Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes 20140426

So i wouldnt say it plays an enormous role in their work. Any other questions . Im sure the research into this was enormous and the many sources but if you could i mean is there the top three or four that come to mind as sources of research that you went to for this book . 70 roughly of the book and it was just invaluable. The twain stuff. There is such great scholarship around twain. You can go to marc twain projects. Org and see all those letters from i think until 1881 and they are wonderful additions of his correspondence so when it comes to researching twain its actually ready straightforward. I think these other characters i had to dig deeper into the archives because their work securely Charles Warren stoddard are not as widely known. That was a little bit more of the detective work which i really enjoyed but the bancrofts had most of it. I was in l. A. At the huntington. I was here the San Francisco Public Library and the oakland Public Library and a couple of collections on the east coast but i was moakley and mostly in brooklyn. Any other questions . Thank you so much for having me. [applause] i will be here signing books so if you want your book signed i will be right here. Thank you for coming. Richard brookhiser was a guest on booknotes in 1991 to talk about the way of the wasp how it made america and how it can save it. So to speak. In the book mr. Brookhiser argues that wasps or white anglosaxon protestants formed the american character and he says if we dont preserve wasp ideals america lose its way. Cspan richard brookhiser, author of the way of the wasp how it made america and how it can save it. So to speak, why do we need this book . Guest well, i think countries need to understand where theyve come from and if they know that, they can know where they might go. I dont think countries can pick virtues out of thin air or just off a tree. The character traits a country has are given to it by its history, and the character type a country has is, therefore, also given to it by its history ours, i think, americas, was put in place by wasps, by white anglo saxon protestants, 200 and 300 years ago, and thats the hand history has dealt us, and it behooves us to study it and understand it. Cspan you start out with a special note upfront and you say, since in this book i will be making a number of unwaspily blunt identifications, in the interest of waspy fair play, i shall begin by identifying myself. First thing you say is, the brookhisers were german catholics. Why are you doing this by the way . Guest well, partly for the fun of it. I think its a sort of a wicked thing to do because no one does it. I mean, people are, i think very, very chary of stepping out and talking about their backgrounds unless they have some ax to grind, unless one belongs to a victim group, and theres some advantage in identifying yourself. People are polite, which is a wasp virtue, so we all sort of obey that. But i figured since i was going to come out and write this book and then beat the drums for a particular set of values, i thought it would be only fair to show where i was coming from. Cspan lets go through as much of it as possible. Again, the brookhisers were german catholics. My fathers mothers maiden name was gleason, which wasnt irish but a respelling of claesgens, another german name. They tried to anglicize it, evidently, and didnt get it quite right. My mothers maiden name was stark, thats english. Her mothers was quilhot, french protestant. What are we getting in richard brookhisers. Guest well, all i was trying to prove there was that im not writing this as an wasp myself. I mean, im not an andover, harvard, Porcellian Club graduate whos just writing about what he grew up with all his life. Like most of the people in this country like the overwhelming majority of people in this country im not a wasp. Im half; im not a full fledged one, literally speaking, although i think if you look at the way i live or the way i was raised, again, like the overwhelming majority of people in this country, i am a wasp by behavior, which is the most important thing about wasps. Its not who they are any longer, who they are literally. Its how they behaved 200 and 300 years ago and how that still affects us today. Cspan the rest of this is, i was raised in the Methodist Church from which i have lapsed. Guest well, im not going to boast about that, but its true. Cspan what does that mean . Youre just no longer a methodist . Guest right. No longer an active one. Cspan i grew up in middlemiddle class suburbs and went to yale. Getting close, though, on this. Guest maybe i was on the outskirts a little bit. Cspan my wifes maiden name, which she has kept, is safer, russian jew. What happens to someone with your background when you marry someone whos jewish . What does that do the combination of. Guest oh, its fun. Well, i eat better. Cspan what are the children . Do you have kids . Guest no. This is something everybody has to work out and, obviously, its a very difficult thing or it can be. I mean if either or both of the parents care about their religious background, its quite a difficult thing. But we dont have kids, so we havent faced that. Cspan let me finish this off. For 13 years, i worked at National Review, catholic. Why did you say that . Guest not that National Review is officially a catholic magazine because it isnt, but just because bill buckley and so many of the other editors over the years have been catholic. Cspan in the whole city of new york, i know two protestants; rather exprotestants. One of them is japanese. Now whats that all about . Guest a little hyperbole there. I probably know more than two protestants but i was looking at my very closest friends. New york is not a city that has lots of wasps running around