[Bret L]

Samuel Eliot Morison And America’s Displaced Protestant Establishment

By Steve Sailer

"As I've been rereading Professor Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's three-volume Oxford History of the American People from 1964, I've been thinking about the old Protestant Establishment.

Morison (1887-1976) was himself a leading member of the Protestant
Establishment (liberal Boston Brahmin wing). His extraordinary career
as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian (for his biography of
Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, for which he had organized a
research expedition by sailing ship from Spain to the New World)
turned middle-aged fighting naval officer exemplifies how an old-
fashioned Establishment that self-confidently viewed itself as holding
its country in trust for its posterity felt it ought to behave.

Of course, you aren’t supposed to think like that anymore. Hence, the
top people now treat America like a short-term transaction rather than
a long-term investment.

I was reminded of Morison when I read neoconservative David Brooks’s
thoughtful February 18th New York Times column, The Power Elite, about
the historic shift in clout from what he calls the “inbred” Protestant
Establishment to what he somewhat deceptively designates as the new
“meritocratic” elite:

“Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby
Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills
called The Power Elite. … Since then, we have opened up opportunities
for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and
members of many other groups.”

(As I wrote at the time, what Brooks is really talking about is the
rise of the Jews. For example, Jews make up a mere 2% of the
population, but 35% of the 2009 Forbes 400 and half of the 2009
Atlantic 50 ranking of the most influential pundits. That’s a lot more
“inbred” that the Protestant Establishment—perhaps 60% of Americans
were white Protestants in 1910. Indeed, even as late as the 2008
Presidential election, white Protestants cast some 42% of the votes.
They went overwhelmingly for McCain.)

And, according to Brooks, it’s not even clear that this more “smart
and hard-working” new elite is actually providing us with better
leadership:

“Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected
blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. …
Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a
half-century ago?”

According to Brooks, one reason is that

“[T]ime horizons have shrunk. If you were an old blue blood, you
traced your lineage back centuries, and there was a decent chance that
you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly
encouraged long-term thinking. Now people respond to ever-faster
performance criteria—daily stock prices or tracking polls.”

Of course, the old blue bloods weren’t thinking just of handing down
their companies, but also of handing down their country.

This now obsolescent multigenerational perspective inspired the
central scene in the 2006 period movie about an uber-WASP CIA agent
played by Matt Damon, The Good Shepherd, which was directed by Robert
De Niro and scripted by Eric Roth. In a 1961 conversation between with
a mafia don (played by De Niro’s old buddy Joe Pesci), Roth’s dialogue
spelled out even more graphically than Brooks’ column the new elites’
combination of resentment toward and grudging respect for the past’s
Protestant Establishment:

Joseph Palmi: “You know, we Italians have our families and the church,
the Irish have the homeland, the Jews their tradition ... What do you
guys have?”

Edward Wilson: “We have the United States of America. The rest of you
are just visiting.”

Morison, the last Harvard professor to ride his horse to work,
embodied that sense of long-term responsibility. At the time of Pearl
Harbor, he was 54-years-old. The U.S. Navy’s history website reports:

“Shortly after the United States entered World War II, Dr. Morison
proposed to his friend President Roosevelt to write the operational
history of the US Navy from the inside, by taking part in operations
and writing them up afterwards.”

FDR, a fellow yachtsman, agreed. Morison (who had previously left his
Harvard professorship to be a private in the U.S. Army during WWI)
spent much of WWII in combat zones, such as off Okinawa during the
kamikaze attacks, as an aged naval officer. The Navy promoted Morison
to Rear Admiral upon his retirement in 1951. This gives his 15-volume
official history of the U.S. Navy in WWII particular intensity and
empathy.

For example, Morison writes in his one-volume summary, The Two-Ocean
War, of the night Battle of Kolombangara. Admiral Walden W. Ainsworth,
holding his fire because he was uncertain if the blips on the radar
screen were friendly or unfriendly, allowed Japanese destroyers to
close enough to launch torpedoes that struck three of his ships: "I
was in the flag plot with him, seeing and feeling the agony of
decision …"

Was the Protestant Establishment as homogenous and inbred as 21st
Century Jewish writers like Brooks and Roth tend to assume?

