{"id":141932,"date":"2021-09-06T16:48:44","date_gmt":"2021-09-07T00:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932"},"modified":"2021-09-07T16:57:12","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T00:57:12","slug":"wasps-the-splendors-and-miseries-of-an-american-aristocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932","title":{"rendered":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7VuC9PDG4rE\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/WASPS-Splendors-Miseries-American-Aristocracy\/dp\/1643137069\/\">Here are some highlights from this 2021 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>* You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. <\/p>\n<p>* WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of his horror when, in June 1853, he heard the \u201cdismal tidings\u201d that young Susan Sturgis Bigelow had swallowed arsenic: three of Susan\u2019s sister Ellen\u2019s children (one of whom was to marry Henry Adams) would also go on to kill themselves. The Gardners too: Joseph Peabody Gardner, in whom was concentrated the blood of a dozen old Massachusetts families, blew his brains out in 1875. His son, Joseph Peabody Gardner Jr., died by suicide eleven years later. Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s son Kermit, his grandson Dirck, and his granddaughter Paulina all killed themselves; Eleanor Roosevelt\u2019s father, Elliott (Theodore\u2019s brother), and her brother Hall both drank themselves to death. Medill McCormick, of Groton, Yale, and the Chicago Tribune, sought relief, by turns, in newspaper work, drink, Jungian psychotherapy, and the Senate before he swallowed swallowed a fatal dose of pills in a Washington hotel room in 1925; John Gilbert Winant, whose career took him from St. Paul\u2019s School and Princeton to the governor\u2019s mansion in New Hampshire and the embassy in London, shot himself in the head in 1947. Edie Sedgwick was preceded to the grave by her two older brothers, Francis, who killed himself at Silver Hill in New Canaan in 1964, and Robert, who crashed his motorcycle into a New York City bus in 1965. As for the two boys of William Woodward (shot dead by Ann), James leapt to his death from the ninth floor of the Mayfair House Hotel on Park Avenue in 1978; William jumped from his fourteenth-floor apartment on East Seventy-second Street in 1999.<br \/>\n The suicides were only the most overt sign of trouble in the culture or the blood; WASPs have long been haunted by the despairs, lunacies, and hysterias in their domestic histories. The Sedgwicks called it \u201cthe family disease,\u201d a malady that oppressed their house ever since Theodore Sedgwick made his fortune in western Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century, more than a century and half before his descendant Edie stripped off her clothes for Andy Warhol. Emily Dickinson spoke of \u201cthe Hour of Lead,\u201d of a funeral \u201cin my Brain,\u201d Henry Adams complained of ennui, John Jay Chapman lamented his \u201cqueerness,\u201d which as a boy led him to make \u201cmysterious gestures before imaginary shrines\u201d and as an adult got him the nickname \u201cmad Jack.\u201d Louisa May Alcott, a golden child of Emerson\u2019s Concord who would go on to write Little Women , contemplated suicide, and \u201cthought seriously\u201d of jumping into the water of the Mill Dam in Boston.<\/p>\n<p>Were WASPs more troubled than other people? Probably not. But they were more articulate. Their miseries got into the record, and did something to shape the destinies of the United States. Reticent though they were in person, they were voluble on paper. At some level they want us to pay attention.<\/p>\n<p>WASP FAMILIES LIKE THE STURGISES, the Sedgwicks, the Gardners, and the Roosevelts were all, even at their lowest ebbs, doing quite well out of life. What went wrong? The New England heritage had something to do with it. (Even those WASPs who, like the Roosevelts, identified themselves with other regions were connected by a hundred ties to the land of the Puritans.) The New England soil was rich in neurotic possibility; the early New Englanders had not only, in Henry Adams\u2019s words, to \u201cwrestle with nature for a bare existence,\u201d they had to do it under the burdens of their perfectionist enterprise. The Puritan effort to build a new Jerusalem in the American wilderness was not a formula for sanity; it was abandoned precisely because it did induce lunacy, not least in (the somewhat optimistically named) Salem itself, the center of witch hysteria. Puritanism was supplanted, in the eighteenth century, by a less demanding (and less fulfilling) Yankeeism, with its easier idolatry of moneymaking. But by then it was too late: the older vision had inflicted enduring wounds.<br \/>\n The Puritan guilts and manias (it is not easy to live in a city on a hill) lingered in New England long after the demise of Puritanism. You sensed them in the dying villages, with their mouldering houses and sapless apple trees, bereft of youth and vitality, for the enterprising children have escaped to seek their fortune in the cities or the West. In the old greens and on the moribund farms, the memory of primeval Puritanism survived, \u201c<br \/>\nshrouded in a blackness ten times black,\u201d in tales of wizards and witch-meetings, malignant groves, a shadowed Satanism, the sort of morbidity Nathaniel Hawthorne and (more recently) Stephen King retail in their books. WASPs in the late nineteenth century were drawn to the haunted countryside, and not only on account of its quaintness or its closeness to nature: they found, in the cranks and recluses, the eccentric spinsters and cracked seers, a reflection of their own uneasy souls.