in it. Cspan why is that . Guest well, new york is the great portal for immigration. This is where so many of the steamship lines ended, so if you were coming from germany or ireland or odessa or sicily or naples or wherever all through the 19th century, you would quite likely have arrived in new york or maybe baltimore, but new york had a majority of people coming there. Even today, people from europe and from the third world stream into new york. Its the historic gateway of immigration and of the first steps of americanization. Cspan now if you go back and study the 13 original colonies and the makeup of the people, what would it have been like . Guest well, you would find that although there have always been people in the United States and what became the United States who werent white english protestants by the way, anglo saxon just means english in terms of this discussion. I dont like the phrase anglo saxon. I think its vague but its what were stuck with in the acronym. But, ill use it so long as we understand what i mean by it is white english protestant. Cspan when i read this, i circled a number of things including anglo saxon which you describe, and then right above it, you tell us what white means and then in the next page, you tell us what protestant means. Guest even though you always had people who werent white anglo saxon protestants, you had lots of german amish in pennsylvania. Theyre still there today, they still speak german, theyve done it for 300 years. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the people in the 13 colonies were white english protestants, and not surprisingly so since they were or became english colonies. They were also englishmen and protestants of a certain kind. The english character is more complicated than the american character. Theres more to it and we didnt get all of it. We got people who politically were whigs or liberal in terms of the day, libertarians, believers in egalitarian, nonhierarchical governments. We also got protestants of a certain kind. There were anglicans who lived in the 13 colonies but they were less establishmentarian than the anglicans who stayed home. There was never an anglican bishop for the 13 colonies. Vestries did a lot of the work that curates did in england. The overwhelming majority of the protestants, apart from the anglicans, were baptists, quakers, presbyterians, congregationalists people of a very low church sort of protestantism. The combination of that libertarian style of politics and that low church style of religion had very important effects on the institutions and the behavior of americans. Cspan under the protestant section, you say, early america was a country of protestants in 1785. Out of a total population of three million. Guest approximately three million. Cspan there were 24,500 Roman Catholics, white and black, fewer than quakers, and no more than 3,000 jews, a tenth of one per cent of the population. Its changed, though. Guest oh, sure. The largest denomination in the United States now is the Roman Catholic church. Thats been the case since 1850 actually. Thats when the Catholic Church became the largest single denomination in this country. Now there still are more protestants than catholics. Its about 2to1 and there are problems with counting, but it seems to be about 2to1, and the percentage of jews, of course, has risen because of the great immigrations from Eastern Europe at the end of the last century. But, even so, protestantism remains a majority, but more important than that is that the nonprotestant religions in this country adopted a lot of the churchstate notions that the first protestants had put in place. Jews in america, catholics in america, americanized themselves very quickly, and they did it because they saw it was in their interests to do so. It was in their interests politically and religiously to adopt the american attitude toward churchstate relations, and when they did, they flourished. This caused a lot of puzzlement back home, especially for catholics. Throughout the 19th century, on into the 20th, time and time and again, rome would sometimes scratch its head at what was going on over here and wonder what its flock over here was doing. Well, what they were doing was they were settling into a situation which was unusual in the history of the Catholic Church, which is to say they were living in a country which had a majority of noncatholics but which did not persecute catholics. And so, they discovered quite soon that this was a good thing they wanted to be a part of it and they became so. Cspan let me ask you some things about yourself. First, politically, can you describe yourself politically . Guest oh, sure, im conservative. Cspan what kind of a conservative . Guest paleo. I was for goldwater in 64. I was nine years old, so who cares . But, you know, i was. That probably locates me. Obviously, i think that shaped the approach i took in this book, but this isnt just a conservatives look at this situation. I think wasp values can go in a number of different political directions. Over time, there have been wasps who were isolationists and wasps who were imperialists. There have been wasps who were social darwinists, free marketeers of the most rigorous sort, and there were wasps who were prairie socialists. Wasp ideals can form different varieties of society. However, theyre all within certain limits. There are certain types of society youre not going to get in a wasp country. Cspan who is your favorite president in history . Guest george washington. Cspan why . Guest no question. Well, not only what he did but, as important, what he didnt do what he did was to win the war of independence and to guide the country during its deliberations over its constitution and then to embody those ideals as the first president. Thats what he did do. What