Not on the evidence of Morison’s Oxford History, which is largely
devoted to chronicling struggles between WASPs--such as Jefferson v.
Hamilton, North v. South, and Robber Barons v. Progressives v.
Populists.

The reality is that a country doesn’t particularly need ethnic
diversity to have ideological diversity. Indeed, ethnic diversity
often short-circuits disinterested intellectual diversity, channeling
every thought into a Who? Whom? rut. As Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew
observed, "In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with
your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance
with race and religion."

Written at the high water mark of liberalism in 1964, Morison’s Oxford
History celebrates the triumph of liberalism / progressivism, of what
Morison called his own "Jefferson-Jackson-F.D. Roosevelt line" over
noveau riche businessmen and other benighted interests.

Strikingly, Morison’s history matter-of-factly treats immigration
restriction as an issue highly popular with his own Progressive /
labor / populist left-of-center alliance. He writes of the now-
sacrosanct Ellis Island years: “One basic cause of the laborer’s
standstill [in wages] was unrestricted immigration … Their competition
kept wages low and hampered the unions’ attempts to organize…”

Since 1964, of course, the history of the long struggle for
immigration limitations has been rewritten to fit the new elites’
ethnic preconceptions.

Was the Protestant Establishment “inbred”? The truth is that there
were multiple Establishments.

The manufacturing elite tended to be open to hard-charging Protestant
farm boys whose mechanical genius overcame their obscure backgrounds.
Henry Ford is the most obvious example.

But America’s liberal intellectual / social reformer elites tended to
come from a well-bred caste, much as in Britain where a striking
number of the Liberal Party’s leading thinkers originated in a small
number of families, such as the Darwins, Huxleys, Keyneses, Arnolds,
Wedgwoods, and Millses.

Samuel Eliot Morison's middle name reflected his mother’s maiden name.
The Eliots were one of the most prominent clans of American
intellectuals. Morison was aware of the usual charges of snobbishness
and inbreeding, so he argued in 1960 in his New England Quarterly that
at least compared to the other Boston Brahmins

“…the Eliots, however, were never a close family corporation like the
Cabots, Adamses or Lowells. They did not marry within the family group
or attempt to bring up their children together or live in the same
city block.”

The Eliots were descended from Andrew Eliot, who moved to Boston in
the 1660s from the English village of East Coker. The most famous of
this Andrew Eliot’s direct male-line descendants, the poet T.S. Eliot,
entitled the second of his Four Quartets "East Coker." It begins: "In
my beginning is my end" and ends, "In my end is my beginning".

T.S. Eliot was a rare conservative among the progressive American
Eliots. Samuel Eliot Morison’s great uncles included Charles W. Eliot,
the president of Harvard from 1869-1909 and perhaps the most important
figure in its history, and Charles Eliot Norton, one of the Republic's
most celebrated idealists and men of letters. In a profile of Norton,
Morison shed some light on the origins of American intellectual
liberalism as an Old Money phenomenon:

“Charles Eliot Norton … was first cousin to Charles William Eliot,
President of Harvard University, and to my grandfather Samuel Eliot,
who for a few years presided over Trinity College, Hartford. The
Nortons belonged to the New England ‘Brahmin caste’ of scholars and
divines; … Samuel Eliot, a Boston merchant who lived largely in the
eighteenth century, made a fortune as a merchant-importer, but also
became a patron of learning. He endowed a chair of Greek literature at
Harvard College, probably at the suggestion of his cousin the Reverend
Andrew Eliot, from whom T.S. Eliot is descended.”

As far back as the early 19th Century, the Eliots had chosen socially
conscious uplift over business:

“Even before Samuel Eliot died, in 1820, the ‘North End Eliots’
decided that they had made enough money, and, like other old Boston
families, devoted themselves largely to learning, education, and
various good causes. ...”

