-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
AMERICA'S SECRET ARISTOCRACY
by Stephen Birmingham (C) 1987
Berkley Book, New York, NY 1990
-----
A very interesting book for details and such. Very well researched and I would
reccommend many of Mr. Birmingham's books to any searcher of history. For it
is my belief, that by better understanding history, we can see today's course.
Om
K
-----
18. Secret Society
Only recently a New York woman, who can trace her lineage to the gracious
Dutch women who founded Society in New York, gave a dinner for fifty of her
friends. Practically all of them came of families antedating the arrival of
the British fleet that turned Nieuw Amsterdam into New York. No mention was
made of the affair in any paper in New York City, first, because the old
regime did not and still does not believe that publicity is necessary to
social success, and second, because the city at large has forgotten the
families who built it.
Yet these families endure, submerged, and women whose ancestors have directed
the social life of New York for ten or more generations still continue to
entertain and be entertained without the blare of publicity.
These words, from Mrs. Joful King Van Rensselaer's book, The Social ladder,
were penned in 1924. But they could just as easily, and accurately, have been
written in 1987, and about private enclaves of New York gentlemen. Few New
Yorkers today are probably aware of the existence, in their very midst, of a
small, elite men's club called The Zodiac. It is typical of America's secret
aristocracy that The Zodiac should have been created, in a very real sense, in
secret, that it should have passed its hundredth anniversary several years ago
without anyone but its members knowing, and that even the Social Register-
which publishes the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and officers of all
the elite clubs in the country-should be unaware of The Zodiac. The Zodiac has
no clubhouse, and no address, and no telephone. It has no bylaws and no
president, and no list of its members has ever been published. And yet it is
easily the most exclusive club in the United States. As its name implies, its
membership is restricted, at any given time, to only twelve male members.
The Zodiac was founded in the 1870s by the elder J. Pierpont Morgan, and to
understand the principles behind The Zodiac it is first necessary to
understand Mr. Morgan. J. P. Morgan has enjoyed, for some reason, the worst
posthumous reputation of any man in the history of American banking and
finance. History has portrayed Morgan as vain, autocratic, stingy,
curmudgeonly, and money-mad. He was in fact none of these things. What he was,
was an aristocrat to the marrow. When Morgan died in 1913, much was made in
the press of the fact that, out of his $69.5 million fortune, only a small
portion of his estate about $700,000-was left to charities, giving the
impression that the public weal was one of the last things Morgan cared about.
What was overlooked was that, during his lifetime, Morgan had contributed vast
sums to a wide variety of causes. He was a notable collector of rare books,
paintings, and other art objects, and many of these were given to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was president. Over the years, he had
made large financial gifts to this museum, as well as to the American Museum
of Natural History, Harvard College (especially to its medical school), the
Lying-in Hospital of New York, and the New York trade schools. He was also the
principal financial backer of the Groton School, in Massachusetts. It has also
been forgotten that, in 1895, when the U.S. Treasury's gold reserves had sunk
dangerously low, Morgan's bank loaned the government $62 million in gold to
shore up the gold reserves to the $100 million level, thereby supporting the
country's currency and averting a financial panic. In his will, furthermore,
Morgan stipulated that his son and principal heir, J. P. Morgan, Jr., should
make regular annual gifts to designated charities.
At the time of Morgan's death, the "huge" size of his fortune was drawn to
public attention. In fact, his fortune, though respectable, was far smaller
than those of Henry Frick, E. H. Harriman, or Andrew Mellon and even smaller
than those of Thomas Fortune Ryan and Payne Whitney. And Morgan's money was as
nothing compared with that of the DuPonts or John D. Rockefeller. It was
Andrew Carnegie who, commenting with surprise on the quality of Morgan's art
collection, said, "And to think-he wasn't even a rich man!"
