-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Saga of American Society
Dixon Wecter
Charles Scribner’s & Son©1970, 1937
Elizabeth Farrar Wecter©1965renewal
LCCCN 78-103633
--[a]--
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GENTLEMAN AND HIS CLUB
FROM the eighteenth century when the Duc de la Rochefoucauld observed "with
melancholy" that American men were too busy "for the enticements of polished
society," to the twentieth when Charles Eliot Norton startled a class of
Harvard undergraduates by the opening remark "I suppose that none of you
young men has ever seen a gentleman," a good deal of material has been
accumulating to show that the gentleman in the more courtly sense is almost
as rare in North America as the heath-hen drumming in solitude upon the dunes
of Martha's Vineyard-another victim of our national ruthlessness. Though
Aristotle sketched the lineaments of the gentleman, with his twelve public
and twelve private virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics, he was really the
creation and darling of feudalism. He was a soldier or shield bearer, as the
word esquire still faintly commemorates. He was also a horseman and
sportsman, a caballero or chevalier, and the smell of saddle leather still
clings about him. Steering a middle course between fop and sloven, scholar
and boor, he lived by the classic maxim of "nothing in excess." He found
courage, patriotism, loyalty, and generosity more attractive than the
churchly and commercial preachments like sobriety, prudence, thrift, and
chastity.[1] Not always consistent, he enshrined women of his own social
class in idealism and exquisite homage, but was not above seducing a few
peasant girls on his way home from the Crusades. But committing even his
peccadilloes with liberality and rakish grace, he relied both here and
hereafter upon the plenary grace of a hearty life. A French lady of the old
regime once said: "Depend upon it—God Amighty thinks twice before he condemns
persons of quality!" While none less than Shakespeare assures us that "The
Prince of Dark-ness is a gentleman." What, between the blunted horns of such
a dilemma, has one to fear?
The cult of materialism in America and the furore of competition during its
building era conspired against the gentlemanly character, for, as William
Butler Yeats has lately said, "A gentleman is a man whose principal ideas are
not connected with his personal needs and his personal success." Yet at the
heart of American conduct there is surely as much essential kindness,
generosity, and desire to do the right thing as was found when knighthood was
in flower. Often it appears quite independently of grammar, occupation, and
affluence. It has been justly remarked that the filling-station attendant has
done more to raise the standard of courtesy en masse in the United States
than all the manuals of etiquette. The wife of a master at Groton, spending a
winter's holiday in South Carolina, was startled when-upon the stalling of
her automobile near a remote country crossroads-the engineer of a "mixed"
train stopped his locomotive, repaired her motor, and tipped his greasy cap
as he climbed back into the cab. Not all of those who have salvaged bits of
the gentlemanly character from the wrack of industrialism are behind plate
glass on Commonwealth Avenue.[2]
Yet the social club in America has done a great deal to keep alive the
gentleman in the courtly sense. Here is his peculiar asylum from the
pandemonium of commerce, the bumptiousness of democracy, and the feminism of
his own household. Here he is technically invisible from the critical female
eye—a state of bliss reflected in the convention that a gentleman never bows
to a lady from a club window, nor according to the best form discusses ladies
there. The club is his Great Good Place, with its comfortable and slightly
shabby leather chairs, the pleasantly malt-like effluvium of its bar, the
newspaper room with a club servant to repair quickly the symptoms of
disarray, the catholicity of magazines from highbrows to La Vie Parisienne whi
ch in less stately company would seem a trifle sophomoric, the abundant
notepaper, the good cigars and hearty carnivorous menus, and the waiters who
are not to be tipped from New Year to Christmas. And perhaps most important
of all, the friends with whom one sits down to a rubber of bridge after five
o'clock, on the way home. They are the men with whom one grew up, saw through
prep school and college, attended at their weddings-and whom the survivors
will accompany decently in gloves to their long home in Mount Auburn or
Sleepy Hollow. They are the good fellows in whose essential infallibility one
is bound to believe. Here we have no poor losers, bounders, muckers, or
cads—and if one should take a cocktail too many and speak with loosened
tongue, nobody outside is the wiser. And if by inconceivable chance one finds
himself unable immediately to go home, there is always a pleasant bed
upstairs in a room of bachelor's asceticism still redolent of pipe tobacco
and toilet water.
One is likely to meet doctors here and almost certainly surgeons, but
never a dentist. There will be many lawyers-barristers, as they style them in
Pall Mall, but not solicitors. Bankers and brokers, of course, who come from
the best Nordic families, and wholesale merchants rather than retail. Retired
military officers, with their excellent horsemanship, their erect carriage,
white hair, and fine apoplectic flush, are also in the best Piccadilly
tradition. Two or three Episcopal clergymen, preferably deans, lie lightly
upon the consciences and the budget of the club. Artists, musicians, and
authors are regarded with suspicion unless their family names and background
are quite trustworthy, and set them clear of raffish bohemia. The Union, the
Knickerbocker, the Racquet, and the Metropolitan condescend to the Century,
where achievement outweighs blood and wealth.[3] A stage player is very
seldom seen, though the fash-ionable architect-as the tradition of Richard
Hunt and Stanford White, or even Addison Mizner in Palm Beach, demonstrates-ma
y be quite a swell and an amusing fellow. With what Henry James called "a
certain light of the fine old gentlemanly prejudice to guide it," the
preeminently social club welcomes the serious frivolity of horses, hounds,
foxes, and boats, but not the effeminate frivolity of aestheticism. Pedantry
is also frowned upon; except for the Social Register, The World Almanac, and
Lloyd's Register of American Yachts not a volume in the club library has been
taken down since the cross-word puzzle craze. It is comforting to think that
one's sons and grandsons will sit in these same chairs, and firelight will
flicker on the same steel engravings and oil portraits of past presidents-and
though the stars may wheel in their courses and crowned heads totter to the
guillotine, this little world will remain, so long as first mortgages and
Government bonds endure. One of the youngest of the really top-flight clubs
has taken for its motto the sentiment of its elders-the Brook, which boasts,
with the help of Tennyson, that
Men may come, and men may go—
But I go on for ever.
