Complaining Because They Won't

 Last month, the Sunday New York Times Book Review carried a piece by David Brooks on Tom Wolfe. This was part or all of an introduction Brooks wrote to a volume comprising Wolfe's pieces "Radical Chic" and "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers". Two weeks later, there were two letters about the piece, one praising Wolfe, and one putting in a good word for the Bernsteins. Nobody addressed what I thought the strangest few paragraphs.

It appears that the old WASP world of Manhattan could trace its ancestry to Debrett's Peerage or the Almanach de Gotha:

The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn’t like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines — the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple.

But the names offered do not convince:

 the old blue-blood Protestant elite — the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers

John Jacob Astor, founder of the family, was the son of a butcher. John D. Rockefeller's father was not especially reputable. The Whitneys went a good way back in the northeastern US, yet I suspect that the reflective among them would have agreed with Mrs. Archer in The Age of Innocence:

 "Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga. These are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word."

 Whatever the case, the new families did not have it so easy:

The members of the new cultural elite could never be so secure. Their status — their very reason for being — was based on their own superior sensibility. They lived by their wits and their public attitudes.

That sixty years ago in the Midwest I heard of Leonard Bernstein had nothing to do with his superior sensibility, except so far as it was reflected in his composing and directing music. I knew no more of his public attitudes than of George Szell's. (Of Szell's I knew only that he thought very poorly of persons arriving late at concerts.)

Then a few weeks later, the print edition carried a review by Jennifer Szalai of Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich. There I was interested to read of

the easy lie of a noxious conspiracy theory in place of the hard truth, that Germany was incapable of defeating the Anglo-American coalition.

The French losses in World War I were about 15% greater than those of the British Empire; the American losses were not a tenth of the French. And Russia may have suffered more casualties than France. If any crank wrote to complain about the salience of the Anglo-American coalition, the letter did not make it into the Book Review.