Perhaps Morgan's most famous comment was his laconic reply to a man who asked
him how much a yacht cost. "If a man has to ask," he answered, "he can't
afford it." At the same time, as an aristocrat who believed that sailing
provided the truest test of a man's character, he also once said, "You can do
business with anyone, but you can only sail a boat with a gentleman." Also
memorable was his humorous reply to a friend who had asked him to lend him
some money. "No," replied Morgan, "but I'll let you walk down the street with
me."
Admittedly, Morgan had a crusty, distant personality and never made a fuss
over other people. He disliked being fussed over himself and, in his London
office, became so annoyed with the European practice whereby underlings bowed
themselves in and out of the offices of their superiors that he ordered the
practice stopped on pain of dismissal.
Like an aristocrat, Morgan observed a strict, almost puritanical code of
behavior. No scandal, romantic or otherwise, ever attached itself to his name,
even in an era where every rich man was expected to have a mistress. Once,
when Morgan was taking to task an associate whose love life was becoming the
stuff of drawing room gossip, his associate replied that he was doing nothing
more than what everyone else was doing "behind closed doors." "That, sir,"
countered Morgan, "is what doors are for." According to Morgan's rigid
standards, the worst thing a man could do was to break his word. Once, when a
man who had been a longtime friend and business associate and was even a
relative by marriage, broke his word over a relatively trivial matter, Morgan
never spoke to the man again.
John Pierpont Morgan was a prototypical patrician Yankee. He was born in
1837, the son of Junius Spencer Morgan, who, with his partner George Peabody
of the Salem Peabodys, formed what eventually became the international banking
house of J. S. Morgan & Company in London. The banker's son was splendidly
educated at the private English High School in Boston and at the University of
Gottingen, in Germany. Throughout his life, J. P. Morgan remained very
England-oriented. His suits, shirts, cravats, hats, shoes, walking sticks, and
even underwear were custom-made for him in London. He admired the stiff-upper-
lip nil admirari quality of the upper-crust Britisher's famous reserve, and
for this he was thought to be a very cold fish indeed. On the other hand, to
the few men whom he considered his true friends, he was intensely and almost
sentimentally loyal. When Morgan built and established New York's imposing
Metropolitan Club at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street in 1891,
it was widely reported that he had done so to spite the older (1836) Union
Club, which had slighted him. In fact, spite had nothing to do with it. Morgan
had proposed a friend of his for membership in the Union, but the club had
blackballed him. Acutely embarrassed that a man whom he had endorsed should
have received such humiliating treatment from his fellow clubmen, Morgan
decided to create a new club for his friend by way of atonement. The
Metropolitan Club that resulted was a far more luxurious facility than the
proud but somewhat dowdy Union Club.
One reason J. P. Morgan was vilified by the press after his death was that,
throughout his life, he had an aristocratic disdain for-even loathing of-
publicity. Though his name was known all over the world, he never made a
speech or attended a public meeting. He never granted interviews to reporters,
and he dodged photographers. When Harvard, to whom he had been so generous,
wanted to give him an honorary degree, he declined the honor, knowing that
receiving it would involve an acceptance speech and dealing with the press.
Publishers offered him huge sums for his autobiography, but he turned them all
down and refused to authorize any book to be written about him in his
lifetime. Even his son-in-law, Herbert Satterlee, was unsuccessful in trying
to persuade him to be interviewed on the subjects of his life and business
philosophy for posthumous publication. "He had," said one of his former
associates, "the instinctive shrinking from publicity of the man of breeding."
The closest thing to a public statement of his code occurred a year before his
death, during the monetary trust investigation of 1911-1913 by a House
committee, when Samuel Untermyer asked him whether commercial credit was based
primarily on property or on cash. "The first thing," roared Morgan in reply,
"is character. A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the
bonds in Christendom."