he didnt do was to become a man on horseback to become a dictator, to identify the state with himself. After he served two terms, he stepped down. Its an interesting thing. George washingtons favorite play was a roman costume drama by the english playwright john addison. It was called cato. And the two most famous lines in cato are tis not in mortals to command success, but well do more, sempronius; well deserve it. Washington must have been familiar with those lines, since it was his favorite play, and i think thats a key to a lot of washingtons behavior and very waspy kinds of sentiments, i think. Cspan second american president on your list. Guest lincoln. This is not a startling list. Im not going to pull out Millard Fillmore or chester arthur. Lincoln because lincoln had to deal with the great sin that wasps committed, the great crime that wasps committed historically, which was slavery now, this was a crime, i think doubly so, in the first place because it is wrong and immoral to own slaves; in the second place, because it really is a violation of wasp approaches to politics. The best thing you can say in defense of wasps is that all the time there were slaves in this country or in the colonies, owned by wasps in most cases, there were also wasps, white english protestants, who recognized that slavery was wrong and that it should end. Jefferson, who was a slave owner, nevertheless wrote the declaration of independence and the rhetoric of freedom which became the basis, the justification, for abolition. Washington, even though he was a slave owner, when he died, he freed his slaves. It wasnt a matter in those days of just doing it. You had to have to set aside x amount of money for each slave so he could set himself up in some sort of profession. Washington planned for that, and he did it when he died. And then on up to the civil war when lincoln preeminently made the case against slavery and brought it to fruition. Cspan third. Guest third, ah, now youre pushing. No, no third. Washington first, lincoln second, the rest behind. Cspan what did you think of Ronald Reagan . Guest oh, i liked him. I was for him in 76, and i think he did important things important things in terms of the world, certainly. I think a lot of the liberation in Eastern Europe would not have happened but for reagans convincing the soviets that they couldnt keep on the way they had been going under brezhnev and chernenko, andropov and those people, that there had to be glasnost and perestroika. Thats a major achievement. But, in terms of our own history, i think you have to say washington, lincoln, and then the rest are not nowhere but. Cspan how many of the president s have been wasps . Guest well, the one who clearly wasnt, and, in fact, there was a question whether it would be an issue, was jack kennedy, and he was catholic the first catholic to be elected president , only one. All the others were either literal wasps or people who were so assimilated for a long, long time that they might as well have been. Roosevelt and van buren are dutch names, but the dutch had been in new york, rubbing shoulders with wasps for hundreds of years, so it kind of didnt count. Eisenhower and hoover were german surnames, but their families had been here since the 18th century. They were very assimilated. But even in the case of jack kennedy, who was a catholic, his father sent him to choate and to harvard, and when he went in the service, he went in the navy, very sort of blue Blood Service to pick. So, he was being deliberately directed by joe kennedy to get a brahmin, upper crust eastern seaboard wasp education and upbringing. This is what has happened to nonwasps over and over again in american history. Its assimilation. You know, when the wasps realized that they werent going to continue to be the majority in this country, which was very clear that they couldnt possibly be, what happened was new wasps were created, and they were created out of all these millions of people who came here with an inkling that it was going to be better. Then as they intuited why it was better then where theyd come from, they waspified. Cspan you write for the new York Observer . Guest yes. Cspan what is it . Guest thats a weekly paper in new york city. Cspan what kind . Does it have an idealogy . Guest its very heterogeneous. Youve got me and youve got regular columnists for the nation and youve got Hilton Kramer doing the arts, the neoconservative voice. Cspan who buys it . Guest i suppose people who like a lot of yelling. Cspan is it mostly new yorkers who buy it . Guest yes, its new york. Cspan you also write talk of the town sometimes for the new yorker . Guest right. Cspan now whats the idealogy or the politics of the new yorker magazine . Guest well, i dont write the political stuff for talk of the town. I write about new york events and local things and happenings, so i dont get into the politics. Cspan your name doesnt go on it though when you write it. Brookhiser; well, those are all unsigned, so, no it doesnt, but theyre a lot of fun. Cspan is that a hard thing to do, an unsigned piece . Guest thats the style. Theyre fun to do, and its always a thrill being in the new yorker, so i have a great time. Cspan thirteen years with the National Review. How come the attraction to the National Review . What is special about the publication . Guest well, gee, our family subscribed to it since i was like 12 years old. It was just sort of the air, and it was a lot of fun to read. It seemed to be correct, but also it was correct in a fun and interesting way. Cspan how has it changing that bill buckleys no longer directly involved every day, or is he . Guest no, the editor now is john osullivan. I think the main difference is that the magazine is more journalistic now, perhaps, than it once was. Part of the reason for that is theres