So says David Zaring, while Orin Kerr reminds us that correlation is not causation.
I don’t know where the expression “white shoe” came from. My tennis-shoes are white, while I only wear dark shoes for job interviews or formal occasions. I first heard of it from this post at n/a’s race/history/evolution notes blog, which makes the old elitist WASP firms look rather dim for not pursuing an evolutionarily stable strategy.
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August 22, 2010 at 9:16 am
This kind of white shoes.
The source is white ”bucks,” the casual, carefully scuffed buckskin shoes with red rubber soles and heels worn by generations of college men at Ivy League schools. Many of these kids, supposedly never changing their beloved footgear, went on to become masters of the universe on Wall Street and in the best-known law firms.
In its early days, the adjective was used in an envious, resentful way by those with less-privileged backgrounds; now it is either a dispassionate description of elitism or a passionate derogation of old-fogeyism.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/09/magazine/on-language-gimme-the-ol-white-shoe.html
“White Shoe” Firm
September 1953, Esquire, pg. 59:
HOW SHOE CAN YOU GET?
America’s premier student of snobs and brows peers through the ivied windows at hallowed precincts and their new social hierarchy of White Shoe, Brown Shoe, Black Shoe
by RUSSELL LYNES
(…)
Shoe
At Yale there is a system for pigeonholing the members of the college community which is based on the word “shoe.” Shoe bears some relation to the word chic, and when you say that a fellow is “terribly shoe” you mean that he is a crumb in the upper social crust of the college, though a more kindly metaphor might occur to you. You talk of a “shoe” fraternity or a “shoe” crowd, for example, but you can also describe a man’s manner of dress as “shoe.” The term derives, as you probably know, from the dirty white bucks which are the standard collegiate footwear (you can buy new ones already dirty in downtown New York to save you the embarrassment of looking as though you hadn’t had them all your life), but the system of pigeonholing by footwear does not stop there. It encompasses the entire community under the terms White Shoe, Brown Shoe, and Black Shoe. (…)
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/white_shoe_firm/
White-shoe law firms are “owned and run by members of the WASP elite who are generally conservative,” says Princeton University’s WordNet. Princeton should know. The term “white-shoe” originally referred to elite college men who wore white buckskin shoes in the 1950s at Ivy League schools. The Oxford English Dictionary credits J. D. Salinger with the first use of the term in 1957. “Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines,” said the protagonist of his novel, Franny and Zooey, an excerpt of which ran in The New Yorker. “Give me an honest con man any day.”
Historically, the term “white-shoe” conveyed class envy and a gentle ridicule of the educated effete. The wealthy could afford special shoes for boating, tennis, and other genteel pursuits, and in the summer they wore white bucks—perhaps with a bow tie and a seersucker suit—to the exclusive Wall Street firms where they worked. School connections played a central role in maintaining the boundaries of the white-shoe class. In 1962, more than 70 percent of the lawyers in Wall Street law firms had graduated from Harvard, Columbia, or Yale. White-shoe also implied exclusion of anyone who was not a WASP male—particularly Jews, who in the 1950s and 1960s were trying to break into establishment firms.
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2005/toa_sepoct05.msp
August 22, 2010 at 4:39 pm
n/a nails the white shoes connection.
You have a similar dynamic in Investment Banks with the rise of Jewish firms like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. However, I think a good part of this story also has to do with the rise of Eastern European Jewry. The German Jews, which dominated law firms and Wall Street before WWII, were fairly straight-laced, and largely seem to have assimilated and disappeared. E European Jews were far more cutthroat, and seem to have dominated Jewish firms after WWII.
One corollary would be that the influx of former USSR Jews would shake things up as well, which one sees perhaps in Google .
August 22, 2010 at 11:14 pm
Paul Gottfried (of German-Jewish descent) has written about that distinction. This from fans of I. F. Stone (eastern european) highlight it as one of the differences between him and Walter Lippmann.
