The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  In other words, Protestant success in America was a version of Triple Package success. The reason the Puritans toiled and saved (impulse control) was that they simultaneously believed they were special (superiority) and literally had something to prove (insecurity) at every moment of their lives. They had to show everyone—Catholics, other Protestant sects, their congregation, themselves—that they were indeed God’s chosen, and the way they would do so was through the accumulation of wealth.

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  PART OF WHAT LED WEBER to a cultural explanation of Protestant economic success was that no other explanation worked. Inherited wealth, Weber observed, might explain some of the disparity between Protestants and Catholics, but not all. Nor could political or national differences account for Protestant success. It wasn’t, for example, that all Protestants were English, and the English were richer and more industrialized than everyone else. No, whether you started with Huguenots in France or Puritans in America, and whether you looked at countries with Protestant minorities or majorities, you found the same puzzling pattern of Protestant economic dominance—requiring an explanation within Protestant culture itself.

  It is a striking feature of Mormon success in America that it too defies all the leading explanations of group economic performance. Obviously Mormon accomplishment isn’t a by-product of immigrant selection bias, because most Mormons aren’t immigrants. And what is the proponent of IQ explanations to say—that a mass genetic mutation in Utah made Mormons smarter than other Americans? Scholars like Jared Diamond have shown how geography can shape people’s economic fate, but it’s hard to think what a geographical explanation of Mormon success would even look like.

  Mormon success defies biological, geographical, and demographic explanations because it’s Triple Package success. In fact, the Mormons’ Triple Package parallels the early Protestants’. Mormons have inherited the Puritans’ sense of chosenness, their immense self-discipline, and their faith not only that they have been placed on earth with a calling, but that, as the author and historian James Carroll puts it, achieving worldly success is a “sign of divine favor.”

  Even the timing of Mormons’ rise to prominence conforms with the theory of the Triple Package. It was only in the twentieth century that the Triple Package consolidated in Mormon culture, laying the groundwork for their present disproportionate achievement.

  Today, strict self-discipline is a fixed star of Mormon culture, manifest in their abstemiousness, their grueling two-year missions, and their sexual conservatism relative to the permissiveness more typical in America. But none of these elements of Mormonism was clearly established until the twentieth century. The Word of Wisdom, which is the textual source of Mormonism’s injunctions against alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and drugs, was viewed as merely good advice until 1921, when the Church made it a code that Mormons had to follow in order to participate in temple rituals. The Mormons’ “Family Home Evening”—a night set aside each week for family hymn singing, prayer, and religious reading—also began in the early twentieth century, as did a new emphasis on encouraging Mormon youth to participate in church activities.

  Missionary work increased stunningly as the century wore on. From 1830 to 1900, the Church estimates that roughly 13,000 Mormons went on mission; from 1900 to 1950, 50,000; from 1950 to 1990, 400,000; since 1990, well over 650,000. And as for sexual permissiveness, until the Church banned polygamy in 1904, the Mormons were the libertines.

  The Mormons’ renunciation of polygamy also brought to a close what might be called their separatist “Utah phase,” a period of isolation in which Mormons sought refuge in the remote Salt Lake Valley from a country that spurned and attacked them. As they sought to put the polygamy issue behind them, Mormons turned outward, engaging with America, hanging U.S. flags in the Salt Lake City tabernacle, forming alliances with the Boy Scouts. In Triple Package terms, nineteenth-century Mormons were like the Amish, finding security in their own faith, values, and insularity, heedless of what the rest of the country thought of them. But in the twentieth century, Triple Package insecurity became much more predominant. As this outward turn came to define twentieth-century LDS culture, Mormons became eager to prove themselves to America, to show they could succeed in America—indeed that they could lead America, that they were the most American of Americans.