no longer such a need to make the ideological case for this issue or that issue. A lot of thats been done. You know, Ronald Reagan was elected president , so some of our efforts have come to fruit. You dont have to keep hammering away at the same old things over and over again, so you can afford to be more journalistic, more interested in daytoday events or weektoweek, monthtomonth sorts of stories, and so the magazine is. Cspan whered you grow up . Guest rochester, n. Y. , upstate new york, so i have made the biggest cultural shift it is possible in this country to make to move to new york city. Listeners out there in kansas or alaska or hawaii, you may think it would be a big shift to go and move to new york, but i must tell you that upstate new york is the part of the United States which feels itself most alien from new york city because were in the same state. We were always thinking about it, how they were taking our taxes and whatnot. The one time i went to new york as a little boy was for the worlds fair in 6465. I remember just walking down a sidewalk and a guy was hawking a tabloid, and there was a headline in big letters, rips out heart, stomps on it. I thought, they dont run headlines like that in the rochester democrat and chronicle. So, it was a shift. Cspan parents still alive . Guest yes, yes. Cspan still working . Guest no, retired. Cspan what did they do . Guest my dad worked for eastman kodak, which is in rochester, the major employer in rochester, and my mom worked for the school system. Cspan who got you interested in education . Guest well, theyd both been to college and they sent my older brother to yale, and so it was not even an option not to do it. Cspan was yale something that you thought about when you were in high school . Guest yes, because my older brother was there. He was the first person in my family to go, but. Cspan why yale . Guest good school and, for me, my older brother was there, so i went to Football Games and stuff and it seemed natural. Cspan what impact did yale have on you . Bill buckley went there. Bill buckley went there. Guest yes, but hed been gone a long time. At yale, the two impacts were there were a number of excellent teachers, mostly in the english department, but i had some others in other fields. Also, at yale, there were a number of very active and intelligent and contrary conservatives. Yale has a Political Union which is divided into parties across the political spectrum. I joined the party of the right, and this was a very fraternal, independent sort of organization, and a lot of the friends i made there i still have, still work with them. Cspan was there a club . Guest well, it wasnt a literal club, but it had a lot of clublike aspects to it. Cspan are you a traditional conservative, interested in social issues, or are you a libertarian conservative . Guest half and half. I really couldnt put myself in either camp. I wouldnt want to lose the other one. Cspan if somebody asked you to write a definitive paper of 500 words about a conservative ideological issue that meant the most to you, what would you write about . Guest well, until 1989, it would have been defense of the country against possible menace from the soviet union. I dont think thats such a big deal anymore. Now, it would be taxes. Taxes, number one; abortion maybe number two. Cspan feel strongly about abortion . Guest yes. Cspan position . Guest against. Cspan a hundred percent against or rape, incest. Guest well, this is something i didnt come to for strong religious reasons. Im not catholic nor am i a fundamentalist, so i dont have that impulse. But it just seemed that if fetuses were not human, what were they . What else could they be . And if they were not living, why were such measures necessary to prevent their continued existence . So, therefore, they must be live and in some sense human and, therefore, it must not be right. Cspan where did you go after yale . Guest National Review. Cspan first job . Guest first job. Cspan your book the way of the wasp, some of the liner notes are the most interesting way, i think, maybe to get you to talk more about the book. Where did the term wasp come from . Guest it was popularized in 1964. There was a book called the protestant establishment by a man named e. Digby baltzell. Hes still alive. Hes a Professor Emeritus of sociology at penn, and i actually interviewed him for this book. I said, why did you make up the acronym . Why did you turn white anglo saxon protestant into wasp . He said, well, white anglo saxon protestant wouldnt fit on a chart. Too big to fit on a chart. I think he was pulling my leg because the fact is if the acronym had spelled out crickets or ants or some insect that people kind of like, it wouldnt have caught on. The fact that it spelled out an insect that stings, that doesnt make honey, thats meantempered, thats unpredictable, thats why people grabbed it, because it was a hostile term. Cspan what is professor baltzells background . Guest he must be a wasp. I think hes a philadelphia gentleman by upbringing. Cspan does he like wasps . Guest hes ambivalent. He thinks they have their good points and their bad points. Cspan whats he think about the fact that he coined the phrase . Guest oh, hes pleased with it. Its like every time anyone uses it, a figurative nickel goes in his intellectual royalty account. Cspan this book is a small book. Guest thats right. It is a long essay, really, but dense. Small but dense. Cspan its published by free press. Did you go to them or did they come to you . Guest oh, i went all around, and they were the ones who bit. Cspan what was the thing that you remember them saying that they liked about the idea . Guest ill tell you how the idea developed. Coming up to the end of 87 this is my second book. My first book was about the 84 election, so i thought, rather