Who are the WASPs?

In the outdated term WASP, the “P” for “Protestant” was not just an indication of religious belief. It was not just an issue of whether a person went to a Catholic church or a Protestant church on Sundays. It referred to the “Protestant work ethic,” a belief that work is a virtuous activity. It valued hard work, thrift, and self-discipline and saw worldly success as a sign of an individual’s salvation.

In his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Max Weber wrote that modern capitalism was the unintended result of early Protestant beliefs. Protestants were people who made money but did not spend it. They became thrifty, hard-working, literate citizens who drove forward a country’s economy. In New England, this took the form of “Yankee ingenuity” and became an essential part of that region’s self-image.

New Englanders were convinced that their beliefs were superior and that all later immigrants should adopt those beliefs in order to become truly “American.” These New Englanders often failed to see that later immigrants brought their own respective work ethics.

The new immigrants did not need earlier New Englanders to tell them how to live or how to work hard. The new immigrants were already eager to succeed and they were willing to work hard if given the chance. But they did not want to “assimilate” and become just like the Yankee capitalists. And the new immigrants did not want to be thought of as second-class citizens because their ancestry did not date back to the “Mayflower.”

(255 words)