the issue of ethnicity and caste. The case provided a social cause upon which the intellectuals could project the resentment against the whole business establishment. At any rate, the alienation of the liberal intellectual community from the values of the old-stock Republican establishment was reinforced by the collapse of the business system afterward. The leaders of organized religion were alienated from the business establishment and calling for change. In literature also there was a radical criticism of the social environment from the point of view of environmental naturalism. Environmental naturalism served the interests of the downtrodden and the cause of recent immigrants who were struggling to assimilate into the main stream of national life and culture.

This article discusses the caste establishment and the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the U.S. The faith of U.S. citizens in the business establishment collapsed almost completely after 1929. The individualistic undercurrents of the intellectual, sexual and religious revolt which paralleled the country-club conformity erupted in a collective wave of political and economic reforms in the course of the new decade. These reforms produced a major change in the structure of the U.S. political establishment. Meanwhile, Roosevelt, had the typical patrician's lack of respect for the money-power. He spent his adult life in the political arena. Indeed, he was ideally suited to bridge the gap between the values of a rising urban frontier and those of a receding rural Protestantism. Moreover, the transition of the society was indeed a social revolution of major proportions. In a conservative and stable democracy, the establishment must reflect the composition and aspirations of the whole people. Thus the significance of the Roosevelt revolution, was that it produced a kind of schizophrenia within the ranks of the establishment. In the course of transforming Democrats from a minority into a majority party, Roosevelt went outside the traditional party organization to form a broad coalition of independent leaders.

This section focuses on events during the Anglo-Saxon decade. In the climate of postwar opinion, it was no wonder that U.S. citizens were ready for legislation against further immigration. The nativism which finally lead to the restriction of immigration was permeated with anti-Semitism. Indeed many have felt that anti-Semitism was one of the major causes of the change in immigration policy. Anti-Semitism was also a part of the Big Red Scare which marred the immediate postwar years. Moreover, the rigid exclusion of Jews from the establishment was due to the changing nature of both the Jewish and gentile communities. It was during the twenties that the managerial society first began to dominated the establishment. Furthermore, the college degree became the main criterion for elite status in the managerial society. While the suburban trend in the U.S. began to take shape back at the turn of the century, the pace was considerably stepped up during the 1920s. The more successful members of the Jewish community who still preferred an urban way of life were seeking addresses. On the other hand, anti-Semitism was by no means the only manifestation of the caste corruption which was intensifies in the country during the twenties. But the last Anglo-Saxon decade, deriding differences and denouncing dissent was also an age of passionate individual revolt among intellectuals.

This article discusses the era of the new freedom in the U.S. In the U.S., political leaders have been more likely to follow in the British traditions of aristocracy that in the continental traditions of caste. Reform has won out over the forces of revolt. Thus, patrician reformers who led the Progressive movement eventually took the way out of the Populist revolt. And in the twentieth century, there has been a continuous thread of aristocratic assimilation and reform. By the nature of position as representatives, presidential reformers have usually acted as restraining influences on the zeal of their liberal supporters. In training and moral conviction, former U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were conservative forces within the reforming revolutions they were called to lead. Wilson was a liberal and only moved toward the New Liberalism as he was forced to face the problem of power and the need for reform. He had to face the minorities issue. The problem of immigration was also a vital issue. For some time, the restrictionists had favored literacy tests for immigrants. The contrasts between the ideologies of caste and aristocracy are nowhere better portrayed than in the career of Louis D. Brandeis and especially in the fight over his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916.

This chapter defines Social Gospel, reform and the New Social Science as intellectual counterattack on caste. The seeds of the destruction of many class ideologies have usually been sown by secure members of the establishment. A sense of guilt or injustice at the top has always had a profound influence on social change. Thus it was within the Protestant establishment itself and at the height of the Victorian and Spencerian syntheses that a loss of confidence and quest for change first became manifest. Environmentalism first began to invade intellectual community in the U.S. through the Social Gospel and Settlement House movements. The theories of social causation and social control which were necessary for maintaining the hope and courage of several generations of social workers were inspired by the Social Gospel movement. The rise of the New Social Science paralleled the development of the Social Gospel, Settlement House and political reforms movements during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It may be no accident that many of the original anthropologists were trained as lawyers. Moreover, historians have played the role of intellectual midwives in translating the ideas of social science into a language that the educated layman can understand.

This section discusses the aristocratic counterattack on caste. This chapter will be concerned with the values of aristocrats who saw the danger in becoming two nations and who somehow never lose faith in the American promise. Charles W. Eliot, a patrician by birth, always played down his ancestry. He was the ideal example of the assimilating aristocrat who never lost faith in the American dream. Eliot and the Roosevelt's defended and advanced the ideology of aristocracy as against the steadily retreating ideology of caste superiority. President Eliot had no faith in the populist passion for equality nor the patrician ideal of homogeneity. His idols were liberty and diversity. In other words, Eliot was a realistic Brahmin. Meanwhile, former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt grew up in the world of Protestant patricians and spent his life trying to justify his inherited advantages. Roosevelt was aware of the position of the Jews in the U.S. social structure. He was forever talking about Americanism but his idea of it was very different from the brand preached by the members of hereditary society. And his visions of the power of the American dream of all inclusiveness will always be remembered by hyphenated-Americans.

