JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 15

         ADMISSIONS STANDARDS AT THE BIG THREE WERE
         SET UP TO HELP THE RICH KIDS GET INTO COLLEGE

    Especially when coupled with the high cost of tuition, the net result of these requirements was that the students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were overwhelmingly from well-to-do backgrounds. Almost exclusively white [though in some years Harvard and Yale enrolled a handful of blacks] and composed largely of graduates of elite private schools, the student bodies represented the most privileged strata of society. Though Harvard ---which had the most flexible entrance requirements and the most generous scholarship program --- was a partial exception, the Big Three were strikingly homogenous, not only in class and race, but also in religion and ethnicity. At Princeton, whose country club reputation was not without justification, Catholics and Jews together made up only 5 percent of the freshman class in 1900. At Yale, which was in a city with a large immigrant population, the combined Catholic-Jewish population was just 15 percent in 1908. Even Harvard, which was in a dense urban area with large numbers of immigrants from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe, the Catholic proportion of the freshmen was 9 percent in 1908, with Jews roughly the same number. 
   These were by no means trivial numbers, especially at Harvard and Yale, but it was clear that the same relatively compact social group predominated at each school : old-stock, high-status Protestants, especially Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. The Big Three were, in short, overwhelmingly populated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs---a term coined more than a half century later by the sociologist and chronicler of the WASP upper class, E. Digby Baltzell. 

THE PROTESTANT UPPER CLASS AND THE CREATION OF A CULTURAL IDEAL 

   As the nineteenth century ended, the Protestant upper class stood at the summit of a nation that was more powerful than ever before. For the first time in history, the United States was a genuine global power ; its population of 76 million far surpassed that of Great Britain, Germany, or France, and its economy was the most dynamic in the world. In 1898, the United States had made the fateful decision to enter into a war with Spain ---- "the splendid little war" that made the United States a colonial power, owning the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico along with de facto control of Cuba. The United States took its place among the great imperial powers in a world increasingly divided into zones controlled by the major European powers. 
   Though members of the Protestant upper class ---notably Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Alfred T. Mahan --- were at the forefront of the imperial project, the WASP elite was in fact bitterly divided over America's new imperial role. Indeed, it was the graduates of Harvard and Yale who made up most of the members of the Anti-Imperialist League. And it was patricians such as William James, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Charles W. Eliot---joined by a diverse group that included Jane Addams, Samuel Gompers, Mark Twain, and Andrew Carnegie ---who led the opposition to the annexation of the Philippines. Condemning "Expansion, World-Power, Inferior Races, Calvination, Duty-and-Destiny" as "twaddle and humbug," the anti-imperialists ringingly reaffirmed America's tradition of anticolonialism---after all, the United States owed its very origins to its colonial struggle against Great Britain. 
   Yet, the proponents of a new and more muscular American global role carried the day, their cause strengthened by the brute reality that European powers had gained control of one-fifth of the world's land and one-tenth of its population between 1870 and 1900 and that recent years had seen the rise of Japan and Germany as colonial powers. In the wake of the new global position of the United States, many white Americans[though not Irish Americans ], as the historian Nell Painter has noted, "renounced their traditional anglophobia [a legacy of the American Revolution and, especially the War of 1812] to proclaim the kindredness of the English-speaking people and the natural superiority of Anglo-Saxons." The ideology of Anglo-Saxonism, though hardly new, received a powerful boost from America's entry into the ranks of imperial nations. Among the core tenets of the ideology was the conviction that, not only blacks, Native Americans, and Asians, but also the burgeoning population of Italians, Jews, Poles, Irish, and other immigrants lacked the distinctly Anglo-Saxon talent for self-governance. 
   During the three decades before 1900, the Protestant elite had become  true national upper class. Under the stimulus of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and nationalization of what had been a largely regional economy, the upper class developed a set of institutions that helped weld it into a national entity that bridged the cultural and social divide between the old patricians and the nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age. Among the upper-class institutions that either were invented or came to prominence in the 1880s and 1890s were the Social Register [its first edition was published in New York City in 1888], the country club, the exclusive summer resort, and the elite men's social clubs that arose in cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.