By the 1870s, Morgan had begun to question the role of the private men's
clubs in the city. Their original purpose, he felt, was being subverted. Men's
clubs in New York and elsewhere had been originally founded on the model of
the men's social clubs in London, designed as places to which men of similar
backgrounds and interests could repair at the end of a business day and enjoy
an hour or so of companionship unrelated to business. The Union Club had been
organized on this principle, and indeed, during the early days of this so-
called Mother of Clubs, it was considered poor form to discuss business on the
club's premises. This had also been the basic tenet on which the oldest club
in America had been established, the Fish House in Philadelphia, which was
founded in 1732. To assure that the Fish House would always be assertively
social, and non-business, it was formed as a men's cooking club, with members
taking turns preparing meals for the membership. (The Fish House, also known
as the State in Schuylkill, was indeed a separate state in colonial times and
was so recognized by colonial governors. For nearly two hundred years, the
club kept the recipe for its famous Fish House punch-a potent mixture of rum,
brandy, peach liqueur, sugar, and lemon juice-a closely guarded secret.)
Other New York clubs had followed the Union Club's example and were, in a
sense, all offshoots of the Union. The Union League Club was organized in 1863
by disgruntled Union Clubbers who objected that the Confederate secretary of
state had been allowed to resign from the club when he should have been
expelled. The Knickerbocker Club had been formed in 1871 by ex-Unionites who
felt the Union was taking in too many out-of-towners and not giving proper
preference to members of Old Knickerbocker families. The Brook Club was
founded in 1903 by two young Turks who had been ousted from the Union Club for
attempting, or so they said, to fry an egg on the bald head of one of the
Union's most venerable members.
But it was not frivolity or politics that Morgan found objectionable about
New York's men's clubs. It was a trend he spotted developing in the post-Civil
War era of capitalist expansion, in which the clubs were abandoning their
initial precepts of gentlemanly good-fellowship among peers and were becoming
places where business deals were put together. In this, he was foresighted,
for this is exactly what the men's clubs have become, particularly in a
financial city such as New York. The clubs have certainly wandered far from
their original goals. The Links Club, for example, was first organized. as its
names implies, "to promote and conserve throughout the U.S. the best interests
and true spirit of the game of golf." Today, the Links, on East Sixty-second
Street in Manhattan, is far from any golf course and has become a club whose
membership consists of business leaders from all over the country-Minneapolis
Pillsburys, Beverly Hills Dohenys, Dorrances from Philadelphia, and Kleenex-
making Kimberlys from Neenah, Wisconsin.
The commercialization of the private clubs is now almost complete. As one New
York clubman put it recently, "If I have a hundred-thousand-dollar deal to put
together, I'll take my client to lunch at the Union or the Knickerbocker. If
it's a million-dollar deal, I'll take him to the Brook. If it's ten million,
we'll go to the Links. If there's no deal to discuss, we'll go to the
University Club."
To offset what seemed to Morgan such an alarming and unaristocratic trend,
his answer was the tiny Zodiac club: twelve gentlemen selected on no other
basis than, as one member has put it, "good-fellowship and good genes." For
nearly a hundred and fifteen years, twelve Zodiac members have met on no
regularly scheduled basis, but at least two or three times a year. For each
gathering, a member is designated "caterer" to the other eleven and is
expected to provide a dinner, either in his own home or in one of the private
rooms of one of his clubs. No female guests have ever been invited to
meetings, though once a year a dinner is held to include the wives of members.
For years, Zodiac members met in full evening dress, white tie and tails,
wearing medals and decorations where appropriate. Today, that dress code has
been relaxed somewhat, and Zodiac dinners are black-tie. Conviviality and
conversation are the only orders of the evening. Business is never to be
discussed.
Not that Zodiac members are necessarily men who lead lives of idleness.
Their gatherings are intended to be marked only by "congeniality and
conviviality," but there is an underlying, more serious theme: the cultural
and civic betterment of the city of New York. Membership in The Zodiac is
supposed to be kept very secret, as Mr. Morgan wished it, but this author has
been able to ascertain the names of ten of the current dozen members. These
are:
- Robert G. Goelet, of the old New York real estate family, related to Astors
as well as to Vanderbilts, a trustee of the American Museum 0f Natural History
and former president of the New York Zoo.
- John Jay Iselin, descendant of John Jay and former president of New York's
WNET/Channel 13 public television station.
