ABSTRACT
The Protestant Establishment's power and authority, as well as its social class and status, rather than its ethnicity, were driving forces in American history and contemporary society. The vast majority of Americans were white, of Anglo-Saxon origin, and Protestant. The old local upper classes had been, by and large, based on social considerations of family, rather than on business connections and wealth, and they had been open to newer ethnic groups as well as to old-stock Protestant Americans of Anglo-Saxon heritage. A moral force within the putatively amoral world of politics and power elites, an establishment of leaders drawn from upper-class families can protect freedom in modern democratic societies. Such an establishment of political, business, cultural, religious, and educational leaders succeeds in its moral function when it sets, follows, and enforces rules of fair play in contests of power and opinion. The caste-like exclusivity and bigotry of the Protestant Establishment served to destroy its class authority.
