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 “inbredâ€