The earliest clubs in Colonial America seem to have been small groups united
by racial or professional bonds and a community of taste which met in private
houses or taverns for dinner and an evening of talk. Such organizations as
the Irish Club and the French Club in New York, which John Fontaine visited
in 1710, the French Club founded in Charleston in 1737, the St. Andrew's
Society in Philadelphia which published its Rule Book in 1751, and the German
Society of Pennsylvania which was founded in 1764, were not strictly social
groups; most of them mixed conviviality of no very exclusive kind with the
purposes of a fraternal and charitable order. Doctor Alexander Hamilton on
his journey north in 1744 chronicles his adventures with a "drunken club" at
a tavern in Maryland, the "Governor's Club" in Philadelphia, the "club at
Withered's" in Boston, and the Philosophical Club at Newport where the worthy
doctor "was surprised to find that no matters of philosophy were brought upon
the carpet," but that punch and tobacco were staples together with much talk
about shipbuilding and privateers. During this decade, with growing leisure
at home and news of coffee-house wits and beefsteak clubs in London, dozens
of imitations sprang up throughout the Colonies. The Maryland Gazette for
March 24, 1747 prints a wistful letter from a gentleman on the East Shore who
finds himself involved in a new club with no very clear idea of its nature,
except that its purpose is to avoid "an Omnium Gatherum who are neither
capable of improving or being improved"; he would be grateful for a copy of
the rules of some good club elsewhere. He hears there are scores of them in
western Maryland.
The oldest group for the sport and association of gentlemen which survives is
the Fishing Company of the State in Schuylkill, best known wherever punch is
brewed as the Fish House Club. It was founded in 1732 on the estate of a
Quaker, William Warner, where opportunities were offered not only to the
angler but also the hunter of rabbits, partridges, and pheasants. Under its
first governor, Thomas Stretch, it was organized like a miniature
commonwealth—"the State in Schuylkill"with executive, legislative, and
judicial branches represented among its thirty members, who were called
"citizens." There was an assembly of five, a secretary-treasurer, a sheriff,
and a coroner. Elections were held annually, and after settling affairs of
state the electors dined royally rather than democratically on barbecued pig,
rounds of beef, and steak, suffused with punch and Madeira. The invention of
planked shad should also be mentioned among the gestes of the Fish House
Club. Membership is still limited to thirty, with the addition of a few
honorary members of which the last, elected in 1920, was General John J.
Pershing. A prospective joiner must wait until resignation or death thins the
ranks. The castle where the club meets for its epicurean meals on alternate
summer Wednesdays is no longer upon the Schuylkill, but near Torresdale upon
the Delaware. Formerly the special straw hat of the club was de rigueur for
fishing, and the straw worn by Lafayette is a venerable relic. Apprentices,
as newly elected members are called, wear. a cook's apron and are taught the
mysteries of club recipes; from dishwashing they graduate to the spit and the
oven. Mr. John White Geary, banker, is its head, and for generations
Cadwaladers, Chews, Biddles, Wrights, and Welshes have been happy to serve in
its kitchens.
The most noteworthy band of epicureans in early New York was called the
Social Club. For some years prior to its dispersal in 1775 its twenty-seven
members met every Saturday evening in winter at the famous tavern in Broad
Street kept by "Black Sam" Fraunces, who later became steward to President
Washington. Fraunces was the best cook of his day, and according to
advertisements sold "portable soup [i.e., solid broth made from beef, veal,
or chicken, often taken on sea voyages], catchup, bottled gooseberries,
pickled walnuts, pickled or fryed oysters fit to go to the West Indies,
pickled mushrooms, currant jelly, marmalade." John Jay,
Gouverneur Morris, Robert R. Livingston, Morgan Lewis, Gulian VerPlanck,
Stephen De Lancey, James Duane, and Leonard and Anthony Lispenard were among
the connoisseurs of this fare; those who had been bred to the bar belonged
also to the Moot Club, which flourished simultaneously. Most members of the
Social Club were passing rich, and for their pleasure in summer could afford
to build "a neat large room for a club house" at Kip's Bay.
Post-Revolutionary dining clubs on the same pattern included the celebrated
Barbecue Club of Richmond in which Chief justice Marshall was the ruling
spirit, and the Cossack Club of Charleston centering about General Charles
Cotesworth Pinckney. The annalist of the Cossacks, Charles Fraser, calls them
"the remnant of a peculiar race of people," aristocrats by birth and
Englishmen by education, but staunch patriots of the Republic: "Such men
were, in their proper element, at the head of society-it was theirs to
maintain and transmit the ancient character of Charleston for intelligence,
refinement, and hospitality."