unimaginatively, let me write a second election book. I know george bush is going to be the next president , so lets focus in on him. I went around to publishers with this idea, and no one was going to take it. In part, not only did they not think george bush was going to win the election, they didnt even think he was going to win the nomination. This was like end of 87. They thought dole was going to get the nomination. I just thought that was crazy, but i began to think why is bush having this hard time . Youll remember, end of 87, newsweek had this cover, bush battles the wimp factor. There was a photograph of bush in a yacht off the coast of maine, and this was the headline over his head. So i began to think why is bush having this hard time . It became clear to me it wasnt because of anything he was saying or doing or that he had said or that he had done. It was because of who and what he was. George bush was a wimp because of the way hed been brought up therefore, he was a wimp because he was a wasp. I mean, this was the implicit equation that was going on. Then, having realized that, i began to generalize. I realized this critique of wasp mores was not invented for george bushs benefit. This has a history here. I began to think about it and look at it, and so the idea developed. Cspan its already been reviewed by several people. Whats the worst thing theyve said about it . Guest the worst thing, one reviewer who shall remain nameless, said that i wrote a whole chapter just to mention the fact that i had been a temporary member of the council on Foreign Relations for five years. He thought i had written an entire chapter on secretaries of state from wall street just to boast about this. I wrote him a note and i said, dear mr. Jones as luck would have it, your review came out the day after your name came up at the cfr for membership. Naturally, i asked henry to blackball you. Cspan why do people get so upset about people who are members of the cfr, council on Foreign Relations . Guest well, its concrete thinking. Its people who are upset with the Foreign Policy of the United States for the last few decades, and there are reasons for being upset with it. But, then they think that the reason its been askew is because there is this organization which has turned out a lot of people in the state department and so on, and they think that thats the source of their mistaken opinions. I think the mistaken opinions come from climates of opinion, from the way people are raised, and what they were taught and the way they think. Its not because theyre in an organization which puts its cooties on them, and then they do crazy things when they get in power. So, its a very concrete. Cspan why were you a member . Guest i was a member for five years. I joined in 1980 because this was the first round for solidarity. They were active and they had not yet been repressed. Jarazelski hadnt yet put them down, and i could see Eastern Europe unraveling. I was a little early as it turned out, but it looked like this was the end game here. I thought, well, maybe if im in this group, i can learn something about this. Cspan can anyone join . Guest no. You have to get two people who are members to sponsor you and then they pass on you. Cspan does it cost you some money . Guest no. Cspan what are the privileges of membership . Guest well, the privileges of membership were to go to a lot of meetings and hear the ambassador from belgium, if he was in town, give a little talk or the Junior Assistant under secretary of state for Banking Development give a talk if he was in town. The most interesting meeting i went to was maurice bishop, the dictator of grenada, who gave a talk not very long before he died. I remember he came with little bodyguards, and they were kids. They were like 17 years old, these kids in these uniforms with very fierce expressions checking everyone out. Here we all were drinking tea out of our little pinkandgreen tea cups, and i said to the guy next to me, dont reach for your pen quick or were going to down in a hail of lead. Cspan why did you get out . Guest if youre younger than a certain age and i think when i was in it it was 35 and maybe now the age is 40 or it was 30, then switched to 35 but if you were younger than a certain age, you could only belong for five years temporary membership and my thing ran out so, therefore, i was out. Cspan is there anything to the conspiracy suspicions of conservatives in this country that the Trilateral Commission and the council on Foreign Relations are all a part of pushing toward a oneworld government . Guest look, i dont think so but how can i be trusted, right . Cspan well, youre no longer a member. Guest well, yes, but i was. I mean the mark of the beast is on me. Thats what they would say. Cspan did anybody throw their subscription to National Review away because you were a member . Guest well, if they were so disposed, they would have done it long ago because bill buckley got in it long before i did, so people who were unhappy about that would have left. Cspan is there any thing to the theory that rubbing elbows with all that group leads to some kind of governance that people ought to be suspicious about . Guest heres what there is to it, which is that obviously people are influenced by the people they know and by the talk they hear all the time. I think it is true, and i look at this in the chapter in the way of the wasp which is on wall street and the fact that for decades many of our diplomats and secretaries of state came from wall street. This was a very common thing. You get someone on wall street, a lawyer or whatever, and hed do his time there and make his bundle, and then hed go to washington and maybe hed go back and forth and you saw this a lot. Charles evans hughes, elihu root, Henry Stimpson they were all wall street