Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico.

Listen. Do you hear that? In the corridors of power, the placid drone of the New England WASP—a soft and snooty echo for sure—has all but gone silent.

In a collapse slower but no less dramatic than that of the North American honey bee, the New England WASP has all but disappeared from its natural habitats—gone, almost, from the region’s 12 Senate seats, vanished from its six governors’ mansions. It’s part extinction, part retreat from invasive species, part departure for greener pastures (there have been sightings as far afield as the Council on Foreign Relations and Southern Florida).


This fall, after Rhode Islanders elect a new governor, only one old-line White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island—will likely remain in New England’s top political perches. Gov. Lincoln Chafee—he of the Rhode Island Chafees—is abdicating the Ocean State’s governorship after a single term, and the single WASP in the race to replace him, Herbert Claiborne Pell IV (you can call him “Clay”), is having a tough go of it. This, despite possessing the sort of sterling pedigree that he’d have trouble cramming into a New York Times wedding announcement: In addition to his diplomas from Harvard College and Georgetown Law, he’s the grandson of Clairborne de Borda Pell, a legendary Rhode Island senator (by way of St. George’s School and Princeton); in turn the son of Herbert Claiborne Pell Jr. of the Pomfret School, Harvard, Columbia and the (Hyde Park) Roosevelt administration. But, so far, the modern Pell is trailing his two Democratic primary opponents by a sizable margin.

It’s an ignoble end for a proud people. Once upon a time, climbing to the top of New England politics practically required membership in a mainline Protestant church, the remnants of an old shipping, banking or textile fortune, and your family’s name on either a nearby town or a building at the local Ivy League campus, preferably both (as in the Lowells, the namesakes of the Massachusetts municipality and the Harvard hall, among many other things). As Richard Brookhiser wrote in his 1990 book The Way of the WASP, “They wrote the rules; everyone else played by them.”

That’s no longer the case. And in Rhode Island, if Pell can’t overcome the serious obstacles he faces, the replacement of blue blood with new blood across the region will be nearly complete.

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Pell the younger—a member of the Coast Guard reserves who has played various roles in the Obama administration, most recently a six-month stint at the Department of Education as a deputy assistant secretary in charge of international and Foreign Language Education—jumped into the governor’s race in January, joining Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and Rhode Island treasurer Gina Raimondo. The only poll conducted since then puts him at a distant third. (Pell’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)

“He’s got a tough road, I think,” says Scott Mackay, a political analyst for Rhode Island Public Radio. Pell’s opponents have both served in high-profile positions and have high favorability ratings. Pell, 32, has not held office in Rhode Island and spent only summers there growing up, though he did establish residency in Newport while studying at Harvard and now has a home in Providence. More importantly for Pell, his late grandfather, having served the state for 36 years in the Senate, was a giant of Rhode Island politics and bestowed upon young Clay near-universal name recognition. “Without the Pell name, I’m not sure he would be viable at all,” MacKay says. Pell’s run will be a test of just how far the name can get him in the 21st century.

Where once the families of Newport would try to marry their children to the offspring of titled English aristocrats, Pell wed ice-skating royalty: the Olympian Michelle Kwan. Whether you see that as a step up probably depends on whether you own a copy of the Social Register—or whether you shop at the Whole Foods on North Main St. in Providence. Kwan caught flack in February for serving as a spokesperson for Coca-Cola while serving on the president’s Council on Fitness, Nutrition and Sports. An ad she appeared in for the soda maker also listed Kwan as a resident of Washington, D.C., not Providence. Lately, it’s become an open question whether the city is even a suitable habitat for a genteel New England WASP and his bride. In December, Kwan’s Prius was stolen (or maybe was misplaced, there’s some dispute) and then again, in February, it was pilfered again after Pell left the keys inside of it overnight (the adventures of the couple’s car have inspired a parody twitter account).

With Pell’s gubernatorial chances—to say nothing of his family’s vehicle—vanishing, the last powerful WASP in New England could be Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (of St. Paul’s School, Yale and Virginia Law). He ousted Chafee from the Senate in 2006 in a WASP grudge match: Their fathers had roomed together at Yale.

Now sure, New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan possesses a number of WASP credentials. She belongs to the United Church of Christ and her father, Robert Coldwell Wood, was schooled at Princeton and Harvard before serving as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Johnson administration. Her husband, Thomas E. Hassan, happens to be the principal of Phillips Exeter Academy. But—as a WASP snob would note—Maggie came to the Ivy League herself by way of public school and her impressive father hailed from St. Louis (and went to college on scholarship!), making him more Truman-esque than FDR-ish. And yes, Maine Sen. Angus King, a former two-term governor, is an Episcopalian, but he’s also the first of his line to hold high office, making him what Cicero would call a homo novus, or a new man.