The gentleman's clubhouse, an anchorage distinct from mere fraternal groups
or periodic dinners, evolved from the London coffee house of late Stuart and
Georgian times. In fact the properties of coffee-discovered, according to
tradition, by an oriental shepherd who watched his goats grow frisky beneath
a coffee-bush-made that drink best among mild solvents of Anglo-Saxon phlegm.
Favorite coffee-houses of Tory or Whig gentlemen, like White's opened in 1698
and Brooks's in 1764, or of foxhunters who began to frequent Boodle's in
1762, began as the property of a publican-but soon those guests who wanted
exclusive privileges paid him a fixed sum to close his doors to all others.
The first coffeehouse in New York was opened about 1700, and quickly became a
rendezvous of the ton. Though few if any American taverns were converted into
clubhouses in the manner of Brooks's, they did bring to focus the social fife
of Colonial gentlemen, and built barriers of price and custom which
effectually excluded the riff-raff. The Green Dragon and the Bunch of Grapes
in Boston, Little's Tavern in New York, and the French establishment called
"Lebanon" in the suburbs of Philadelphia for "orderly, genteel and reputable
people," were all locally famous.[4]
The oldest gentlemen's club in the United States which has lasted without
a break is the Philadelphia Club. As early as 1830 a few gentlemen met at
Mrs. Rubicam's Coffee-House at Fifth and Minor Streets to play cards. Joined
by friends they organized the Adelphia Club in 1834; it soon came to be
called the Philadelphia Club. Henry Bohlen, George Cadwalader, James Markoe,
and Henry Pratt McKean were among its guiding lights. In 1835 the club rented
the old house where Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples, had lived in exile, and
became officially the Philadelphia Club. For the past eighty-six years it has
occupied its present stately brick dwelling at Thirteenth and Walnut, built
originally as a residence for Thomas, only son of aristocratic Major Pierce
Butler of South Carolina. Ladies have been admitted only three times in the
club's history, for balls in 1851 and 1869, and a centenary tea in 1934-at
which Mrs. John Markoe, last belle of the ball of 1869, poured tea for the
distinguished veterans. Most members of the Fish House Club belong also to
the Philadelphia Club, and its link with the old Assembly is very strong
since members traditionally come here for their nightcap after the ball is
over. Bounded by these three sides of a triangle lies probably the most
compact and inviolable little group of aristocrats in America. Its most
dangerous schism broke with the Civil War, when a Unionist entered the club
remarking that "this place reeks of Copperheads." A fellow-member promptly
knocked him down, was expelled, reinstated by court order, again expelled and
again reinstated by Federal command; he then entered the club, ordered a
drink, and handed in-his resignation for ever. One of its most picturesque
habitue's was Chief Justice Gibson, whose habit was to sit till all hours
with good whiskey and better company, and then needing to get up early to
render decisions would order the boy who waked him to bring "Coffee, hot as
hell and strong as the wrath of God."
The Philadelphia Club has had its crusty characters so typical of club life.
There was the member who used to sleep in the library every afternoon, and
left instructions to be called for dinner. A waiter once came for this
purpose, but found that the mere human voice-raised to the maximum loudness
thinkable in the Philadelphia Club—was unavailing. Of course he could not
touch the reverend member with his hand, but being a waiter of resource, just
then he spied the Club's cat strolling in. Picking up the cat he deftly
placed it in the sleeper's lap, hid behind the door, and returned a few
seconds later with his respectful announcement. And there was the late
William Read Fisher, who stoutly opposed a plan for converting the former
coat-room into a tea-room about 1900; his protests were out-voted and the
alteration took place, but until the day of his death in 1913 Mr. Fisher upon
entering the Club would walk straight up the marble steps and-before going in
to lunch or bridgedeposit his hat and coat aggressively on a chair in the new
tea-room. Such intransigence calls to mind the Oxford legend of the ghost in
Pembroke College, of a seventeenth-century don who is always seen walking
apparently on his knees in the neighborhood of his old rooms. Such peculiar
behavior was explained when the present bursar, digging among old records,
discovered that the floors in that wing had been raised eighteen inches in
early Victorian times; the ghost, being a conservative, was simply haunting
the old level.
And the Philadelphia Club, like others of its kind, has had its celebrated
wagers. John T. Montgomery, a wag who died forty years ago, once casually
remarked over the card-table that he had a brother thirteen feet high. Bets
were immediately placed by sceptical friends. "I suppose it is generally
admitted that two halves make a whole?" ventured Mr. Montgomery mildly. When
everybody had assented to this axiom he concluded, "Well, I have two
half-brothers, each six-foot-six-and-a-half." After ocular proof of this fact
he collected his winnings. Another sort of ruse was once practised in the
Union Club of New York, before removal from Fifth Avenue to its present
quarters at Park Avenue and 69th Street had invalidated its old custom of
reviewing the town from behind its plateglass windows. A favored sport was to
bet upon the number of Negroes who would pass the Club windows during a
specified time. A member who lost a good many dollars by this pastime once
had the good luck to meet a parade of colored delegates starting far up Fifth
Avenue. Hastily calling a taxi he arrived at the Union Club, and with great
success bet with all comers on the apparently insane proposal that 500
Negroes would pass within the next half hour.
