Show Originally Aired: 7/17/2002 CALL 1 800-423-TALK
Snobs
Cover detail from "Snobbery: The American Version" Email to friend
"I dwell near the shades of Harvard, in the state of the sacred cod. Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God." The famed Boston quatrain laid out the rules of the WASPs, top of the heap in the world of 19th century snobs.
You took your place by birth, not bucks. Even in the roaring '20s, Jay Gatsby could never cross the Sound. But in modern America, WASPs are passé. What matters now is your tailor and taste, your school and your friends and your car and your clubs and your kids and your job and your voice and your health, and most of all, have you been on TV?
So says a Jag-driving, quotation-spouting child of the Jewish middle class, who enlists Coward, Wilde, and Proust to extol his work.
