-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Right People - A Portrait of the American Social Establishment
Stephen Birmingham�1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1968
Little, Brown and Company
BostonoToronto
LCCN 68-11525
360pps. � out-of-print
-----
9.
The Club Convention
NOT long ago, to their dismay, the heirs of a prominent Philadelphian read in
his obituary notice, "Mr. � was a member of the Philadelphia Club and the
Racquet Club." The deceased's son picked up the telephone, called the editor
of the paper and demanded a retraction. "He was a member of the Rabbit, not
the Racquet Club!" the son explained. When the editor apologized and added,
"But does it really make all that much difference?" the son exploded, "But it
makes a world of difference! A world!"
The difference between the exclusive Philadelphia Racquet Club, and the
ultra-exclusive Old Philadelphia Rabbit Club is clear enough. The Rabbit has
only eighty to a hundred members, compared with the somewhat more inclusive
Racquet. But the Rabbit itself plays a weak second fiddle in Philadelphia to
the redoubtable Fish House or, as it is officially called The State in
Schuylkill. Social historians often point out that men's city social clubs in
the United States are modeled on their counterparts in London. But
Philadelphia's Fish House has been able to work it out the other way around �
so that London, in fact, was copying Philadelphia. The Fish House calls
itself "The oldest formally organized men's social club in the Anglo-Saxon
(which is to say civilized) world." The important qualifier in this claim is
"formally organized." Such famous London clubs as White's, St. James's, and
Boodle's would, according to most standards, seem actually older, but Fish
House members point out that the London clubs were not private clubs, but
public coffee houses, until White's became "formally organized" in 1736. The
Fish House, therefore, which formally organized in 1732, squeaks under the
longevity wire. The Fish House membership is limited to thirty, plus a tiny
handful of "apprentice" members, and so, though it is often said that "Nearly
all Fish House members also belong to the Rabbit," all the members of the
Rabbit do not belong to the Fish House. The Rabbit, by the way, is a relative
stripling among Philadelphia men's clubs � founded and "formally organized"
in 1861.
Both the Fish House and the Rabbit are, of all things, cooking clubs. If the
Fish House specialized in cooking fish, and the Rabbit in rabbit, it would be
simple enough, but the Rabbit is called the Rabbit because its original
clubhouse stood on Rabbit Lane. Philadelphians nourish their parochialisms
and eccentricities, and so the fact that these two clubs have no exact
parallels in the Anglo-Saxon � or other � world is exactly as Philadelphia
Society prefers it to be. In the Fish House, for instance, for over nine
generations distinguished Philadelphia men who normally would not enter their
own kitchens from one month to the next have put on long white aprons and
strange widebrimmed straw bats which members call "boaters" (but which look
more like Chinese coolie hats[*] than traditional boaters) and, with ladles
and saucepans and other implements of cuisine, prepare such delicacies as
boola-boola soup and planked shad. The Fish House meets thirteen times a
summer, from May to October, and at each of its lengthy and somewhat bibulous
luncheons � Fish House Punch is the club's invention and its traditional
specialty -each course is the responsibility of an individual member. Thus
every member gets a try at several dishes during a season.[ * The similarity
to coolie hats has been remarked upon by others, and so Fish House members
make it a point to say, "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" aspect of the club is equally quaint, and even more
tradition-bound. The club began as a "Fishing Company," one of several groups
that gathered along the banks of the Schuylkill River (after a morning of
fishing, members cooked their catch for lunch), but somewhere along the line
the group that has descended as the Fish House got off on a novel tack. It
decided that it was an independent Colony, with a separate government, its
own laws, and its own officials. What justification in fact there was for
this assumption is dim indeed. Nevertheless, the State in Schuylkill
continues to this day to pretend that it is a separate state "in Schuylkill,"
even though it moved from Schuylkill in 1822 and, in 1888, moved from the
Schuylkill River altogether to the banks of the Delaware where it now