  It’s impossible, of course, to prove that the arrival or strengthening of these Triple Package elements in Mormon culture drove their success, but there’s some interesting indirect support. A century ago, some Mormon communities refused to go along with the renunciation of polygamy and splintered off from the main church. One such group, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), retains a significant number of followers even today (perhaps 10,000), located mainly in Colorado City, Arizona. The FLDS broke away before the main church made the Word of Wisdom binding and in other ways began moving Mormon culture toward increased self-discipline and self-denial. As a result, the FLDS don’t refrain from alcohol, cigarettes, or coffee. They retained, moreover, the inward focus of earlier Mormon history, living their own way regardless of what the rest of America thinks of them. And as it happens, Colorado City is one of the poorest cities in the United States.

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  THE CHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS—so-called second-generation survivors—have been studied extensively over the last several decades. To no one’s surprise, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been found in this group, both in their behavior and in higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. (It has even been suggested, on the basis of new discoveries in epigenetics, that the parents’ trauma may have affected their children’s genetic inheritance, leaving so-called genetic scars on the next generation.) The surprise, rather, came in a very different finding: that second-generation survivors outperform other groups economically, not only non-Jewish groups, but Jews as well, including Jews who immigrated at about the same time.

  This unexpected finding prompted sociologists to take a closer look at the causes of success in Holocaust-survivor families, and what they found was—the Triple Package.

  One of the most powerful and poignant impressions conveyed in interviews with the children of survivors is the extent to which they felt they had to hold themselves in check, to suppress their own feelings, needs, or rebelliousness, out of care for their parents:

  I remember as a child always worrying. I felt I had to take care of my parents. I think [my mother] looked up to me as being a mature person and someone she could count on even though she didn’t want to count on me. I felt children around me had much more freedom, a carefree attitude. . . . I was more burdened in feeling responsible for my parents. I was very mature. I was never a child, able to play and have fun.

  In his book on Holocaust survivors’ children, psychologist Aaron Hass, himself a member of the “second generation,” writes:

  ‘For this I survived the Nazis? For this I survived the camps?’ This was my parents’ frequent anguished refrain—if I talked back to them or if I came home later than I said I would. . . .

  I, my needs, seemed to slip away in the face of their horrible past. Given my understanding of what they had experienced, how could I cause them more grief? How could I electrically prod an already exposed, frayed nerve? . . . Their reservoir of pain was already straining the limits of the fragile structure enclosing it. My parents, I believed, were always on the edge. . . .

  Acts of rebellion were not a part of my childhood or adolescence. . . . After having learned more details about what actually happened to Jews in Europe, it has been even more difficult to act contrarily, to criticize, to say no.

  In agonizing fashion, these statements describe a heightened need for impulse control, communicated to children at a very young age. Researchers have even found that as young children, second-generation survivors often seem to have been “inhibited from making noise.”

  As to insecurity, the anx
iety of survivors’ children is in some ways too obvious to require description. In addition to worrying about their parents’ fragility, they were often taught that the world might turn on them, that they needed to work harder at school and in life precisely because of life’s precariousness. Helen Epstein, also a second-generation survivor who has conducted extensive interviews with other survivors’ children, quotes a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian man:

  My parents always said that a person can lose everything, but what’s inside his head stays there. I had to acquire an education, they said, because our enemies could take everything away from us but that. Little by little, as I became aware of who the enemies were, I began to understand.

  In her moving memoir, The Watchmaker’s Daughter, Sonia Taitz (again, a second-generation survivor) writes:

  When college ended, I had fears of going back to Washington Heights, my mother’s onion-potato kitchen and my own set of pans. I didn’t want to be sent to the wrong line—the death line, then heaped in a pile. I wanted to strive, to win.

  One of Hass’s respondents, a television scriptwriter, remembers:

  My mother raised us to be self-sufficient, prepared, and success-oriented because she was afraid . . . we wouldn’t be able to take care of ourselves in case something like the Holocaust happened again. We had to do well to protect ourselves, more than to make ourselves happy.