'Me Union Club ranks in antiquity a close second to the Philadelphia Club.
Francis Gerry Fairfield in his book The Clubs of New York (1871) recalls the
year 1836 as an annus mirabilis: "Tradition preserves the record of the
season under the designation of the cold summer. Weird auroras did not
forbear to lift themselves in mountains of fire along the north, even in
July; and more than once the canopy-aurora hung like a mock sun in the very
center of the heavens. People predicted strange things." Rather as an
anticlimax we learn that the only prodigy brought forth was the Union Club.
More and more New Yorkers, travelling abroad, were observing the social clubs
of the West End in London, and of these the Union was an express imitation.
"If this club can be gotten up like the English clubs it may succeed; little
short of that will meet the views of the members," Philip Hone writes in his
diary on December 7, 1836, after dining with the governing committee at
Windust's.[5] In earlier times New York citizens had lived and entertained
for the most part at home, and in post-Revolutionary days had looked upon the
St. James's Square type of club with actual disfavor. But now with increasing
congestion in the city, further distances from home to business, and the rise
of a class of worldly bachelors and menabout-town whom Hone mentions as the
chief beneficiaries of the new Club, attitudes were changing.
The entrance fee was set at $100, and annual dues $20. In midsummer, 1836, a
committee made up of Hone, Thomas J. Oakley, Ogden Hoffman, J. De Peyster
Ogden, and a few others had sent out invitations to membership. One of them
was received by an up-and-coming Scotchman who had just started a newspaper,
and whose blatancy had not yet been fully revealed; five years later he could
not have bought his way into the Union Club at any price. James Gordon
Bennett early adopted the habit of inviting the readers of his Herald to
share his personal problems and affairs: in 1840 he was to announce his
forthcoming marriage under the headline "Declaration of Love-Caught at
Last-Going to be Married-New Movement in Civilization." Now, with the
engraved invitation from the Union Club upon his desk Bennett could not
resist the possibilities of "copy"; on August 17, 1836, in an editorial he
pondered:
"Shall I, or shall I not, accept the invitation?
"What is the use of any social system in which women do not participate? In
which their petticoat is not seen-where glossy ringlets cannot enter and make
it Paradise? . . .
"The Union Club, now proposed, is the first attempt of this kind in this
country. Can it succeed? Will it promote principle, taste, philosophy, talent
and genius? It may aid eating, cooking, and conversational powers, but one
hour of solitary bliss of true genius is worth an eternity of meretricious
social happiness . . .
"Still I shall take the matter, as requested, into consideration, and reply
to the secretary in a few days."
At this time Bennett was eager to increase circulation, and seized at every
straw to ingratiate himself with the 300,000 New Yorkers who were not being
invited to join the Union Club. In November he criticized the Union Club
sharply and ended with the flourish, "Down with all Clubs say we." For months
afterwards he fired desultory salvos at the extravagance, over-charging, and
likely degeneration of the Union Club into a "mere gambling association,"
until some of the more faint-hearted subscribers actually dropped away.
Early in 1837 the Club hired M. Julien, a chef from Paris, who gave
satisfaction in every respect except turtle-soup and terrapin—later to become
a specialite de la maison, along with clams southside and French
pancackes.[sic] A cellar of excellent wines was laid down, and gourmets began
to flock to the Union. Its first president was Samuel Jones, Chief Justice of
the Superior Court of New York City; he was succeeded by John C. Stevens,
noted pioneer of yachting, and in turn by Governor John Alsop King, son of
Rufus King. In 1842 the Club moved to William B. Astor's former house on
Broadway, which, says Philip Hone, is "an excellent lounging place for young
and old beaux, each of whom would fain be thought what the other is; where
horse racing and politics are discussed by those who know little about either
of those abstruse sciences; where the 'young idea' is taught to shoot
billiard balls and study the mysteries of whist; and where I frequent,
notwithstanding the satirical tone of the present remarks."
The roll of early members shows a predominance of merchants, with lawyers a
close second; today brokers lead the field. In 1855 the invincible Bennett
referred to the Union as "an eating and drinking establishment of merchants,
old fogy speculators, stock jobbers, Wall Street bulls and bears, lame ducks,
and kite-flyers . . . this nursery for old bachelors." Aside from female
servants few women have ever set foot within the Union Club; even its
historic mascot was a tom-cat, Kibosh. The wife or widow of an ex-president
is allowed to see her husband's portrait when it is hung, and on one
memorable occasion the wife of an inveterate whist-player knocked aside the
doorman and forced her way into the card-room. The historian of the Club
relates that the luckless husband "retained his presence of mind. Gravely he
introduced his wife to his fellow members at his table. Then he turned to
her, and courteously and politely asked her to be seated until the rubber was
ended. When this had been accomplished he offered his arm to his wife, bowed
gravely to the other members and left the Club—never to set foot inside the
clubhouse again."
Although Goelets, Pynes, Schermerhorns, Iselins, and Wilmerdings do not make
history if they can help it, the Union Club has not been wholly barren of
dramatic episodes. Refusal of the demand in 1861 to expel Judah P.
