Peter and the Wasp

THE DECLINE OF THE WASP

by PETER SCHRAG

255 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

There is nothing quite like a master theory of history to set the old blood coursing. Master Theorist climbs his neat little mountain. He looks down upon the masses--ants, really. He hears the rush of centuries--a mere ticktock. Then he closes eyes and ears tight and pronounces his patented, stretch-fit perspective. Can any high match the high of an intellectual passing the aeons in review?

To the list of great pulse flutterers like Toynbee and Spengler must now be added the name of Peter Schrag. A knowledgeable and lively writer on the subject of education (Voices in the Classroom), Schrag has restricted himself here to American history. But alas, the apprentice pundit has not restricted himself enough. He is still the victim of that dread disease of Master Theorists: the single explanation.

What once made America great? What now makes America fairly awful? Schrag's answer to both questions: the WASP. The plot of Peter and the WASP goes like this:

Once upon a time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants--Puritans and the children of Puritans--clamped a code on America as tight as the pillory. Ramrod stiff with duty, tense with work ethic, the code operated splendidly on the frontier, and more or less adequately until after World War II. But then WASP "defaulted on their birthright of cussedness and irreverence" and turned into what Schrag calls the "plastic WASP." Still claiming to be the model--the only model--for a Good American, the plastic WASP has ended up a crabby tyrant of pallid respectability.

At this point, Schrag proceeds to potshot all the easy targets in sight. Disneyland and Playboy, Pat Nixon and Doris Day, Billy Graham and flavorless bread--blaming them all on the WASP.

Schrag's monolithic reading runs its natural course to self-parody. But the sad thing is that in overestimating the WASP--both as hero and as villain --he underestimates everybody else. One would never guess that the most talented playwright in American history was a black Irishman named Eugene O'Neill, or that the wisest philosopher was a half-Spaniard, George Santayana. One would never suspect that America's only native art, jazz, was the invention of Americans who were neither Anglo-Saxon nor white.

In straining to justify his theory of WASP domination, Schrag goes so far as to classify John F. Kennedy as a "perhaps" WASP. But even more regrettable than such thesis twisting is the author's failure to recognize that the case against the WASP has already been made--by WASPS. From Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James through Sinclair Lewis and J.P. Marquand, the WASP novelist has chosen as a favorite theme the moral decay within his breed.

Schrag is correct, if obvious, in decrying "conformity." He may even be partially correct in blaming conformity on the WASP. But in calling for "diversity and dissent," he fails to supply enough of these qualities to his own polemic. And what would he propose for a WASP-free America? After half seriously nominating Bella Abzug, Muhammad Ali, and Johnny Cash for President, he suggests legalizing marijuana, abortion and homosexuality, plus "decentralizing" schools and police forces.

Poor rugged-individualist Schrag! A nasty fate is in store. Before his manifesto has time to dry, all those despised WASP liberals will be lining up to sign their plastic John Hancocks to it.

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