<\/p>\n<p>* THE CHILDREN OF THE BRAHMINS blamed their weaknesses, their fatigues, their failures\u2014the scruples that prevented them from getting on in the world\u2014on neurasthenia. They actually believed it to be a medical condition. In his 1881 book American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, the WASP physician Dr. George Miller Beard described neurasthenia as a disease caused by \u201clack of nerve-force\u201d and productive of such symptoms as, but not limited to, insomnia, bad dreams, mental irritability, nervous dyspepsia, fear of society, fear of responsibility, lack of decision in trifling matters, profound exhaustion, and excessive yawning.<\/p>\n<p>* What distinguished the WASP neurasthenic was his (or her) consciousness of unused powers in the soul that he (or she) sought to discharge in civic and creative activity. You see it most clearly in Henry Adams, who adopted the pose of a neurasthenic weakling oppressed by his New England heritage, looking on life rather than living it, and doomed to fail in an America that had little use for the patrician\u2019s theory of virtue. The pose was ironic\u2014the man who wrote The Education of Henry Adams was not in any ordinary sense a failure: but it enabled Adams to explain why the best and brightest of his generation so often fell into neurotic despair. Neurasthenia, he maintained, was the natural response of gifted natures to an environment unsympathetic to their gifts. It was the inevitable reaction of those who, resisting the fragmentary part-lives on offer in the Gilded Age marketplace, sought to do justice to the whole of their nature in a land where the two great perfectionist experiments (New England Puritanism and Yankee commercial democracy) were culturally inadequate precisely because they were founded on too narrow a conception of human flourishing.<br \/>\n Neurasthenia was hell. But Adams learned from Dante that hell was good, a thing, indeed, instituted by divine love, \u2019l primo amore . For in deserving cases the path through la citt\u00e0 dolente , the suffering underworld city, led, if not to sanity and salvation, at any rate to small victories over hellishness. This was the tradition of productive lunacy, the belief that you can\u2019t attain the Jerusalem of your heart\u2019s desire without first submitting to a Babylonian captivity. In writing the life of his dead friend George Cabot Lodge, Adams spoke of the young man\u2019s \u201cphilosophic depression,\u201d the dejection one feels when one\u2019s powers find no release in joyful activity and one\u2019s soul is condemned to feed upon itself. But the lassitudes of neurasthenia, exempting the sufferer from the demands of the marketplace, could also, Adams suggested, buy one time\u2014to plot a comeback, and obtain one\u2019s revenge on those who doubted one\u2019s virtue.<\/p>\n<p>* BLAMING THE PARENTS FOR THE failures of the children would become, in the heyday of Freudianism, a WASP pastime. Henry Adams anticipated the trend, urging his wounded contemporaries to rouse themselves from their neurasthenic fatigues and repair the errors of the ancestors.<br \/>\n His discovery of the primal sin of the fathers\u2014their narrowness of vision\u2014illuminates WASP culture and in some measure explains it. He made articulate the partly formed, half conscious idea of the WASPs that, however much they might venerate their forebears, there was something missing in the civilization they created. Political reform by itself could not fill the void. It must be supplemented by cultural regeneration, and cultural regeneration\u2014this was the crucial insight\u2014was impossible without forums in which the soul, protected from the rapidity and chaos of American life, could ripen. Looking back longingly to the stoas and porticos of the Mediterranean, Adams was never more of a WASP than when he reflected on the virtues of the old civic culture, the \u201cclassic and promiscuous turmoil of the forum, the theatre, or the bath,\u201d formative institutions \u201cwhich trained the Greeks and the Romans\u201d in their prime, and brought alive parts of their nature that would otherwise have been neglected, but which were unknown in America.<br \/>\nYet Adams\u2019s most delicate stroke was his suggestion that the cultural revolution he contemplated was unrealizable. The acceleration of mechanical power in America would, he predicted, doom the efforts of the preppy rebels and frondeurs; the WASP coup d\u2019\u00e9tat he advocated would ultimately fail. In effect The Education of Henry Adams dared its readers to prove its author wrong.<\/p>\n<p>* Together with memories of color (sitting \u201con a yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight\u201d), illness and taste (coming down with scarlet fever and his aunt \u201centering the sickroom bearing in her hand a saucer with a baked apple\u201d), and displacement (being \u201cbundled up in blankets\u201d and carried from his family\u2019s house in Hancock Avenue to a new, larger one in Mount Vernon Street), some of Adams\u2019s most vivid early recollections are of filial resentment: of his grandfather John Quincy Adams for making him go to school, and of his great-grandfather John Adams for being a dull writer whose work he was forced to help his father edit. How mortifying, for Henry, that these forebears, with all their faults, should have had, by any worldly measure, so much greater success than he! It must have been an unconscious satisfaction to him that the Republic they founded was inadequate.