Benjamin-not that he was a Jew but because he had become the financial brains
of the Confederacy-led to the secession of hotheaded patriots to form in 1863
the Union League Club, composed, as a Democratic paper sneered at the time,
"of able-bodied gentlemen, whose purpose is to induce other able-bodied men
to enlist." Its politics have always been more outstanding than its
pedigrees. And the expulsion from the Union of Count Joseph Loubat in 1882
became a cause celebre. In 1891 another rift occurred in its ranks when the
late J. P. Morgan, piqued by the blackballing of a business associate,
inspired a few friends to join him in founding the Metropolitan Club.
Popularly known as the "Millionaires' Club," the Metropolitan is made up on
the one hand of a stratum acceptable to the Union Club and on the other of
gentlemen whose wealth is a little too cumbersome to pass through the
mid-Victorian doorway of the Union and the Knickerbocker. As a matter of
history it may be recorded that even its founder came in later years to make
amends to the Union Club, when the partner he had championed turned out to be
hardly worth the trouble. But the red-letter day in the life of the Union
Club occurred in the autumn Of 1920, when the Cork Men's Benevolent and
Protective Association, issuing from St. Patrick's where they had been
attending Mass for the repose of the soul of the martyred Terence Macswiney,
saw the Union Jack flying from the mast over the door of the Union Club in
commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Mayflower. Storming the Club
with sticks and stones, they broke plate-glass windows and exchanged bloody
noses with Club members who bravely stood their ground and refused to lower
the ensign. Police finally routed these Irish patriots with gentle firmness,
while over the fortress still waved the symbol of St. George and St. Andrew.
Mr. Telfair Minton, the Union Club member who sustained greatest mayhem in
the shape of two black eyes, was consoled by a cablegram from a friend in
London, "0 say, can you see?"
The various dining clubs within the Union which have sprung up, flourished
and died during the last century illustrate the cellular division so
frequently seen in club life. A petit comite will form inside even the most
exacting group, commandeer a room for itself, and begin to build an enclave
of tradition. Usually taking the guise of an informal dining club, it
specializes in appeal to gourmets who are also good fellowslike the Decanter
and the Pee Wee Clubs within the Philadelphia, the Kitten and the late Zodiac
Clubs of the Union, and the Beacon Society within the Algonquin Club of
Boston. Three members are probably the minimum which can still remain
"clubable"—exampled by the late but famous little group of Harry Payne
Whitney, Francis P. Garvan, and Finley Peter Dunne in New York, called "The
Meeting-House."
The Union is proud to call itself "the mother of clubs." The most
aristocratic of its children is the Knickerbocker, organized in 1871 by a
company of young men who were either members of the Union Club or securely
upon its waiting-list—Alexander Hamilton, who was the first president from
1871 to 1890, John J. Astor, William Cutting, Robert S. Hone, Philip
Schuyler, and a few others. According to the version told at the Union,
several of those young bloods grew impatient with the ten years' waiting-list
at the elder club; today, with less arrogance, the Union acts upon
candidacies with reasonable promptness. According to the story of the
Knickerbocker Club, these young men felt that the Union was getting too
mixed, democratic, and resolved to found an association whose name should
stress the requisite of family. Its membership is limited to 750, and for a
time its critical demands were exceedingly high. Like so many other symbols
of solidarity the Knickerbocker has relaxed its standards, decorously and
almost imperceptibly over a span of the last twenty years. Today, since the
opening in 1933 of the Georgian club-house of the Union with fine athletic
facilities, the Knickerbocker appears to be waning in favor. With its sedate
quarters on upper Fifth Avenue it seems just now to be a relic of those
sedentary times when, as Holmes declared in Boston, "Society would drop a man
who should run round the Common in five minutes."
Another club legend of New York records that the Brook was started by two
youngish gentlemen expelled from the Union for the unappreciated prank of
putting a poached egg upon the head of its most revered patriarch. Founded in
1903, it has chosen to remain a small but very smart club with a sporting and
cavalierish bonhomie among its members. Its guiding spirit and current
president is Mr. Percy Rivington. Pyne. A much larger club with even greater
stress upon the sporting tradition is the Racquet and Tennis Club, founded in
1890 by Isaac Townsend, R. J. Cross, H. De Coppet, H. S. Hoyt, Edward La
Montagne, and Rutherfurd Stuyvesant, and merged with the earlier Racquet
Court Club founded in 1875 under the inspiration of William R. Travers. Among
young men of New York, especially those who must concentrate upon membership
in a single important club, the Racquet is today the most attractive
socially, though tales of its exclusiveness are somewhat exaggerated when
ascribed to a club which numbers 2100 members.
Every American city with a vestige of tradition has one eminently respectable
men's club, housed behind brownstone or substantial brick, heavy but
impressive in architecture, food, and membership. The Chicago Club, the
Pacific Union Club in San Francisco, the Denver Club, the Boston Club in New
Orleans, the Metropolitan in Washington, and the Maryland Club in Baltimore
are all impeccable. Young men often profess scorn of their stodgy ways, but
are immensely flattered when an old fogy offers to nominate them. Local
conditions played of course an important part in the time and circumstances
of their origin.[6] Thus the Pacific in San Francisco began at the
surprisingly early date of 1852, a year after the Somerset of Boston and five
years before the Maryland Club, because of socially minded Peytons, Wards,
Colemans, and McAllisters who had arrived in the wake of the Forty-Niners.