  On top of this insecurity, another was layered: survivors’ children frequently describe a pressure to do well in life in order to redeem their parents’ hardships, to make good their sacrifices. One study summarizes this attitude as follows: “They felt it was up to them to bring joy, pride, and pleasure into their parents’ lives. This obligation to make parents happier through their own lives was described by all participants. . . . The adult children described feelings of constant pressure to fulfill goals that parents had set for them.”

  If this burden was in some ways typical of second-generation immigrants, it was especially acute in the case of survivors’ children. This was so not only because of the intensity of their parents’ suffering. A “need to resurrect their lost families” ran deep among many survivors. Their children were somehow expected to replace the family members whom the Germans (or Poles or Ukrainians or others) had murdered. Children were often named after the murdered; parents would impress on them a “strong need to make up for the loss of their deceased family members by telling them such things as ‘you are all we have left,’ while pointing out similarities to those relatives who perished.” To quote just two second-generation survivors:

  I was not David Greber, but my father’s brothers Romek and Moishe and Adamek, and his father David; my brother wasn’t Harvey, but Herschel, my mother’s beloved brother, or Aharon, her father; my sisters were named for our grandmothers and aunts Sarah and Leah and Bella and Molly, loved ones our parents last saw when they . . . were being separated for transportation to camps from which they never emerged. Representing six million dead is a grave responsibility, and a terrible burden for a child to carry.

  I wondered what I could do in my life that would even register. . . . At times, my life seemed to be not my own. Hundreds of people lived through me, lives that had been cut short in the war. . . . My parents, too, were living through me. They saw in my life the years they had lost in the war and the years they had lost in emigrating to America. My life was not just another life, I thought often when I was a child, it was an assignation.

  And yet despite these impossible-to-meet expectations, despite the need to suppress their own impulses, survivors’ children repeatedly describe their peculiar heritage in terms not of victimization, but of pride. A corollary of the much more famous “survivor’s guilt,” it turns out, is survivor’s superiority. As another survivor’s child told Hass:

  I make a differentiation between Jewish survivors and Jewish nonsurvivors. I always felt almost proud that my parents were survivors. Perhaps I thought they were better Jews because of all they had sacrificed and been through. I always felt I was better than other Jews. I felt proud, almost as if I was there.

  Epstein reports a similar comment from one of her interviewees:

  I may have said my parents were in concentration camps calmly, smoothly, but in my ears the sentence rang like a declaration of loyalty. It put me squarely on the side of “those people,” far away from the complacent, untouched Americans—Jews or Gentiles—who seemed to be so quick to make assumptions about things they did not understand. I answered their pity or embarrassment or confusion with pride.

  Taitz expressed a sentiment along the same lines:

  My father and mother were both concentration camp survivors. Not victims—survivors, people who had looked death in the face and rebutted it. . . . I never thought of them as weak, but as God-like warriors themselves, however wounded.

  Thus, in the children of Holocaust survivors, we find the complete Triple Package, if in a strange and painful guise. Indeed, reading descriptions of this cohort, you’ll find almost express Triple Package terminology: the “sense of superiority” that many survivors’ children have; the “lingering insecurities” that drive them “toward educational and occupational success.” Out of this combined superiority and insecurity came an almost compulsive need to work, to persevere, to achieve: “Permeated by an intense drive to build and achieve, the home atmosphere of fighter survivors was filled with compulsive activity. Parents forbade any behavior that might signify victimization, weakness, or self-pity. Pride was fiercely held as a virtue, relaxation and pleasure were deemed superfluous.”

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  IT’S FITTING TO CLOSE THIS CHAPTER with the possibility of group decline. In 2012, Ron Unz, former publisher of The American Conservative, assembled striking data that, he argued, demonstrated a recent “dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement.” Using admittedly imprecise surname-based analysis, Unz estimated that Jews dropped from more than 40 percent of U.S. Math Olympiad top scorers in the 1970s to 2.5 percent since 2000. From 1950 to 1990, Jewish high schoolers made up roughly 20 percent of the finalists in the prestigious, nationwide Intel Science Talent Search; since 2010, only 7 percent. In the Physics Olympiad, Jews accounted for 25 percent of the top scorers as recently as the 1990s; in the last decade, just 5 percent.

