At least Stephen Mansfield's book title doesn't sound cowardly

DIGRESSION: For a discussion of the importance of acknowledgment and recognition, see Warwick Wadlington's book Reading Faulknerian Tragedy (Cornell University Press, 1987). END OF DIGRESSION.

 

 

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

 

 

From early colonial times onward to about the 1960s, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males (WASPs) dominated the prestige culture in American culture.

 

But WASPs tended not to like people who were not white and/or people who were not Anglo-Saxon and/or people who were not Protestants.

 

For example, Thomas Paine was white and Anglo-Saxon, and he helped inspire the American Revolution with his famous pamphlet Common Sense (1776). But today he is usually not remembered as a Founding Father, because he also criticized Christianity. As everybody knows, some of the Founding Fathers were Deists, not Protestants. Basically, Paine was a Deist. But his talent for writing spirited prose criticizing Christianity won him spirited denunciations from Protestants.

 

In any event, the 1960s ushered in certain challenges to the admittedly fractious WASP cultural juggernaut that had dominated prestige culture in American culture. In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy, an Irish-American Catholic who was educated at Harvard, was narrowly elected president of the United States. President Kennedy supported the black civil rights movement led by the eloquent Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an ordained African American Baptist minister, who did his doctoral studies in theology at BostonUniversity.

 

The women's liberation movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s (also known as second-wave feminism) inspired a widespread crisis in masculine identity in American culture generally, not just in WASP males. Second-wave feminism was inspired, in part, by Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex (1949). But second-wave feminism in turn inspired a noisy backlash among certain white conservative Americans such as Rush Limbaugh.

 

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