ABSTRACT
Jews living in specific environments, for their part, perceive certain distinctive WASP traits that also have little to do with formal religious affiliation or with traditional hostile stereotypes. E. Digby Baltzell's demonstrates that the denial of membership to Jews is closely related to the almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon composition of the top leadership of the largest corporations. The doctrine of leveling of a fraternal commonwealth in which all social differences are seen as secondary and even accidental, has not played much of a role in the ideology of American liberalism, although it has been central to British and European socialist thought. American liberals have tended to concentrate their efforts on removing the barriers to mobility represented by hereditary class and racial or ethnic differences, and American sociologists have demonstrated the existence of these barriers with muckraking zeal. Although C. Wright Mills's "power elite" is not identical with Baltzell's "Protestant establishment", Mills attributed enormous importance to upper-class family bonds and old-school-tie loyalties.
