|
Edward Digby Baltzell (1915 - 1996) was an American professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, best known for his coinage of the acronym WASP.
Career Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania into a wealthy, Episcopalian family, Baltzell attended St. Paul's School, an Episcopalian boarding school in New Hampshire. "Digby" then matriculated to Penn, graduating in 1940. After World War II service as a naval aviator he earned his doctorate degree from Columbia University. He later became an eminent Penn sociologist credited with the serendipitous invention of the acronym WASP, which stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. His term changed perceptions of American society and even American history bringing forth new insight into the workings of the ruling elite of America. Baltzell was appointed to the faculty of Sociology at Penn in 1947, and remained there until his retirement in 1986. Until his death in 1996, Baltzell was Emeritus Professor of History and Sociology. Some of his authored books include Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (1958), American Business Aristocracy (1962), The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964), Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership (1979), The Protestant Establishment Revisited (1991), Judgment and Sensibility: Religion and Stratification (1994), and Sporting Gentlemen: Men's Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar (1995). Baltzell's accomplishments include his appointment to the Danforth Fellow at the Society for Religion in Higher Education of the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1967-1968, Charles Warren Research Fellow at Harvard University in 1972-1973, and Guggenheim Fellow from 1978-1979. He was a member of the American Sociology Association, the American Studies Association, and the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Although raised in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, he had houses on Delancey Place in Philadelphia and in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Character and personality Those who knew "Digby" describe him as a dapper figure in tweed jackets and bow ties, popular in a slightly aloof way, but always courteous and accessible. Far more important to him than his personal preference for English clothes and for the ethos and manners of the gentleman was his conviction that aristocracy was necessary for the provision of leadership, both nationally and internationally. It was apparent to students in his classes that he disdained the use of mathematical and statistical models as crutches to support sociological hypotheses. During the Vietnam conflict he once asked a class of predominantly male students the odds of being shot if one were sent into combat in Southeast Asia. After dismissing a few statistical responses from students based upon their reading of newspapers and magazines, he gave the answer. "Fifty-Fifty," he declared. "Either you will or you won't." On August 17, 1996, while vacationing at his summer home, Baltzell was stricken with chest pains and hospitalized at Hyannis, then moved to Boston, where he passed away at Brigham and Women's Hospital at the age of 80. Baltzell--whose first wife, the artist Jane Piper, died in 1991--was survived by two daughters, Eve and Jan Baltzell and by his second wife, Jocelyn Carlson Baltzell and two step-daughters Justina Carlton and Julie Carlson Groves. He was also survived by a brother, Dr. William Hewson Baltzell, IV, and a niece and two nephews. He once dedicated one of his books to "all my undergraduate friends at the University of Pennsylvania, many of them grandsons of immigrants to the urban frontier, who, in spite of their possessing too many Jaguars and mink-coated mothers, have constantly been renewed by faith in the American Dream of unlimited opportunity". See also
Published Books | |||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||
 |
|
| |