What if Republican Charlie Baker wins the governorship in Massachusetts? The moderate Republican certainly looks like a classic New England WASP. Alas, Baker, too, attended public high school, in Needham, Mass., and his brother once confided to the Boston Globe, “I don’t think Charlie ever felt at home at Harvard.”

That fish-out-of-water quality makes him a far cry from former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, a fellow Republican whose family claimed countless Harvard degrees dating back to the ’50s — the 1650s. Weld may have been the last New England WASP in high office to really own the identity. Once, when Massachusetts Senate President Billy Bulger—a Catholic and the brother of the legendary Boston gangster Whitey Bulger—cracked wise about Weld’s lineage, the Brahmin governor famously responded with a correction, “My ancestors, actually, weren’t on the Mayflower,” Weld said. “They sent the servants over first to get the cottage ready.”

Indeed, Weld’s reign may well have represented the high-water mark for WASP rule in New England. His political career came to an end in 1996 when he lost his bid to unseat incumbent Senator John Kerry, a Roman Catholic who nonetheless seems WASP-y through and through. But the “Kerry” moniker was actually an invention of his Austrian Jewish grandparents, who changed their name from “Kohn” and converted to Catholicism at the beginning of the 20th century. His irrepressible WASP-ness was inherited from his mother, a member of the Forbes family and a descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

These days, it seems the most politically successful WASPs from New England earn high office in camouflage—like George W. Bush (of Philips Andover, Yale and Harvard), the son of a Yankee president and a Connecticut senator, who nonetheless ran for president himself as a Texas cowboy.

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Should we be surprised it’s come to this for the WASP? Their dominance—a feature of New England politics since the Puritans established the region as a Protestant theocracy and began training their clergy at Harvard College—showed signs of cracking as early as the end of the 19th century, thanks to European immigration. Not long after, Bostonians were electing Irish Catholic mayors and the well-heeled newcomer families, like the Kennedys, were sending their kids to schools once reserved for the Yankees.

According to Garrison Nelson, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont who is preparing to present at a conference in Vienna on “the end of America’s political WASPocracy,” the 1952 Massachusetts Senate race, in which the Catholic John F. Kennedy ousted the WASP Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., was something of a turning point in the region. “It’s quintessential because it’s two Harvard guys going toe-to-toe,” said Nelson of the race. “Why is Kennedy more acceptable than some others? Because he has the credential that allows the transition to take place.” New money has been encroaching on old politics and mores in New England ever since (In the ’90s people even began bringing Hummers to Nantucket—like they’d never seen cobblestone streets before.)

Lisa Birnbach, author of The Official Preppy Handbook and America’s preeminent WASP-watcher, attributes the fading of WASPs from politics in part to their distaste for the eroded decorum of public life. “I think public service has become a very difficult and unattractive career move,” she says. “It does force the old-line WASPs … to reconsider whether they want to submit themselves and their families to that kind of cruelty and that kind of snark.”

In New England, there are now more people of French or French Canadian descent than of English descent, not to mention Italians and Irish. Nationally, mainline Protestants make up only 18 percent of the population, according to Pew. For sure, mainline Protestants will not stop holding office in the U.S. and there are few tears to be shed for the seeming decline of well-heeled, white politicians of any stripe. But the fact that WASP families can no longer produce shoe-in senators and governors is emblematic of a shifting political landscape.

Since the Civil War era, when New England WASPs by-and-large supported abolition and opposed the power of the immigrant-heavy Democratic Party, they’ve been a Republican lot. But the national party has, of course, evolved away from the New England moderates. “For years, New Englanders elected moderate Republicans of well-born status,” says MacKay. “With the Republican Party being taken over by these old Confederacy people, there doesn’t seem to be any room.” That’s what former Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords, a WASP who left politics, concluded when he defected from the GOP in 2001. Chafee, after losing his Senate seat as Republican in 2006 and winning the governorship as an independent in 2010, became a Democrat last year.

At this point, a prospective candidate might well count on a couple rules of thumb: If your great-grandfather has a Wikipedia page, your family’s turn at the wheel is probably up. If your money was old by the time John D. Rockefeller made his first million, there’s probably not enough of it left to fund a post-Citizens United political campaign (Pell has lent his campaign $1 million of his inheritance).

“It’s heartbreaking in a way,” says Birnbach, though not everyone is heartbroken. In 2010, taking note of the fact that the Supreme Court was on the brink of going from majority WASP to WASP-free in the space of five years, Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman praised the transition noting that the WASP ruling class had willfully sewn the seeds of its own destruction, letting Catholics, Jews and others into Ivy League schools and other powerful clubs, like the federal bench, if slowly, then ceding authority without violence. Indeed, the WASP-ocracy has wound down with stereotypical civility, says Garrison Nelson, the University of Vermont professor, who says that as far as political overlords go, New England’s WASPs had class. “They were polite and kind,” he told me. “And they didn’t thump each other.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified John Winthrop as governor of New England Bay Colony.