- S. Dillon Ripley, retired head of the Smithsonian Institution and married to
a Livingston.
- Schuyler G. Chapin, former dean of the Columbia University School of Arts
and a Schuyler descendant.
- Daniel G. Tenney, Jr., a descendant of Massachusetts Sedgwicks, married to a
Philadelphia Lippincott, a partner in the old New York law firm of Milbank,
Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, and a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation.
- Robert S. Pirie, president of L. F. Rothschild & Company.
- August Heckscher, former New York City Parks commissioner and The Zodiac's
secretary and only officer.
- Arnold Whitridge, occupation "gentleman," and the club's oldest member.
- Howard Phipps, Jr., of the Pittsburgh steel family.
- J. Carter Brown III, director of Washington's National Gallery of Art.
The observant will note a preponderance of Harvard and Yale alumni among The
Zodiac's membership. The even more observant will spot the fact that many of
these men are graduates of the Groton School. Mr. Morgan would have approved
of that, too.
Today, only three men's clubs in America survive that are dedicated
principally to good-fellowship and good times. There is the ancient State in
Schuylkill, still a men's cooking club, which was obviously the inspiration
for Morgan's Zodiac. The State in Schuylkill calls itself "The oldest formally
organized men's social club in the Anglo-Saxon (which is to say civilized)
world." The governing qualifiers here are the words "formally organized." Such
famous London clubs as White's, Boodle's, and St. James's would appear at
first glance to be older, but State in Schuylkill members point out that these
private clubs started out as public coffeehouses, until White's became
"formally organized" in 1736, thus making the State in Schuylkill four years
older. As for its informal name, the Fish House, this stems from the fact that
the club was originally a "Fishing Company" of Philadelphia men who fished the
banks of the Schuylkill River in the eighteenth century and enjoyed cooking
their catches afterward.
The Fish House meets thirteen times from May to October for its home-cooked
luncheons, and periodically during the winter months for dinners. Each course
of each meal is the responsibility of an individual member, meaning that
members get a chance to try their hand at various dishes-with an emphasis on
hearty, outdoorsy fare such as boola-boola soup (made with mussels), planked
shad, and pressed duck-throughout the year. As with, The Zodiac, there is a
dress code at the Fish House. Preparers of the dishes don long white aprons
and odd-looking wide-brimmed straw hats called boaters, but which look more
like Chinese coolie hats. Members explain that "these hats are of a pattern
brought from China early in the last century, and were worn by a high Mandarin
caste."
The State in Schuylkill clings determinedly to the notion that it is a
separate state, and no part of Pennsylvania. Its members are called Citizens,
and among its elected officials are a secretary of state, a secretary of the
treasury, a governor, counselors, a sheriff, and even a coroner. Meals
traditionally begin with a toast-"To the memory of General Washington"
-followed by a second, "To the memory of Governor Morris," who was Samuel
Morris, Jr., governor of the State in Schuylkill from 1765 to 1811. After
other past governors have been toasted, there is a toast "To the President of
the United States," though during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt this
part of the ritual was conspicuously omitted. The club's bylaws permit no more
than thirty Citizens, or members, at any one time, though at its meetings a
certain number of carefully screened Apprentices-or hopeful members-to-be are
invited. While the Citizens do the cooking, the Apprentices do the serving. As
a result of the thirty-Citizens-only rule, there have been fewer than five
hundred Citizens of the State of Schuylkill in the more than two hundred and
fifty years of its existence. Citizenship, it may go without saying, is nearly
always conferred upon members of old Philadelphia families.* (*Membership is
supposed to be a closely guarded secret but who belongs can be ascertained by
consulting the Social Register.)
During Prohibition, the State in Schuylkill reminded itself that it had never
actually ratified the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, it saw no reason to be
bound by the strictures of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Then there is San Francisco's remarkable Bohemian Club.