people who went to washington. I think it is true that at the end of that period i think that period has ended. The last wall street secretary of state was cyrus vance. They dont churn them out anymore, and i think there are reasons for it. But at the end of that period, i think the blood was running thin. There was the big book about the wise men that came out a few years ago about dean acheson and averell harriman and john mccloy and all those people and they were sort of the culminating generation of this type of man. I think, on the one hand, they did a lot of things that were very good and effective. On the other hand, there were some problems in their leadership. I think that is one symptom of wasp blood running thin. I believe, by the way, that the way of the wasp, the wasp ideals are in trouble in this country and have been in trouble for a number of decades. They are no longer as influential as they once were or as effective as social forces. I think the reason for that is not that weve had lots of immigration and that there are lots of nonwasps in america, and its not because people who are nonwasps have attacked wasp ideals. I think its because too many wasps, themselves, have lost their nerve, and they have let us down. So this book is, in part, a plea to wasps and to nonwasps, to say, look, here are these values. Theyre on the shelf, theyre on the rack. Anyone can use them, and we should. Cspan dedicated for jeanne. Guest jeannie, my wife. Cspan who did you dedicate the first book to . Guest my parents. And my third book will be dedicated to my brother. Cspan whats it going to be . Guest i dont know. Cspan next page you have a quote. Im going to read the quote. Its a quote from George Orwell who was. Guest english journalist. Left wing anticommunist journalist. Cspan i thought of a rather cruel trick i once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and i cut him in half. He paid no attention; merely went on with his meal while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. George orwell. Guest well, now, of course, theres a pun there. He was writing about the insect, and ive used this to introduce a book about the ethnic group. But the reason i picked that is just what i was saying. I think there has been a loss of nerve among wasps and that it has had bad effects on their way of life and bad effects on this country. I think it goes back for decades in many cases. I think one of the great problems has been a schism in the protestant churches in america, which i think has been going on for a hundred years. Another very bad symptom was the career of Woodrow Wilson who, i think, was very influential in changing the way americans think about politics and what politics should be about, and he changed it for the worse. We suffer today from the effects from both those events. Cspan i dont know how far we can get with this, but id like to try it. On the acknowledgements page, you list a lot of people and you just give their names. If you could give me a quick read on who they are. You say, many people agreed to sit down and talk with me, including ken auletta. Guest a journalist in new york. Cspan why did you pick him . Guest hes written about wall street. Cspan martha bayles. Guest shes writing a book about rock n roll, which is going to come out in a couple of years. Cspan why is that relevant . Guest well, it was just about the culture of the 60s, which was kind of a gaudy fulfillment of a lot of attacks on wasps, and people see that as the beginning of the end. I dont see it as the beginning of the end. I think the beginning of the end was much further back, but the 60s is sort of a. Cspan are all these people conservatives . Guest not all of them. Cspan is ken auletta . Guest i think hed say he was a moderate. Cspan david brooks. Guest conservative journalist, wall street journal in brussels now. Cspan what did he have to do with the book . Guest he was a movie reviewer for many years, and i wanted to just check some of my notions of Popular Culture against him. Cspan jack cuddihy. Guest he wrote some very interesting books on jewish assimilation in america. Cspan eVan Galbraith. Guest Van Galbraith works on wall street and talked me through that. Cspan george gilder. Guest well, conservative intellectual, thinks about anything under the sun, so i wanted to pick his brain. Cspan campbell gibson. Guest he works with the Census Bureau. I went to the Census Bureau in suitland, maryland, to just see what statistics there might be on wasps. Its hard to get them. One problem is the census has no religious information. It is against the law for the census to ask any question about religion. Theres ethnic data. You can find how many english people of english descent there are, not religion. Cspan jeffrey hart. Guest a colleague of mine, National Review for many years and knows everything. Cspan conservative . Guest oh, yes. Cspan whats he do besides write for National Review . Guest professor at dartmouth. Cspan charles kesler. Guest former colleague of mine. Hes chairman of the Political Science department at claremont college. Cspan in california. Guest california. But hes an expert on wilson among other things. Cspan irving kristol. Guest neoconservative thinker. Cspan john lukacs . Guest john lukacs, hes a historian. Mostly writes about world war ii, but also about america. Cspan conservative . Guest no, hes denied that he is one. Hes by himself. Cspan where does he live . Guest pennsylvania. Cspan richard neuhaus. Guest former lutheran minister, now converted to catholicism. A student of american religion. Cspan and what did you talk to him about . Religion . Guest right. Cspan terry teachout. Guest works for the daily news, young conservative journalist working on a biography of h. L. Mencken. Cspan in new york . Guest in new york. Cspan you mention