To Morison, American liberalism was invented by his ancestors, the
descendants of the Puritans. As he made clear in his Oxford History,
rudimentary versions of most American progressive movements, including
civil rights for blacks, feminism, and the rudiments of the ideology
of environmentalism (Thoreau's Walden), were up and running in the
greater Boston area by the 1840s.

In other words, American liberalism was invented by the oldest and
most socially respectable hereditary elite in the country's least
ethnically diverse region, and imposed from the top down.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Perhaps, as the ever-diplomatic Chou En-lai famously said of the
French Revolution, it's too early to tell. But it's clearly a thing
that ought to be kept in mind.

Morison died in the spring of 1976 at age 88. Having had just finished
reading his Oxford History of the American People for the first time,
I was sad that he hadn't lived quite long enough to see the Tall Ships
parade in New York Harbor at the Bicentennial on July 4, 1976.

The epitaph Morison chose for himself was "Dream dreams, then write
them -- aye, but live them first!"


http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100228_morison.htm

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Mar 1, 1:10*am, Bret L wrote:
Samuel Eliot Morison And America’s Displaced Protestant Establishment

By Steve Sailer

So is Sailer good in bed, Bratzi, or are you two still in the fantasy
stage?

You're just a groupie and a dull one at that.

[GeoSynch]

Jilly drooled:

Samuel Eliot Morison And America’s Displaced Protestant Establishment

By Steve Sailer

So is Sailer good in bed ... ?

Inquiring Jillys wanna know.

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Mar 2, 3:55*am, "GeoSynch" wrote:
Jilly drooled:

Samuel Eliot Morison And America’s Displaced Protestant Establishment
By Steve Sailer
So is Sailer good in bed ... ?

Inquiring Jillys wanna know.

So don't keep us in suspense. Is he good, Sugar?

[GeoSynch]

Jilly's on the prowl:

Samuel Eliot Morison And America’s Displaced Protestant Establishment

By Steve Sailer

So is Sailer good in bed ... ?

Inquiring Jillys wanna know.

So don't keep us in suspense. Is he good, Sugar?

Between mouthfuls and lookin' for another bellyful again, are you?

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Mar 3, 4:05*am, "GeoSynch" wrote:
Jilly's on the prowl:

Samuel Eliot Morison And America’s Displaced Protestant Establishment
By Steve Sailer
So is Sailer good in bed ... ?
Inquiring Jillys wanna know.
So don't keep us in suspense. Is he good, Sugar?

Between mouthfuls and lookin' for another bellyful again, are you?

Nice try. You implied that you knew. I can see you were bull****ting
again.

[Glanbrok[_2_]]

On Mar 3, 10:08*pm, "Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!"
wrote:
Between mouthfuls and lookin' for another bellyful again, are you?

Nice try. You implied that you knew. I can see you were bull****ting
again.

Four out of five service branches want to repeal DADT. Fortunately,
the true-red republicans in the Senate can't see why they should take
that radical step. (Repealing a law requires 60 votes.)

For the time being, Stynchie's hatreds are safe from the Liberal
Conspiracy of Tolerance and Common Sense. whew!

[GeoSynch]

The pustulated carbuncle that answers to the name "MidYut" seeped:

Four out of five service branches want to repeal DADT.

Sounds vaguely like the commercial for Dentyne gum and the dentists who'd
recommend it.

Fortunately, the true-red republicans in the Senate can't see why they should
take that radical step. (Repealing a law requires 60 votes.)

And some squishy Dems are getting a bit squeamish about that infanticidal
procedure called abortion and the impact its inclusion in the health care bill
would have on their re-election prospects.

For the time being, Stynchie's hatreds are safe from the Liberal Conspiracy of
Tolerance and Common Sense. whew!

What burnished Orwellian doublespeak you spout there, 'lil Georgie. Liberals are
the most fatuous paragons of intolerance if you don't toe the politically
correct tightrope line.