Because the club idea is Anglo-Saxon rather than French, New Orleans was
tardy in adopting it; and because it is urban rather than rural, Virginia
social life, even in its capital Richmond, was long oblivious. Even today in
a small and clearly delimited aristocracy like that of Charleston, clubs on
the London pattern have never struck root.
In addition to the social club par excellence, most larger cities have at
least one intellectual and celebrity-garnering club which usually meets
around a long table for lunch, and once or twice a year-preferably midsummer
or the Christmas holidays-stages a play, or carnival, or gala party. The most
picturesque of these is the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, founded in 1872,
and worthy disciples are the Cactus Club of Denver, the Tavern Club of
Chicago, and the Cosmos in Washington. Eastern clubs of this type often
assume most functions of the staid social club as well; of these the pioneer
is the Century Association of New York, founded in 1847, and without doubt
the most aristocratic is the Tavern Club of Boston, begun in 1884.
Excessively reactionary in the matter of electric lights and pedigrees, the
Tavern has for its core a group even more socially fastidious than the
proverbial Somerset—a noble Boston tradition which began in 1851 under the
presidency of Francis B. Crowninshield, with a membership of 600 whose
names—Amory, Appleton, Codman, Coolidge, Cushing, Dexter, Endicott, Gardner,
Hooper, Minot, Perkins, Sears, Thayer—are still the incantation of its
sesame. Probably the Somerset is the only club in America whose members do
not trouble to sign checks.
Shortly after the foundation of the Tavern Club, Doctor Tilden canvassed for
funds to buy a bear-cub to which he had taken a great fancy in a dime
muse[u]m of freaks, kept by a giant who was proprietor as well as one of the
curiosities. But a cool-headed Executive Committee vetoed the scheme out of
hand, and diverted the fund to purchase a massive punch-bowl which became one
of the prized possessions of the Club. Yet the "jolly brown bear" lingered in
song and story, and remains the Club symbol today. One of several rousing
Tavern Club bacchanals has as its burthen
Vive la bear, vive la bear!
Vive la, vive la, vive la bear!
Joy we share; down with care!
Vive la compagnie!
For the Tavern is nothing if not lyrical, with such past and present
litte-rateurs as M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Arlo Bates, Bliss Perry, George Pierce
Baker, Owen Wister, Arthur Stanwood Pier, and Charles Eliot Norton. William
Dean Howells was one of its founders, aided by less literary and more
traditionally Brahmin souls like Colonel Henry Lee, Major Henry Lee
Higginson, and Cameron Forbes. Its present most actively venerable member is
President Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell, "Cousin Larry" to Beacon Street,
and among its non-resident members is Mr. J. P. Morgan, exceedingly persona
grata in Boston and at his alma mater Harvard. The Tavern Club has a long
record of theatricals capably done—chiefly Elizabethan plays, and Beaumont
and Fletcher in particular- and is so securely Bostonian that in 1905 it
could well give a dinner in honor of Booker T. Washington with a panegyric in
verse by Le Baron Russell Briggs. Some years ago Winthrop Ames celebrated the
Tavern in pleasantly invidious lines:
Every worthy club in Boston
Has its proper point of pride:
At the Botolph Sunday Concerts,
At the Somerset 'tis "side";
And the graveyard gives the Union
Its distinctive clammy calm,
But the Dry Martini Cocktail
Is the Tavern's special charm!
The St. Botolph is a more democratic version of the Tavern; the Union is the
bankers' and lawyers' lunch club. The Tennis and Racquet is 'favored by
sporting youth, while for costly epicurism nothing can compare with the
annual dinner of the Massachusetts Humane Society, founded in 1780 to furnish
life-boats and preservers, and to award medals for acts of heroism. Extremely
rich and patrician, it now devotes its surplus income to hospitals. With it
should be compared the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society,
organized in 1849 to skate on the Schuylkill; its members always carried rope
to save people who had fallen through the ice. Though owning a less ambitious
program of service to humanity, it still flourishes and now does its skating
indoors.
Of the resort clubs, halfway between the urban and the country club, those of
Newport are examples of exclusiveness. There is the Reading Room, chartered
in 1854 by William S. Wetmore, William B. Lawrence, and Edward King when
Newport was a quiet summer home for a few Northern and many Southern families
of quality who lived chiefly in boarding-houses. In that day Bailey's Beach
was regarded as very "fast" because it licensed mixed bathing—"I confess I
thought this," wrote Alexander Mackay in 1846, "more in accordance with the
social habits of Paris and of Vienna than those of the United States." Women
in ankle-length pantalettes and red frocks with long sleeves, and men in
knee-length suits, disported themselves in the foam-the gentlemen, as Charles
Augustus Murray observed in 1839, "handing about their pretty partners as if
they were dancing water quadrilles." Only the walrus and the carpenter were
missing, for a later generation saw the Clambake Club appear in 1897 under
the sponsorship of Henry F. Eldridge, James Otis, Center Hitchcock, Prescott
Lawrence, Frederick Paine, and others. Its shield displayed a clam above a
lobster rampant, and the waggish device Ex litore clamavi. The Gooseberry
Island Club, devoted to fishing, drinking, bathing in the nude, and dressing
in time to welcome the ladies to lunch, is Newport's most recherche. Its
dozen members today include Ogden Mills, Doctor Alexander Hamilton Rice,
Doctor Henry Barton Jacobs, and others of the utmost social gravity. These
are also among the present Governors of the Spouting Rock Beach Association,
otherwise Bailey's Beach, which manages adroitly to be exclusive in repute
and democratic in practice. For it was here that Evelyn Walsh McLean hired
two private detectives to patrol the plage while she bathed, explaining,
"Good Lord! I've got to be watched!" But the Governors disapproved, and Mrs.
