E. Digby Baltzell - The Protestant Establishment Revisited

First published 1991 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 90-24034

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baltzell, E. Digby (Edward Digby), 1915
The Protestant establishment revisited: the collected papers of E. Digby Baltzell / edited by Howard G. Schneiderman.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7658-0664-2 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Social classesUnited States. 2. Upper classesUnited States 3. Elite (Social sciences)United States. 4. WASPs (People)United States. I. Schneiderman, Howard G. II. Title.

HN90.S6B353 1991
305.50973dc20

90-24034

CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0664-2 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-88738-419-6 (hbk)

E. Digby Baltzell Circa 1988

Alexis de Tocqueville

The American upper class, in the latter half of the twentieth century, has, like the French nobility of the eighteenth century, become less an aristocracy, and more and more a caste. As it was for Tocqueville, this decline in upper-class authority has been the focus of the works of E. Digby Baltzell. A member of the upper class himself, Baltzells criticism of the WASP upper classs decreasing contribution to national leadership has earned him the epithet WASP with a sting from the Wall Street Journal. In 1964 Baltzell published his best-known book, The Protestant Establishment, setting forth a much-cited but often misunderstood theory of the structure and function of the establishment. Twenty-six years have passed and it remains the only theory of its kind. Unlike cynical conceptions of the establishment, which view power and authority as evils, even if necessary ones, Baltzell sees an open and authoritative establishment as not only necessary, but also as a desirable part of the process of securing responsible leaders in a democratic society.

While this viewpoint may seem out of place in our increasingly egalitarian age, Baltzell is an honored figure in contemporary sociology whose work is much respected. Who is E. Digby Baltzell? What is his theory of the establishment? And why is it important? While some of these questions will be answered in this introduction, Baltzells essays, collected here, speak for themselves. They are illustrative of the scope of his thinking about class and authority, and of his career as a sociologist and social critic.

Baltzell came from an upper-class family, which would today best be characterized as WASP, a term that he himself made fashionable. Descended from an old stock English family, Baltzells father, Edward Digby Baltzell, Sr., was born on a family estate called Digby, in the northeast part of Philadelphia, and was named after his grandfather and his birthplace. Baltzells mother, Caroline Duhring, came from a family of German descent, which had come to Philadelphia in the 1840s. Her grandfather was a physician, and her father an Episcopal clergyman who was head of the City Mission. Baltzell himself was born in a house at 1915 Rittenhouse Street, right off Rittenhouse Square, one of Philadelphias most fashionable addresses, but grew up in Chestnut Hill, one of the citys richest, old-family neighborhoods.

Privilege, however, is no insulator against hardship, or marginality. Baltzell, the eldest of three sons, was born dead, and his infants heart started beating only after the doctor grabbed him by the feet and whirled him around in the air to revive him. Thus, although he was born to high status, his life, from the start, was not entirely easy. Although his family was an old one, they were somewhat down in the world-impecuniously genteel, as Baltzell has described it. He was raised by a determined and domineering mother who, among other oddities, was fascinated with all sorts of fortune-tellers, and a father who was an alcoholic. But they managed to send him to Chestnut Hill Academy, a private day school, and then to St. Pauls, an exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire. During Baltzells last year at St. Pauls, his father lost his job in an insurance company as a result of his drinking, and soon after died of a heart attack. After graduating from St. Pauls, Baltzell enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained a half-tuition scholarship and paid the rest with the proceeds of a summer job running a tennis club in Maine, and by working at all sorts of odd jobs supported by the New Deals National Youth Administration (NYA).

The connection between Baltzells childhood experiences and his eventual turn toward the academic life is worth noting. Although raised in the elite Chestnut Hill neighborhood, Baltzell himself has said that he and his young friends were as isolated, in their own way, from the rest of the city as were poor immigrants in their much less golden ghettos. The rest of society remained uncharted for him, and within his own relatively sheltered upper-class world, the combination of difficult parents and impecuniousness compared to his rich friends made Baltzell something of an outsider. His mothers belief in ouija boards and fortune-tellers became well known locally, and rumors spread among neighbor-hood children that she herself was a witch and that the Baltzell house was haunted. But it was his fathers alcoholism that, more than anything, made Baltzells early life difficult. He once said, I was always on the outside looking in. In college, although he belonged to a rather heavy-drinking fraternity, he himself never drank until several years after graduating; in fact his half scholarship stipulated that the recipient be a good Protestant boy who did not drink alcoholic beverages. Baltzell has often compared his own life to that of the novelist J.P. Marquand, whose family was much like his own, proud but poor-of, but not in, society. As a marginal upper-class insider, Baltzell, like Marquand, could see through a great many things his class took for granted. The guys who have it, he says, dont know whether they love it or not, do they?