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Mar 4, 11:48*pm, "GeoSynch" wrote:
The pustulated carbuncle that answers to the name "MidYut" seeped:

Four out of five service branches want to repeal DADT.

Sounds vaguely like the commercial for Dentyne gum and the dentists who'd
recommend it.

Almost exactly except not even close.

Fortunately, the true-red republicans in the Senate can't see why they should
take that radical step. (Repealing a law requires 60 votes.)

And some squishy Dems are getting a bit squeamish about that infanticidal
procedure called abortion and the impact its inclusion in the health care bill
would have on their re-election prospects.

So a conglomeration of rapidly-dividing cells in the first trimester
is an "infant" now. That's an interesting (but dull) intepretation.

Do I have to abide by your religiosity?

For the time being, Stynchie's hatreds are safe from the Liberal Conspiracy of
Tolerance and Common Sense. whew!

What burnished Orwellian doublespeak you spout there, 'lil Georgie. Liberals are
the most fatuous paragons of intolerance if you don't toe the politically
correct tightrope line.

According to those paragons of conservative tolerance Glenn Beck and
Rush Limbaugh.

Do you have any original thoughts, Sugar, or is regurgitating
propaganda all you're capable of?

[GeoSynch]

Jilly jived:

Pudge: ... Liberal Conspiracy of Tolerance and Common Sense."

Me: "Liberals are the most fatuous paragons of intolerance..."

Jilly: "... paragons of conservative tolerance Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh."

Ham-handed deflection attempt rather amusing, silly Jilly. LoL!

Do you have any original thoughts

That's a real hoot spouted by someone completely brainwashed by modern
variations of military MK-ULTRA mind control techniques.

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Mar 6, 2:46*pm, "GeoSynch" wrote:
Jilly jived:

Pudge: ... Liberal Conspiracy of Tolerance and Common Sense."

Me: "Liberals are the most fatuous paragons of intolerance..."

Jilly: "... paragons of conservative tolerance Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh."

Ham-handed deflection attempt rather amusing, silly Jilly. LoL!

LoL! Thanks for the tacit agreement that conservatives are far worse!
LoL!

Do you have any original thoughts

That's a real hoot spouted by someone completely brainwashed by modern
variations of military MK-ULTRA mind control techniques.

Um, whatever, Sugar. Here's a question for you:

Hum, ho hum?

[Boon[_2_]]

On Mar 6, 7:57*pm, "Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!"
wrote:
On Mar 6, 2:46*pm, "GeoSynch" wrote:

Jilly jived:

Pudge: ... Liberal Conspiracy of Tolerance and Common Sense."

Me: "Liberals are the most fatuous paragons of intolerance..."

Jilly: "... paragons of conservative tolerance Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh."

Ham-handed deflection attempt rather amusing, silly Jilly. LoL!

LoL! Thanks for the tacit agreement that conservatives are far worse!
LoL!

Do you have any original thoughts

That's a real hoot spouted by someone completely brainwashed by modern
variations of military MK-ULTRA mind control techniques.

Um, whatever, Sugar. Here's a question for you:

Hum, ho hum?

Exactly. These idiot trolls couldn't possibly be more boring.

[GeoSynch]

Jilly tilted:

Ham-handed deflection attempt rather amusing, silly Jilly. LoL!

Thanks for the tacit agreement that conservatives are far worse!

Only in your addled mind would that constitute "tacit agreement."

Do you have any original thoughts

That's a real hoot spouted by someone completely brainwashed by modern
variations of military MK-ULTRA mind control techniques.

Um, whatever, Sugar.

Now *that* constitutes tacit agreement you're a programmed robot.

Here's a question for you: Hum, ho hum?

The "bored diva" routine again? Go swoon on your chaise lounge.

[GeoSynch]

BaBoon howled:

Exactly. These idiot trolls couldn't possibly be more boring.

Translation: "Eek-eek! Ouh-ouh! Me want banana! And diet soda, too! Ouh-ouh!
Eek-eek!"