McLean abandoned her Newport campaign forever, leaving its dowagers in
possession of their citadels and its tradesmen in a quandary. An earlier
explorer of Newport who left a cairn to mark the spot was James Gordon
Bennett, Jr., who for a time courted society as sedulously as his father had
insulted it. A British army officer, Bennett's guest, on a dare rode his polo
pony up the steps and into the hall of the Newport Reading Room. Indignant
old members of the Reading Room, sensing the presence of a horse in their
midst as the beginning of social disintegration, revoked the officer's
guest-card. In reprisal Bennett resigned and built a club of his own, the
Casino, on Bellevue Avenue opposite his own house. Tennis is its chief
interest, an annual invitation tournament marking the height of the Newport
season. On Tuesday nights in its ballroom Broadway plays are presented by the
original cast, for the pleasure of an intimate group.
The country club, though few of its patrons realize it, is a peculiarly
American concept. Some years ago it spread to Canada and Mexico City, and at
present—viewed with conservative disapproval—is gaining a foothold in the
suburbs of London, at Richmond and elsewhere. Its infection of England is
somewhat ironic, because the country club is essentially the communal,
telescoped American equivalent for the British week-end. A gentleman must dig
his toes into the turf with fair regularity, and his children must romp in
sun and wind if they are to be future empire-builders. Hence before Long
Island was rediscovered with such acclaim, the country club began. Today its
chief support comes from those vice-presidents of small banks, moderately
successful lawyers, and busy doctors who cannot well maintain a great rural
estate. Henry James, revisiting the Hudson Valley after long absence in 1906,
seized upon the country club as a deeply significant American symbol—the only
known organization which accepted the Family in "its extension, its whole exte
nsion, through social space"—father, mother, offspring of collegiate or
tenderest years, with relatives and guests, and no discriminations of age or
sex. To the family, in all its majestic eld or jam-smeared adolescence, it
offered "new forms of felicity," as James observed with European wonder. Here
he saw on golf links and tennis courts, in swimming pools and gymnasia, in
restaurants and ballrooms and piazzas, "the sovereign People, as a pervasive
and penetrative mass, 'doing' themselves on unprecedented lines." Of course,
as he added in afterthought, there are a few people who cannot belong to
country clubs, because "even the most inclusive social scheme must in a large
community always stop somewhere." Happily for his own peace of mind James had
not the prescience to analyze the night-club era.
The history of the country club is bound by several links with the popularity
of golf. Said to be derived from the Dutch kolf, club or stick, this game was
first imported from Holland, and played in New Netherlands with such zeal
that the authorities forbade it within thickly settled areas. Dying out in
its more ferocious form, the game was later revived upon the Scotch model.
Charleston in 1795 had the first recorded golf club and clubhouse, on
Harleston's Green; Savannah and Augusta both had golf clubs at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. The Savannah Golf Club had a house on East Common
where it gave banquets and ballsone of its invitations, dated December 20,
1811, for a New Year's Eve dance, hangs on the walls of the Denver Country
Club. After 1818 it apparently dissolved. Such groups in general were made up
of loyal Scots, who putted on a stretch of turf, drank whiskey under the
apple trees, reminisced fondly about the Old Country, and entertained at rare
intervals their Caledonian friends. None of these organizations lasted long.
Not until the idea of the country club had already germinated near New York
and Boston, with hunting, riding, and shooting as its staple sports, did golf
return to America and powerfully re-enforce the need for acreage. The first
golf club in the modern sense was the St. Andrews Club of Yonkers in 1888;
soon thereafter its members built a suitable clubhouse. In the same year the
Meadowbrook Hunt Club, organized in 1881, declined to sponsor golf, but in
1890 two young swells who had picked up the game at Biarritz, Duncan Cryder
and Edward S. Mead, introduced it to Southampton and the following year
founded the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club-the oldest club in America which has
used continuously the same terrain. These were the "dude years" in the
development of golf, which saw expensive courses laid out at Brookline as the
property of "The Country Club"—only one of its kind which has never assumed a
name, under the proud impression that it is sui generis, like the roc's
egg-and at the Newport Country Club under the sponsorship of Whitney Warren,
and at Westchester, whose pioneering Country Club had been founded by James
M. Waterbury, sporting son of a rich New York merchant, in 1884. Not until
the early twentieth century did golf reach the upper middle class, and create
demands for country clubs from Detroit to Houston, Atlantic City to Los
Angeles—"turning cowpastures into rich tourney fields," as Sinclair Lewis has
recorded. Golf therefore was not the initial provocation for the country
club, but the most potent agent in its spread.