reposes. In 1781, the club formally joined the United States of America �
even though the United States has never acknowledged its membership � but it
continues to call its members "citizens," and among its elected officials are
a Secretary of State, a Secretary of the Treasury, a Governor, Counsellors,
Sheriff, and even a Coroner. Its headquarters � the clubhouse � is called
"the Castle." When national Prohibition was imposed in the 1920'S, the State
in Schuylkill remembered that, though it was indeed a state, it had never
ratified the United States Constitution. Prohibition, it argued, was an
infringement of states' rights, but once again the Federal government seemed
not to hear. If members of the Fish House approached these matters with
tongue in cheek, that would be one thing, but they do not. They take them
with intense seriousness, and any guest at the Fish House, confronted with
its incorruptible ritual, is ill-advised to snicker. For example, meals
traditionally begin with the toast, "To the memory of General Washington,"
followed by a second, "To the memory of Governor Morris." (Samuel Morris,
Jr., was Governor of the State in Schuylkill from 1765 to 1811.) After past
Governors have been toasted, there is a toast "To the President of the United
States." During the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, this
part of the ritual was conspicuously omitted. The Rabbit, though newer,
observes very similar rites, and complements the Fish House in that it holds
its meetings � with meals, again, prepared by members � during the winter.
The Rabbit can be said to surpass the Fish House in at least one matter. The
recipe for Fish House Punch was leaked to the public around 1900, but the
formula for the Rabbit's sacred grog is still a closely guarded secret. All
that is known about Rabbit Punch is that it is brewed for twenty-four hours
in "leather firkins," and is served hot.
Obviously, all men's social clubs are designed in part to allow men to remove
themselves for a little while from the company of women, and doubtless one of
the joys of a men's cooking club is that it challenges feminine domination of
the kitchen, at least symbolically. Probably a very similar anti-woman
feeling spawned San Francisco's famous Bohemian Club where, lest it be
supposed that the ladies of Society controlled such cultural bailiwicks as
music, theatre, and the dance, the gentlemen proposed to mix good fellowship
and wine with a bit of antic art. The Bohemian Club has never claimed to be
its own state of the Union, but it has more cause to than the Fish House; in
addition to a spacious clubhouse on Nob Hill, which includes a theatre
seating seven hundred and fifty, the club maintains a twenty-eight-hundred
acre "Grove" in the Sierra Nevada mountains where, once a year, Bohemian Club
members and their carefully chosen guests (President Eisenhower was one)
gather and "encamp" for two weeks. Typical encampments include lectures,
poetry readings, musical productions, spectacles of son et lumiere, concerts
by the club's own seventy-piece symphony orchestra and, of course, revels of
a more alcoholic sort. Each Bohemian encampment opens with a campfire
ceremony called "The Cremation of Care," and proceeds from there, with all
entertainment designed, directed, and performed by members themselves. For
years, the location of Bohemian Grove was � or so members solemnly insisted �
a secret, and no one of the female sex was allowed to set foot on the
territory (though ladies were admitted to the clubhouse in the city). As a
result, lurid tales circulated about Bohemian Club encampments during which,
it was said, primitive and erotic rites were celebrated by men from the
Social Register and ladies, in Rubenesque disarray, of slightly lower social
standing. Such tales � though club members naturally did little to put an end
to them � were apparently exaggerated. Nowadays, though not admitted during
the encampment period, wives and families of members may visit the Bohemian
Grove for picnics. Most agree that it is a pretty and unsinfullooking spot,
The Bohemian Club is one of several descendants of New York's Century
Association, the first "artistic" men's club designed, according to its
founders in 1847, for "authors and artists," as well as for "gentlemen of any
occupation provided their breadth of interest and . . . imagination make them
sympathetic, stimulating, and congenial companions in the society of authors
and artists." How closely this policy has been adhered to is a matter of
debate, but the Century Association idea has been both durable and popular.