<\/p>\n<p>* In retrospect it is remarkable that these WASPs should have sought satisfaction in directing the destinies of distant nations and puzzling out the feuds of remote peoples in insalubrious climates. But statesmanship, if it is an expensive form of therapy, is not, Pascal long ago observed, an ineffective one. Yet beneath the WASPs\u2019 pursuit of those twin balms, power and pleasure, there was a desire to make a civic contribution. They had all been expensively educated in a tradition that descended, ultimately, from Athens, and they regarded \u201cthe man who takes no part in public affairs, not as a man who minds his own business, but as a man who is good for nothing.\u201d Public service, they were taught, not only bettered the res publica, it was an essential element of self-realization.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time there was something less creditable at work in this zeal for civic virtue. Complex webs of privilege enabled the WASPs to live spacious, many-sided lives even as so many of their fellow citizens performed monotonously dull tasks to get their bread. The WASPs persuaded themselves, as they negotiated their treaties or sailed about their harbors in Maine, that their lives were of service to those forgotten millions who toiled away in occupations that made a mockery of their potential. Self-deception is evident. So far were the WASP mandarins from seeking to enlarge the civic playground, so that others might play there, too, they seemed to rejoice in their possession of the high places in the state. In the recesses of their hearts, they seem even to have derived pleasure from looking down on their less fortunately developed and less well connected fellow citizens.<\/p>\n<p>* \u201cWe live by poetry, not by prose,\u201d Wilson said, \u201cand we live only as we see visions.\u201d It would be truer to say that we live by poetry and by prose, and that we get into trouble whenever we confuse the one with the other. The WASP statesmen who were to shape the American Century were, by and large, realists in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, versed in the language of geopolitical interest. But Woodrow Wilson taught them to clothe this realistic prose in an ideal rhetorical poetry. As statecraft, the WASPs\u2019 m\u00e9lange of the two presidents\u2019 policies was ingenious, but not without disadvantages. The WASPs intended Wilson\u2019s poetry to be the servant of Roosevelt\u2019s prose. But poetry is a potent, as well as an unpredictable thing. What if the servant should become the master?<\/p>\n<p>* Instruments of collective security differ from the traditional alliances that Wilson sought to do away with. Traditional alliances are \u201cdirected against specific threats\u201d and define \u201cprecise obligations for specific groups of countries linked by shared national interests or mutual security concerns.\u201d Collective security, by contrast, \u201cdefines no particular interest, guarantees no individual nation, and discriminates against none.\u201d It \u201cis theoretically designed to resist any threat to the peace,\u201d but because it \u201cleaves the application of its principles to the interpretation of particular circumstances when they arise,\u201d it unintentionally puts \u201ca large premium on the mood of the moment and, hence, on national self-will,\u201d with different nations favoring different approaches and unable to agree on the concerted action that might deter an aggressor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wasps-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t<!-- All in One SEO 4.9.10 - aioseo.com -->\n\t<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"max-image-preview:large\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Luke Ford\"\/>\n\t<meta name=\"google-site-verification\" content=\"HMjuOfLRyzTPB-5Z5FG4BHkfZ1fbEij34rmbKM3BkZ4\" \/>\n\t<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"All in One SEO (AIOSEO) 4.9.10\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Luke Ford - No sacred cows.\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:image:secure_url\" content=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"800\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-09-07T00:48:44+00:00\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-09-08T00:57:12+00:00\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/lukecford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@lukeford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@lukeford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:image\" content=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg\" \/>\n\t\t<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"aioseo-schema\">\n\t\t\t{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"BlogPosting\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#blogposting\",\"name\":\"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford\",\"headline\":\"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1#author\"},\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#person\"},\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#articleImage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/wp-content\\\/litespeed\\\/avatar\\\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923\",\"width\":96,\"height\":96,\"caption\":\"Luke