mencken a lot in the book. Why . Guest well, i mention mencken because hes sort of the great enemy of wasp values. He loathed wasps and he loathed their values, and he was a very eloquent critic of them. Cspan ernest van den haag. Guest long time contributor to National Review, economist, professor another person who knows everything. Cspan my thanks to them all. Rich vigilante has been telling me what to write and think for 16 years. Why should he stop now . Guest my dearest friend. Early on in the book i tell a little story about george bush to show how he was raised. When he was a kid and when he would play baseball and come home having hit a home run, he would tell his mother. Hed burst in and want to tell her, oh, i hit a home run. His mother, dorothy, would always say, how did the team do, dear . I told this story to my wife, jeanne, whos jewish, and to rich, my dearest friend, whos italian, and when they heard that, theyd reacted like shed beaten him with a coat hanger. How could you possibly do this to your kid . You know, he wants to brag about his home run. What are you doing, lady . Well, all right, maybe it was squelching, but it was also trying to instill teamwork into young george. Cspan matter of fact, your first chapter bush bashing, wasp bashing is the title of it. First sentence, if America Needs saving and if only a return to white anglo saxon protestant behavior and ideals will save it, then arent we lucky to have george bush in the white house . Guest well, of course, this was written long before operation desert storm. Cspan when was it finished, by the way . Guest oh, gee, i finished it in the spring of 90, so this was months before. At that point in the book when i ask the question, its ironic because then i go immediately into the flack he was getting in 87 and early 88 which we just talked about how everybody was saying hes such a wimp, hes so ineffective, hes vague, hes never done anything, he never could do anything. His background was something he had to surmount. It was not an unalloyed benefit to him. Cspan did you get caught having written about george bush a lot and then finding that he turned around and did unwaspish things . Guest well, no, i think his behavior during the course of the war was sort of waspish values at their best. A lot of the bad rap he was getting was based on misapprehensions and hostile depictions of wasp traits which i think are distorted. The notion that, you know, wasps are unimaginative, they cant create anything well, that may be true as far as art or good food is concerned. Its not true as far as constitutions are concerned. Wasps have been pretty good at that. The notion that wasps just have a lot of money and this is how they run everything, well, not every wasp has a lot of money. There are plenty of wasps in this country who drive pickups with gun racks, and they live in kentucky and West Virginia and are not upper class by any stretch. The second point is those wasps who do have money, its because they or some ancestor of theirs went out and worked 12 hours, 14 hours a day for it. This is a value that a lot of other cultures have, too, not just ours. But it is certainly a wasp value and certainly one that immigrants were happy to assimilate to. Cspan maureen dowd, in her review of your book in the new york times, talks about having been invited to the white house for a buffet with george bush. I think there were movies, and mrs. Bush was there and when she arrived all the. Guest she was hungry. Cspan she was hungry, yes. All that she found was, what, some strawberries and some cream or Something Like that and some tea. Guest i can top that. I gave a talk last month to a very waspy group. I dont want to say who they were because they were very nice to me. When it came time for dinner, the dinner was very good. But, before the dinner, there was a Cocktail Party, and there were two tables. There was a refreshments table and a drinks table, and the drinks table was great. It was filled with bottles. There was liquor, there was soda, there was anything you could desire. The refreshments table had four little bowls, about this big, with pretzels and potato chips in them, and they werent empty there were 50 people at this Cocktail Party and they didnt empty those four little bowls. Cspan is there something about wasps and food . Guest well, i thought there were six wasp character traits. The one this relates to is antisensuality. The whole six are industry and success, antisensuality and use, and civicmindedness and conscience. Wasps place a high value on industry and success. They place a low value on things which are sensual or not obviously useful. Socially they are civic minded, and personally they are driven by conscience. You can find those traits in other cultures in the world. You can find a culture which has one or two or three of those, but i think the combination of all six and the way that they play off against each other is probably uniquely wasp. Cspan what would have been different about this country, say, if well, you can name any other group. Guest well, all right, lets take a possible alternative. Suppose the spanish empire had made this part of north america its own not likely, but not inconceivable. I mean, they had florida and they owned the louisiana territories, at one point. We can look at latin america to see what we might have become. We might have developed a mercantilist economy, a very stagnated one, tightly controlled by bureaucracies and by a few families who were well positioned, an underclass composed of peons that had great trouble rising out of that status. Another thing about the latin american example is its interesting that the immigrants from europe who went to latin america rather than to america turned into latin americans. My ethnic group is a good example. Im germanamerican