In addition to the Bohemian, other clubs founded along the same
artist-and-writer lines include the Players, the Lambs, the Lotos, and the
Coffee House in New York; St. Botolph's in Boston; the Franklin Inn Club in
Philadelphia; the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.; the Cactus Club of Denver;
and the Tavern Clubs of Boston and Chicago. Each maintains its own rules and
rituals � such as the rule at the Coffee House that members, who sit
family-style around circular tables, must not "talk shop," and that guests,
furthermore, may not be introduced to members. As a result, a guest at the
Coffee House is often in the dark as to the identity of his luncheon
companions unless his host resorts to some such tactic as, "Well, if it isn't
Woody Broun!" when a member appears at the table.
The no-ladies-allowed rule in men's clubs was, needless to say, one of the
earliest to be challenged. Long before Lucy Stone, the women of American
Society wanted � out of sheer curiosity and jealousy if nothing else � to
have equal access to their husbands' hideaways. Every club, as a result, has
its favorite story of this or that prominent Society woman who dressed as a
man in order to gain entrance, and who, as the case may be, may or may not
have succeeded. And, one by one, the barriers began collapsing. Interestingly
enough, the conventional men's clubs � that is, the non-artistic � were the
first to relax their rules. Boston's Somerset Club, from its very early days,
had a ladies' dining room where women were admitted for the evening meal �
though at lunchtime it is still strictly a male affair, and wives of members
who may call for their husbands are unceremoniously placed on a horsehair
sofa in a dimly lit waiting room. The Philadelphia Club., in contrast, was a
long holdout. The Club insists that it was not until its centenary ball in
1934 that a female foot set foot on the premises. Now, however, women may
come to the club for dinner on all but certain nights. In New York, the first
club to admit ladies at the dinner hour was the Harmonie, a club of the
city's German-Jewish elite. The Union Club, New York's oldest and grandest
club of the Gentile elite (though, from its earliest days, it had a few
Sephardic Lazaruses and
Hendrickses among its membership, plus at least one German Jew, Adolphe
Ladenburg, and, of course, August Belmont who "passed") soon followed suit.
It is supposedly at the Union that a member, noticing a certain lady enter
the club one evening, commented wryly to the doorman, "Is it now permitted
for a member's mistress to enter the club at dinnertime?" To which the
doorman is said to have imperturbably replied, "Only if she is the wife of
another member, sir."
In Washington, women crept into the Metropolitan Club floor by floor
starting, naturally, at the bottom. First the ground, and then the second
floor of the clubhouse felt the imprint of the spiked heel, and presently a
sign was posted at the foot of the third-floor staircase, reading: NO LADIES
ALLOWED ON THE THIRD FLOOR FOR ANY PURPOSES WHATEVER. The ladies themselves
made such fun of the way the sign was worded that soon, in embarrassment, it
was removed, though ladies are still enjoined not to mount to the sacred
floor and, so far at least, they have been obedient. The Harvard Club of New
York, meanwhile, quaintly separates the sexes by making ladies use a separate
entrance located barely an arm's length away from the crimson-painted main
entrance. Inside the clubhouse, ladies and gentlemen are permitted to join
one another. The Pacific Union Club, in San Francisco, though not as old as
some of its counterpart men's clubs in the East, is said to have the cleanest
record in the country when it comes to excluding women. The only concession
the Pacific Union makes to the opposite sex is in one by-law which states
that if a member should be stricken while in the clubhouse, and should be
considered "in extremis," he may be permitted to have "one female nurse" in
attendance.