Ford\"},\"datePublished\":\"2021-09-06T16:48:44-08:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-09-07T16:57:12-08:00\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#webpage\"},\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#webpage\"},\"articleSection\":\"WASPs\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#breadcrumblist\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog#listItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\",\"nextItem\":{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?cat=29620#listItem\",\"name\":\"WASPs\"}},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?cat=29620#listItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"WASPs\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?cat=29620\",\"nextItem\":{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#listItem\",\"name\":\"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy\"},\"previousItem\":{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog#listItem\",\"name\":\"Home\"}},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#listItem\",\"position\":3,\"name\":\"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy\",\"previousItem\":{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?cat=29620#listItem\",\"name\":\"WASPs\"}}]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#person\",\"name\":\"Luke Ford\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#personImage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/wp-content\\\/litespeed\\\/avatar\\\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923\",\"width\":96,\"height\":96,\"caption\":\"Luke Ford\"}},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1#author\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1\",\"name\":\"Luke Ford\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#authorImage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/wp-content\\\/litespeed\\\/avatar\\\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923\",\"width\":96,\"height\":96,\"caption\":\"Luke Ford\"}},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932\",\"name\":\"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford\",\"description\":\"Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \\u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#website\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=141932#breadcrumblist\"},\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1#author\"},\"creator\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1#author\"},\"datePublished\":\"2021-09-06T16:48:44-08:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-09-07T16:57:12-08:00\"},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/\",\"name\":\"Luke Ford\",\"alternateName\":\"No Sacred Cows\",\"description\":\"No sacred cows.\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#person\"}}]}\n\t\t<\/script>\n\t\t<!-- All in One SEO -->\n\n","aioseo_head_json":{"title":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford","description":"Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of","canonical_url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932","robots":"max-image-preview:large","keywords":"","webmasterTools":{"google-site-verification":"HMjuOfLRyzTPB-5Z5FG4BHkfZ1fbEij34rmbKM3BkZ4","miscellaneous":""},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#blogposting","name":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford","headline":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1#author"},"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#person"},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#articleImage","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/litespeed\/avatar\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923","width":96,"height":96,"caption":"Luke Ford"},"datePublished":"2021-09-06T16:48:44-08:00","dateModified":"2021-09-07T16:57:12-08:00","inLanguage":"en-US","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#webpage"},"isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#webpage"},"articleSection":"WASPs"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#breadcrumblist","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog#listItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog","nextItem":{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29620#listItem","name":"WASPs"}},{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29620#listItem","position":2,"name":"WASPs","item":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29620","nextItem":{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#listItem","name":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy"},"previousItem":{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog#listItem","name":"Home"}},{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#listItem","position":3,"name":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy","previousItem":{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29620#listItem","name":"WASPs"}}]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#person","name":"Luke