Tuxedo, though not as sometimes stated the first country club in the United
States, soon followed Westchester, and ever since its foundation in the
winter of 1885-86 has remained the prince of its type. The first Peter or
Pierre Lorillard in 184 foreclosed a mortgage upon part of its territory,
then a wilderness of thickets and boulders beside the lake which Indians had
named Ptuck-sepo or Tuxedo. The Lorillards, successful manufacturers of
cigars and snuff, continued to buy land until Pierre Lorillard III came into
possession of 600,000 acres by inheritance, purchase, and winning at poker
from his relatives. After consultation with his friend the architect Bruce
Price, he decided in 1885 to convert this rugged but picturesque site, then
reached by railway from New York, into a resort of individual cottages where
the Best People who were growing tired of resort-hotels at Saratoga and
Richfield Springs might come to hunt, fish, and skate. He built roads, a
water and sewage system, a Park gatehouse or keeper's lodge "like a
frontispiece to an English novel," twenty-two cottages, stables, swimming
tank, and the clubhouse itself—a huge gray wooden structure with wide porches
surrounding a ballroom where on Saturday evenings Lander's band was hired to
play. A contemporary description reads: "There is a brown plush divan around
the room between the windows, and a row of camp chairs where a few chaperons
sit while slim girls in gauzy skirts and long corset-like silk bodices circle
about in the arms of men whom an all-afternoon tramp in the stubble after
birds has not fatigued." Its gala opening on May 30, 1886, drew 700 guests
from New York, who were impressed to find a staff of game-keepers in green
and yellow with Tyrolese hats who started self-consciously from the underwood
as the liveried coachman drove past in his smart yellow buckboard. William
Waldorf Astor, Grenville Kane, Peter Cooper Hewitt, and Sir Roderick Cameron,
merchant and British consul in New York, were among the first cottagers. In
the best English tradition Sir Roderick maintained a shooting-box there; for
native partridge and woodcock were abundant, though the imported pheasants
and turkeys failed to stay within the pale of the Park and were given up in
despair. Mr. Lorillard spent the balance Of $2,000,000 in laying out in 1889
a golf course whose location has been changed several times, in building a
race track whose grandstand is now used solely for horse and dog shows and
Fourth of July sports, in constructing an electrically lit toboggan slide
nearly a mile long, and in introducing court tennis in 1899 under the
sponsorship of T. Suffern Tailer. The Kanes promoted fox hunting and Mrs.
James Brown Potter-then known as a relative by marriage of the saintly Bishop
Potter rather than the sensational actress she later became-helped with
amateur theatricals and breathed her first demoralizing whiff of grease-paint.
The first of a famous series of autumn balls, which came to mark the
beginning of New York's social season, was held in October, 1886. A society
reporter wrote: "Young Griswold Lorillard appeared in a tailless dress coat
and waistcoat of scarlet satin, looking for all the world like a royal
footman. There were several others of the abbreviated coats worn, which
suggested to the onlookers that the boys ought to have been put in
strait-jackets long ago." Tradition asserts that the tailless dress coat
originated at a small dance given by one of the egregious Chowder and
Marching Clubs in the Bowery, at which certain leaders of Irish fashion
decided that swallow-tails impeded the vigor with which real dancing ought to
be done, and that young Lorillard and his friends adopted the style. It is
more probable however that the inspiration for the "Tuxedo"—as it was first
called in society and still remains to the uninitiate—was the new English
dinner-coat which the Prince of Wales and his cronies had recently adopted.
Even as the distinguished black garb affected by the hero of Bulwer-Lytton's
popular novel Pelham in 1828 had forever shamed out of favor the claret,
purple, crimson, and indigo dinner-clothes of the Regency, so the
semi-clerical coat affected by a most unclerical heir to the Crown and his
imitators at Tuxedo changed permanently the style for informal dining and
country-house parties.
Today Tuxedo has 246 members and a new clubhouse designed by John Russell
Pope which was opened in 1928, built in the style of an English country
place, with open terraces instead of porches. Its old architecture survives,
however, in scores of provincial country clubs which had accepted it as their
cynosure. Its honorary president is the present Pierre Lorillard. Other
conspicuously fashionable country clubs are the Piping Rock at Locust Valley,
Long Island, the Saddle and Cycle in Chicago, and the Burlingame in San
Francisco. One of the most critical is the Myopia Hunt Club, founded by a
near-sighted group of Bostonians in 1892 for golf, hunting, and polo. In the
tradition of high living and hard riding the premier American country club is
the Meadow Brook in Nassau County, Long Island, with a hunting area of some
twelve by twenty miles along the Jericho Turnpike. Fox hunting was
inaugurated in 1890 during the Mastership of Thomas Hitchcock, Sr.; its
present president is an almost equally famous sportsman, Mr. Devereaux
Milburn. Its 200 members have their distinctive evening dress, a scarlet coat
with robin's egg blue facings and hunt buttons, worn with white waistcoat.
Upon its field the International Polo Matches have been held since the
beginning of the present century. Even more narrowly sporting is the Turf and
Field Club at Belmont Park, incorporated in 1895. The Creek Club, founded
later upon Long Island by Vincent Astor, Marshall Field, Clarence H. Mackay,
and the late Harry Payne Whitney, is both costly and aloof. These clubs have
evolved in such specialized fashion and are so heavily buttressed with wealth
that they have little in common with the average pedestrian country club in
America
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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