E. Digby Baltzell

Edward Digby Baltzell (November 14, 1915 – August 17, 1996) was an American sociologist, academic and author. He became an eminent professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and was credited with popularizing the acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). His work shed new light on the ruling elite of America, changing public perceptions of American society and history.

Baltzell was born in Philadelphia, to a wealthy Episcopalian family. "Digby" attended St. Paul's School, an Episcopal boarding school in New Hampshire. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of St. Anthony Hall, and graduated in 1940. He served as a naval aviator during World War II, then earned his doctorate from Columbia University.

Raised in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, he had houses on Delancey Place in Philadelphia and in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. An expert historian of Social Register clubs, he was asked to join many of them. He chose to be a member of only one, the Franklin Inn Club in Philadelphia, where he was a frequent luncheon guest during the last years of his life.

He joined the faculty of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947. He was described as a dapper figure in tweed jackets and bow ties, popular in a slightly aloof way, but always courteous and accessible. He could often be seen pedaling an old one-speed bicycle between his Delancey Place home near Rittenhouse Square and Penn's West Philadelphia campus. Far more important to him than his personal preference for English clothes and for the ethos and manners of the gentleman was his conviction that was necessary for the provision of leadership, both nationally and internationally. He felt that social stratification was inevitable, but that if the highest socio-economic levels were not accessible on the basis of merit (regardless of ethnic or racial background) society would degenerate into harmful caste-dictated divisions. His most productive years as an academic and social commentator corresponded to the actual relaxation of social barriers that took place in the late 1960s. It was apparent to students in his classes that he disdained the use of mathematical and statistical models as crutches to support sociological hypotheses. During the Vietnam War he once asked a class of predominantly male students the odds of being shot if one were sent into combat in Southeast Asia. After dismissing a few statistical responses from students, he gave the answer. "Fifty-Fifty," he declared. "Either you will or you won't." He dedicated one of his books to "all my undergraduate friends at the University of Pennsylvania, many of them grandsons of immigrants to the urban frontier, who, in spite of their possessing too many Jaguars and mink-coated mothers, have constantly been renewed by faith in the American Dream of unlimited opportunity".

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