Ford","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#personImage","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/litespeed\/avatar\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923","width":96,"height":96,"caption":"Luke Ford"}},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1#author","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1","name":"Luke Ford","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#authorImage","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/litespeed\/avatar\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923","width":96,"height":96,"caption":"Luke Ford"}},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#webpage","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932","name":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford","description":"Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of","inLanguage":"en-US","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#website"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932#breadcrumblist"},"author":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1#author"},"creator":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1#author"},"datePublished":"2021-09-06T16:48:44-08:00","dateModified":"2021-09-07T16:57:12-08:00"},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/","name":"Luke Ford","alternateName":"No Sacred Cows","description":"No sacred cows.","inLanguage":"en-US","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#person"}}]},"og:locale":"en_US","og:site_name":"Luke Ford - No sacred cows.","og:type":"article","og:title":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford","og:description":"Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of","og:url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932","og:image":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg","og:image:secure_url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg","og:image:width":800,"og:image:height":600,"article:published_time":"2021-09-07T00:48:44+00:00","article:modified_time":"2021-09-08T00:57:12+00:00","article:publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/lukecford","twitter:card":"summary_large_image","twitter:site":"@lukeford","twitter:title":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy - Luke Ford","twitter:description":"Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. * WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a \u201ctendency to suicidal mania.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of","twitter:creator":"@lukeford","twitter:image":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg"},"aioseo_meta_data":{"post_id":"141932","title":null,"description":null,"keywords":null,"keyphrases":null,"primary_term":null,"canonical_url":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"og_object_type":"default","og_image_type":"default","og_image_url":null,"og_image_width":null,"og_image_height":null,"og_image_custom_url":null,"og_image_custom_fields":null,"og_video":null,"og_custom_url":null,"og_article_section":null,"og_article_tags":null,"twitter_use_og":false,"twitter_card":"default","twitter_image_type":"default","twitter_image_url":null,"twitter_image_custom_url":null,"twitter_image_custom_fields":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"schema":{"blockGraphs":[],"customGraphs":[],"default":{"data":{"Article":[],"Course":[],"Dataset":[],"FAQPage":[],"Movie":[],"Person":[],"Product":[],"ProductReview":[],"Car":[],"Recipe":[],"Service":[],"SoftwareApplication":[],"WebPage":[]},"graphName":"","isEnabled":true},"graphs":[]},"schema_type":"default","schema_type_options":null,"pillar_content":false,"robots_default":true,"robots_noindex":false,"robots_noarchive":false,"robots_nosnippet":false,"robots_nofollow":false,"robots_noimageindex":false,"robots_noodp":false,"robots_notranslate":false,"robots_max_snippet":null,"robots_max_videopreview":null,"robots_max_imagepreview":"large","priority":null,"frequency":null,"local_seo":null,"breadcrumb_settings":null,"limit_modified_date":false,"ai":null,"created":"2023-05-12 09:46:05","updated":"2025-06-05 23:36:20","seo_analyzer_scan_date":null},"aioseo_breadcrumb":"<div class=\"aioseo-breadcrumbs\"><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb\">\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\" title=\"Home\">Home<\/a>\n\t\t<\/span><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb-separator\">&raquo;<\/span><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb\">\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29620\" title=\"WASPs\">WASPs<\/a>\n\t\t<\/span><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb-separator\">&raquo;<\/span><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb\">\n\t\t\tWASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy\n\t\t<\/span><\/div>","aioseo_breadcrumb_json":[{"label":"Home","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog"},{"label":"WASPs","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29620"},{"label":"WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141932"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=141932"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":141943,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141932\/revisions\/141943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=141932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=141932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=141932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}