ABSTRACT
Digby Baltzell was an unusual kind of sociologist. For the first academic term immediately following the end of the Second World War, he, the late Robert Bower, and I were the only new Columbia graduate students in sociology of “preppy” WASP upper-middle class origins, although I was an outlander from Canada. This inevitably drew us together, but Digby alone chose his own background as a subject for study in his sociological work. I don’t believe, by the way, that Digby coined the pleonasm “WASP,” as is often claimed, though he regrettably used it a lot in The Protestant Establishment (1964) which did a good deal to popularize it. It is as a historical sociologist of the American upper class that Digby is likely to be remembered, a chronicler of its rise and decline who used sociological theory to give a sympathetic account of its erstwhile social and political role.
