How do Americans cope with the fact that most of them aren't Anglo-Saxon and thus unrelated to the founders who are...

It crumbled like every great civilization. WASPs were great, but their success got the better of them. Not a difficult code to crack.

I just looked mine up. It's not all that common these days, supposedly of Viking origin. Still, family legend says we descend from John Gaunt. Once I discovered this, it made sense why I read Chaucer as a child. Musings.