on my fathers side. Lots of germans came to this country. Lots of germans also went to buenos aries and became argentineans and paraguayans and whatnot. Once they arrived in argentina, they turned into argentineans. They assimilated to that social model with the blessings and the bad things about it. People assimilate to what theyre confronted with, what theyre presented with. Im lucky that my ancestors came here rather than there. Cspan page 149 there are 171 pages in this book including the index there is a group of americans that needs waspifying even more desperately than immigrants. That is the urban poor. What do you mean by that . Guest we have a class of people which is called the underclass in this country. They are the locus of a lot of our drug problems and a lot of the problems with illegitimacy and family breakdown and things of that kind. What would be the best, most effective way to help them . There are programs you might think of that could improve their lot in various ways and tax packages or benefits or welfare or whatnot. But it seems to me that the best way to help these people is to instill into them the same sort of ethic that americans have had instilled to them over the last three centuries which succeeded in turning a lot of people who came here poor from poor societies, from very degraded societies culturally, gave them a chance to work, to succeed, and to raise themselves. Thats what i mean by that. Cspan the poor and the not so poor have a drug problem this is the same page. Since the wasps last bright idea for handling a drug problem was prohibition, their guidance may be considered suspect. Guest right. Im not saying that wasps got everything right. Were talking about a human construct, so obviously its flawed. We talked about slavery, and this is another thing i think was a wasp error. The notion that the drinking problem, which the United States had still has but it was worse at the turn of the century and on up to the 20s the notion that the way to solve that was to make liquor illegal turned out not to be the way to solve it. This was a failure, and its a failure that the wasps probably preeminently foisted upon us. Its one of the things on their debit side, historically. Cspan on the jacket, this is from the first chapter here then is how white anglo saxon protestants and their history and habits are actually written and thought about these days. They didnt have as much impact on this country as weve always been led to believe, but what they had was unfortunate. They give everyone else a hard time, an offense mitigated if it is mitigated only by the hard time they give themselves. Theyre bad dancers and lousy lovers. Why is that in there . Guest well, go on. This is the hostile critique. Cspan their upper classes can still win president ial elections, but they cant hit baseballs. Their lower classes profess religions that are a little better than voodoo and a lot less fun. This is a broad consensus of literary gents, some eminent, many popular, of experts and wouldbe experts in the field, of purveyors of mass culture that also happens to be wrong. Guest ok, what you just read, except for the last sentence, thats what people think if you buttonhole them and say, if you take them on the street and say, well, what do you think about wasps . Theyll say that kind of thing. Maybe theyll be a little more polite, maybe theyll only say, well, you know, they have money and theyve had a lot of it in their family and theyre sort of boring. That would be the most polite form of the stereotype, and it can get quite ugly as that indicates. I think this is wrong. This is the hostile view of the character type which, in fact, was the american character type for decades and decades. Unless we understand where we came from, were not going to know what we might become. Were not going to have realistic notions of what we could become because you just cant improve a culture by going down a laundry list or a chinese menu of characteristics and saying, i want one from column a and one from column b and c and these all look like good ideas and well have that. No. You have to begin with what youve, in fact, been dealt. I think what america has been dealt by its history and by the people who first came here is a pretty good setup, and i think we have to know what that was and build on that. Cspan we only have about four minutes. If you were to pick a philosopher, a political philosopher or a political scientist off the shelf for late night reading, who would you pick first and second . Guest well, start with the declaration of independence and then do the federalist papers. Theyre old, but theyre damned good. Cspan which of the federalist papers writers john jay, james madison, Alexander Hamilton would you prefer to read . Guest well, i think madison wrote the papers that are now thought to be the most essential. Jay wrote only three, but hamilton also contributed some good stuff. Cspan whos your favorite of the three . Guest well, the most important of those documents is the declaration, i believe. I think the federalist papers are the commentary on the constitution, which is really a way of effectuating the ideals of the declaration. This is one problem that wasps have. They are very good at thinking, but they only do it in bursts. There are lightening flashes of brilliance and then decades of darkness before the next one. The attitude is, all right, we already thought of that. Whats the good of keeping on thinking . Cspan who are your favorite world figures . Guest world figures. Well, i just came from a lunch addressed by margaret thatcher. Shes no longer prime minister, but she was an awfully good one. Cspan what about in history . Would you put her up there high in history . Guest lower than some. I would say of World Leaders of the last 200 years, the best ul