An examination of WASP culture through the lives of some of its most prominent figures.

From politics to fashion, their style still intrigues us. WASPs produced brilliant reformers - Eleanor, Theodore, and Franklin Roosevelt - and inspired Cold Warriors - Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and Joe Alsop.

Yet they were unhappy. Descended from families that created the United States, WASPs felt themselves stunted by a civilization that thwarted their higher aspirations at every turn. They were the original lost generation.

Yet out of the neurotic ruins emerged a group of patriots devoted to public service and the renewal of society. In a study of the WASP revolution in American life, Michael Knox Beran brings the stories of Henry Adams and Henry Stimson, Learned Hand and Vida Scudder, John Jay Chapman and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to life. These characters were driven by a vision of human completeness, one that distinguishes them from the self-complacency of more recent power establishments founded on money and technical know-how.

WASPs shaped the America in which we live, so much so that it isn't easy to understand our problems without a knowledge of their mistakes.