  If Jewish academic performance is declining, whether or not as dramatically as Unz says (many have criticized his methodology and claimed his data exaggerate), this drop-off would throw a wrench in a belief held by lot of people: that Jews do better academically for the simple reason that they have higher IQs. By contrast, a decline in Jewish performance would be wholly consistent with the theory of the Triple Package.

  The Triple Package and claims of higher Jewish IQ are by no means mutually exclusive. If it were true that Jews had a higher mean IQ—which has not been established*—that would feed directly into the Jewish superiority complex, reinforcing their Triple Package. But higher IQ couldn’t by itself explain Jewish success. To repeat: study after study has proved that IQ is not a complete predictor of success. IQ without motivation lies fallow. Drive predicts accomplishment better than IQ, and the Triple Package generates drive.

  But drive, unlike IQ, is something a group can lose in a single generation. And if the rise and fall of past successful groups in America is any guide, Jews are long overdue for a fall.

  Immigrant success in the United States is almost always a two-generation affair. For most immigrant groups, including Asians, Africans, Hispanics, and Afro-Caribbeans, decline sets in at the third generation. For example, “first- and second-generation Asian students outperform whites, whereas there is no performance difference between the third-generation Asian and white students.” All this is exactly what the theory of the Triple Package would predict: assimilation and success weaken the insecurities and other cultural forces that drove the first and second generation to rise.

  Today, the majority of Jews in the United States are third-, fourth-, or
fifth-generation Americans. Most are the children of lawyers, doctors, bankers, or other white-collar workers, relatively secure both economically and in their identity as Americans. Bellow and Roth, who wrote “Jewish American” literature, with predominantly Jewish characters speaking in Jewish voices, have given way to Matthew Weiner, who created Mad Men. No longer the outsiders their immigrant forebears were, today’s affluent American Jews should be ready to follow the seemingly inevitable Triple Package trajectory into decline—not unlike the mid-twentieth-century WASP establishment that Mad Men depicts.

  But it’s possible that because of the Jews’ unique history, their Triple Package is less dependent on immigrant status and more durable even in the face of wealth. In no other group has the coupling of a superiority complex and insecurity been so core to its historical identity. In America today, Jews may be part of the economic and cultural elite, but the memory yet lingers of Jews just as affluent and assimilated in Weimar Germany. And while Jews may no longer fear persecution in the United States, Israel—with which American Jews often feel an almost ethnic identification—remains surrounded by 220 million people many of whom deny its right to exist and some of whom openly call for its annihilation.

  Perhaps the best evidence that Jews are still insecure is the consistently apoplectic reaction to any suggestion of Jewish decline. By contrast to WASPs, who seem to accept their plight almost cheerfully—time to trade in the sailboat for a canoe!—Jews don’t seem ready to throw in the towel yet. There are no books with titles like Cheerful Money: The Last Days of Jewish Splendor. On the contrary, Jews are insecure about losing their insecurity and as anxious as ever about their population, their future, their religion, their identity.

  From this point of view, looking at math scores or science competitions for evidence of Jewish decline may be misplaced. Concentrating on science and math would have been perfectly logical for American Jews throughout much of the twentieth century, when they had less English proficiency and faced greater barriers to success in fields like law, politics, or publishing (just as East Asian immigrants focus on science and engineering today). It bears remembering that Jews in America top the charts not only in terms of standard metrics like household income or net worth or even Nobel Prizes. To a degree shocking given their minuscule population percentage, Jews are also among America’s preeminent poets and jurists, directors and journalists, comics and comic book artists, opinion leaders of both the left and right.