This section discusses the social defense of caste. Wealth became increasingly centralized in the hands of a few. The inequality of wealth was accompanied by an increasing centralization of business power as the nation changed from a rural-communal to an urban-corporate society. In so many ways, nativism was part of a generalized anti-urban and capitalist mood. Moreover, anti-Semitism in the U.S. is often allied with an antipathy toward the city and the money-power. Nativism was also a part of a status revolution at the elite level of leadership on the Eastern Seaboard. The idea of caste dies hard, even in a democratic land. The old-stock patriots flocked to the standards of newly founded societies. The whole movement was intimately bound up with anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments. Furthermore, U.S. citizens have always longed for grass roots. In a society of cement, the resort movement in the U.S. paralleled the genealogical escape to the past. The physiological and physical ugliness of the city streets gradually drove those who could afford it back to nature and the wide-open spaces. Although the high tide of formal resort society has declined in recent years, the exclusion of Jews has largely continued.

This section discusses the ideological defense of caste. One of the vital aspects of the American dream has always been the sense of having a moral mission in the world. This sense of mission reached its height in the abolitionist movement. Meanwhile, a brief outline of the development of ant-Semitism in the thinking of Henry Adams will serve to illustrate a point. For Adams only gradually lost his original faith in environment and the capacities of men for self-improvement and replaced these ideas with the belief in heredity and race. He replace the aristocratic idea with the idea of caste. Adams sought mental refuge in medievalism and the virgin primarily because of his increasing distrust of modern society. Inevitably, privilege without power breeds resentment and the need for a sense of caste superiority. The anti-Semitism of Adams was tied up with his feeling of personal failure and alienation from the tone of his times especially in the U.S. The family of Adams had always taken a leading part in the destiny of the U.S. and the anti-Semitism of Adams was a indeed a kind of self-hate. In fact, the more one sees it as a symbol par excellence of the powerless brahmin who is finally forces to embrace the idea of caste after losing faith in aristocracy. And caste has one final defense.

This section discusses the progress of immigrants and the theory of establishment. The WASP upper class remained more or less in control of the American elite throughout the first three decades of the century. However, new ethnic families were establishing themselves on the ladder of economic, political and social mobility. They protected themselves from the strange and hostile ways of the native Americans by settling along the Irish Riviera in South Boston, Massachusetts. Economically, they were unskilled laborers, domestic servants and small entrepreneurs serving other members of the community. As traditional ways to wealth and respectability in business were more or less monopolized by Protestant Americans, many of the more talented members of minority groups found careers in urban politics and hierarchy of the church. The position of newer immigrants as a whole was gradually improving. Moreover, within each of the three religious communities, there are several class levels. Mobility within these class systems is one of the major instruments of assimilation. There are also highly complex class systems within every Catholic community in the U.S. marked by Polish, Italian and Irish parishes and associations.

This section discusses the issue of caste in the U.S. It was the despotic and caste-creating policies of Czarist Russia which eventually led to the hypocritical aspects of the racialism and nativism that have plagued American leadership in the twentieth century. For the careers of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia symbolized an age which divided its most talented leaders into first and second-class aristocrats. Roosevelt and La Guardia had parallel careers which were strikingly different because of their ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, the aristocratic process had degenerated into a standard in the generation of La Guardia. The social situation at the levels of American leadership was calculated to manufacture a large number of marginal men of great ability and affluence. And since the end of the Second World War, Anglo-Saxon stock have risen to positions of power and influence and the number of second-class aristocrats has increased. While idiosyncratic anti-Semitism had been characteristic of the code of gentlemen, it was only in the 1880's that upper-class anti-Semitism became rigid and institutionalized.

This section discusses the association of creation of aristocrats in the U.S. with the Lincoln family. The idea of equality lies at the heart of the American dream and has since become the basis of the secular religions. While socialist faiths have centered on the vision of equality of conditions in a classless society, the traditions have stressed equality of opportunity in a hierarchial and open class society. Traditions of mobility and equal opportunity are infinitely superior to the leveling ideals of socialism. And the ideal of equality of opportunity has its most inspiring example in the life of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was a conservative in politics. After the success of his speech delivered at Cooper Union, he eventually secured the Republican nomination and went on to lead the nation. His emancipation proclamation as well as the legend of his rise from a degenerate percentage of poverty to the presidency, have combined him the authentic symbol of the democratic ideal of equality and opportunity. Meanwhile, the liberal idealism of the declaration has always been balanced by the authoritative realism of the constitution. Thus, it is the central theme of this book that no notion can endure without the liberal democratic and authoritative aristocratic processes.

This article introduces the book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America by E. Digby Baltzell. The book will be primarily concerned with the problem of exclusion and prejudice within the white community. The author has also focused on the problem of anti-Semitism largely because the present position of the Jews in the U.S. illustrates the nature of the conflict between social forces of caste and aristocracy which is the central theme of the book. The book also contributes something toward an understanding of the causes and consequences of the situation. Moreover, the method consists of an historical analysis of the conflicting attitudes and values of the members of the upper class in the country in the years between the generations of former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It is the central thesis of the book that in order to maintain a continuity of power and authority, its membership must be representative of the composition of society as a whole. This manuscript presents that an authoritative leadership structure will evolve in the country only when and if a new and representative upper class and establishment are created. The conclusion of the book presents an analysis of upper-class institutions with the year 1940 when rather secure establishment of Anglo-Saxon-Protestant gentlemen still ran the city.