Since San Francisco is a much newer city, the Bohemian Club cannot claim the
great age of many eastern men's clubs, but it is nonetheless a spiritual
descendant of both the State in Schuylkill and New York's Century Association,
which in turn was another of the splinter groups to emerge from the old Union
Club. Formed in 1847, the Century's first membership consisted of gentlemen
who felt that intellectual and artistic endeavors were being slighted by the
Union. (At the time, one Union Club member grumbled, "There's a club down on
Forty-third Street that chooses its members mentally. Now isn't that a hell of
a way to run a club?") From the State in Schuylkill, the Bohemian Club has
borrowed its emphasis on the great outdoors. From the Century, the Bohemian
has taken its emphasis on matters of the mind, or at least the imagination.
Every Bohemian Club member is expected, no matter what his actual calling or
profession, to demonstrate some sort of artistic talent-whether it be writing
doggerel, playing a musical instrument, or singing a passable baritone. When
"other qualifications have been met," a candidate for Bohemian membership can
even make a willingness to paint flats for the scenery of the club's stage
shows pass for a "talent." In the city, the Bohemian Club occupies a handsome
red brick Georgian clubhouse on one of the flanks of Nob Hill, and among the
facilities here is a 750-seat theatre, where members prepare and present
regular amateur theatricals. But the club's most celebrated institution is its
annual two-week summer "encampment" at Bohemian Grove, a twenty-eight-hundred-
acre tract it maintains high in the Sierra wilderness. Each Bohemian
encampment begins with a campfire ceremony called The Cremation of Care and
continues with such events as lectures, poetry readings, musical productions,
spectacles of son et lumiere, and concerts presented by the club's own
seventy-piece symphony orchestra. All these productions are written, produced,
directed, and performed by the club's membership, and a high degree of
professionalism is expected and often achieved. In between these cultural
events, there is plenty of time for entertainment of a more bibulous nature.
By eastern standards, the Bohemian Club is large, with some twelve hundred
members, but it is also in one sense exclusive. Because social San Francisco
has been accused of being both parochial and provincial (as well as a bit
nouveau), and to offset the fact that some older established eastern families
still tend to think of San Francisco as being at the end of the Anglo-Saxon
(which is to say civilized) world, the Bohemian Club likes to think of itself
as a national, not just a city, club. Though plenty of Old Guard (which is to
say late-nineteenth-century) San Francisco names such as Crocker, Flood,
Spreckels, and de Young are represented in its membership, the Bohemian Club
welcomes members from other cities. Thus, while prominent San Franciscans and
other Californians often have to wait for years to be invited to join, men
from Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington go sailing in with no delay at
all. The club also has members from Canada and from European cities. To each
encampment, a small, carefully screened list of out-of-town guests is invited.
These have included Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. But otherwise
the encampments are members-only, and assertively all-male.
For a long time, the location of the Bohemian Grove was a jealously guarded
secret, which led to stories and speculation particularly among wives of
members-about wild goings-on, involving loose women, at the grove. Naturally,
members did nothing to scotch these lurid tales. But eventually the secret
leaked out. Today; wives and children of Bohemian Club members are permitted
to visit the grove, though never during an encampment. They find it a peaceful
spot for picnics, and if there were ever orgies there, no sign of them
remains.
Then, finally, there is the little Zodiac club of New York, the most secret
of them all. Aside from its once-yearly nod to spouses, women are never
included at its gatherings, nor have outside guests ever been invited. With
only twelve members, a member must die or otherwise be placed hors de combat
before a new member can be taken. As a result, only about fifty men have
belonged since J. P. Morgan started it more than a hundred years ago.
"Part of the fun of belonging to The Zodiac," says John Jay Iselin, one of
the club's newer members,* "is that nobody else knows about us and, because
nobody else much cares, they can't call us 'exclusive.' We're just a bunch of
friends who like to get together and enjoy each other's company."
And to enjoy the company of good genes.
(*An opening for Iselin appeared upon the death of James Bryant Conant, former
president of Harvard, later U. S. high commissioner for West Germany, and
still later American Ambassador to Germany.)
pp. 205-215
--cont--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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