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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; a rumor got out that the Atomic Energy Commission refused to locate a plant in the city because of private-club discrimination.
Non-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 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."
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.
A Certain Security
But the 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.
Wasps dominate the governing bodies of the richest universities in a ratio of four to one. More than four-fifths of the directors of the largest foundations are Wasps; of the 37 officers and directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, only one is non-Wasp. Under pressure of law and of the meritocratic "cult of performance," Wall Street law firms and brokerage houses are making room for more Jews and Catholics, but they are still overwhelmingly Wasp-controlled.