August 24, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Back to the point about the economic and political opportunities opened by serving as a federal prosecutor in the southern district of New York – this is a specific and egregious example of the broader baleful phenomenon by which the post of district attorney, county attorney, or state attorney-general is used as a careerist’s point of departure. It invites abuses as the “crusading prosecutor” seeks publicity for himself and his cases. Remember when Rudy Giuliani was the federal prosecutor in the southern district of New York? All the corporate bigshots who were hauled off to the hoosegow in handcuffs in his white-collar crime cases, with full news media coverage? The media weren’t there when most of them were discharged without conviction, or even the opening of a trial. Patrick Fitzgerald’s having obtained conviction on only one of 24 counts against Rod Blagojevich, after all his bluster about “crime sprees” and Lincoln turning over in his grave is another illustration. It also invites corruption, particularly as seen in several states where a state’s attorney-general has colluded with the private bar to make his jurisdiction a haven for certain types of lucrative litigation.
I’ve often wondered if the system used in Britain and most of the Commonwealth would not be better: a director of public prosecutions, with a small office staff, hires private-sector barristers to prosecute criminal cases on behalf of the crown. No political or economic benefit accrues to these barristers except what they legitimately earn as a result of their professional competence. Today they may represent the Queen; in another case, the defendant. The familiar American prosecutor of the Giuliani or Fitzgerald type, with his flair for publicity and penchant for exploitation, is unknown in these countries. That seems to me to be a great benefit of their system.
August 24, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Good point about Giuliani but you forgot Spitzer.
I’m not so confident that merely contracting out will accomplish much. I think there are all sorts of confounding differences between the two political/legal systems.
August 29, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Spitzer is certainly another illustration. I certainly didn’t omit him for partisan reasons – the role of crusading prosecutor has been played by members of both parties. Earl Warren is probably the most prominent example of the species. He used his reputation as a tough district attorney as a stepping-stone to the California attorney-general’s office, thence to the governorship, and ended up as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, without ever having served on any lower court. The drastic consequences for subsequent American law are evident from history.
It is an interesting exercise to compare Warren as a type of chief justice with his rough contemporary, Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard of Aldbourne. Goddard was a product of the typical cursus honorum of the English bar, never having served in elected office. In sharp contrast to Warren he protected the civil liberties of the innocent against government intrusion, while being a severe judge of the guilty. Rather than granting extensive appeals, he was prompt to dismiss them. It is interesting to consider how different our country might be today had it had a Chief Justice like Goddard rather than Warren.
August 31, 2010 at 6:27 pm
I’d never heard of Goddard before. Warren is an understudied figure for the effect he had. Although I suppose I am imputing too much to him for the decisions of the “Warren Court”. I knew that Warren had interred the Japanese, but I didn’t know much about his time as crusading prosecutor.
September 30, 2010 at 4:15 am
Did German Jews dominate law firms before World War II? That doesn’t match my intuition. I think a stronger case can be made for investment banks and media. I don’t see a clear jewish competition to the WASP firms until Wachtel in the 1960′s + year, thanks in large part to Wachtel being more innovative in pay structures (I’d call it riskier, but if you’re smarter and know you are it’s not riskier) and taking more repugnant cases.
Although I don’t know how to classify Skadden with its weird surnames, nor do I know their pre-world war II history (or if they even existed).
Obviously in 2010 jews are very powerful in law, including at the very top. It seems to me that in insurance and management consulting, new england wasps have retained a larger share of power.
October 1, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Skadden was founded in 1948. Of the current partners listed by Wikipedia, Flom’s article is said to be the child of Jewish immigrants (Slate, Skadden & Meagher sound English/Irish while the Arp surname apparently comes from north Germany). Friedman, Aaron, Frank & Birnbaum sound like Jewish surnames. The Directors seem more heavily Jewish, with McNally being the one WASPish surname.
I was surprised to read that Greg Giraldo used to work for them. I was also surprised that he died.
I don’t know much about consulting, just that McKinsey is the big player there.
October 5, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Good research, TGGP. Thanks for not burying the big reveal in a link.
October 5, 2010 at 6:35 pm
You’re lucky I’ve switched to a laptop and frequently screw up using the touchpad, or I would embed more links!