ABSTRACT
White Protestant Americans: From National Origins to Religious Group, 1 by Charles H. Anderson, is part of the series Ethnic Groups in American Life, edited by Milton M. Gordon, which will include other monographs on Jewish Americans, Japanese Americans, black Americans, Mexican Americans, and so forth. The author has written a sensible and solid book on a slippery subject—slippery because there is some question as to whether “white Protestants” are best understood as one of the many “ethnic groups” in American life. Thus, the traditional sociology of ethnic relations in this country has largely concentrated on minority groups, especially those whose members came here after the Civil War from southern and eastern Europe or Asia and subsequently suffered various forms of discrimination in the course of their attempts to rise out of pariah and lower-class status into the mainstream of middle-class life. White Protestants, on the other hand, have always been and still are both a majority of our population and situated in the higher levels of middle-class life. They have been considered Americans rather than hyphenated Americans, discriminators rather than objects of discrimination. This has been the case ever since sociology became a recognized science in the early years of the twentieth century.