While the women of American Society were busily and systematically invading
their husbands' clubhouses, they were also forming clubs of their own � to
the equal consternation of the men. New York's Colony Club (founded in 1903
by such as Mrs. John Jacob Astor III, Mrs. W. S. Rainsford, and a
sister-in-law of the Junior League cofounder, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman) was
designed to be as sexually exclusive as the Union, the Knickerbocker, and the
Brook. Male clubmen were scandalized, and said flatly that the only reason a
group of women would wish such an organization was to have a place to conduct
clandestine love affairs, and to receive letters from their lovers � which
gives a fair indication of the use some of the men of Society were putting
their clubs to. The ladies airily replied that, as a matter of fact, having
an extra letter box was one of their reasons for establishing the club. These
were the golden years before the First World War when such controversies were
as serious as any that arose. The idea of the women's social club caught on,
and many others were established across the country. In New York, one of the
most interesting was the Cosmopolitan Club, which is now roughly the feminine
equivalent of the Century, drawing its membership largely from ladies who,
though gently born and bred, toil in literature, music, and the arts. In the
Cosmopolitan Club's first years following its founding in 19 1 1, it bad
nowhere near such an intellectual cast. It was known, in fact, for its wild,
night-long "revels" to which no men were admitted, and where the lady
members, costumed according to the theme of the evening � a night in Rome, in
Hong Kong, or in Araby � carried on with every bit as much alcoholic abandon
as any camper in the Bohemian Grove. "At dawn, the halls and public rooms
were strewn with wilted ladies," wrote one diarist of the time. Naturally,
when word of such carryings-on reached the men, they were as anxious to get
inside the women's clubs as the women had been to get inside the men's and,
true to form, rumors began to circulate of men dressed as women, who had
gained admission to such clubs as the Colony and Cosmopolitan. Clearly, the
walls that separated the sexes were about to come tumbling down.
While all this was going on, another force was at work � eating at the
single-sex club structure from within, as it were. This was the jealousy,
rivalry, and competitiveness that has always characterized American Society.
No sooner were there men's clubs in American cities than everyone was arguing
over which one was the "best." The American club scene became a social
battleground as it never was in England. Just as the Junior League and the
Colony Club today spar over which is the more "important," so, in the old
days, did the Cosmopolitan make it a three-sided battle in New York with
members of various clubs snubbing each other, dropping each other from their
guest lists, and blackballing each other from their clubs. The idea of
"exclusivity" � of keeping people out -- became the backbone of club life
when, as sometimes happens, a club can also be oriented toward the more
positive goal of taking people in. The men's clubs bickered and called each
other names, and members were always stalking out of clubs never to come back
again. Clubs splintered into other clubs. In New York, the Union League was
founded by a "league" of exmembers of the Union Club who departed, angrily,
at the time of the Civil War protesting that, despite its name, the Union had
merely allowed a pro-Confederate member to resign, instead of expelling him
bodily. The Knickerbocker Club � named after the patron saint of New York
City -was another Union Club spinoff, protesting that the Union was taking in
too many members from out of town. When one of J. P. Morgan's friends was
blackballed by the Union, Morgan simply built a club of his own � the
Metropolitan.
Often the clubs squabbled over which bad the better food and service, but the
heart of the matter was really which had the higher social standing. The
Harvard Club became renowned for its popovers � and still is. (When dining
there, it is part of protocol to admire the popovers.) The Union League, so
said its members, could not be outdone when it came to johnnycake. At the
Racquet and Tennis Club, the piece de resistance of any meal was the rice
pudding. ("Would you join a club for its rice pudding?" sniffed members of
other clubs.) The Brook Club was known for the overall excellence of its
cuisine, as well as for its slippered and unobtrusive service (members are
never presented with checks to sign; a soft-spoken servant follows each
gentleman around, seeing to his needs), and also for the general grandeur of
its operation. Guests of members of the Brook, for instance, are first
escorted to the downstairs "Stranger's Room," where they may peruse an
ancient edition of Barron's while waiting for their host.
Still, for all the clubs' attempts at elegance, there were perennial
complaints and dissatisfactions. At the Knickerbocker a member complained
that a waiter bad "touched" him. He would say no more. The man's fellow
members were puzzled, not knowing whether the waiter bad made an
inappropriate sexual advance, or had asked to borrow money. At last, however,
it turned out that the waiter had tapped the member on the shoulder to call
him to the telephone.
The battle of the sexes � in this case to be in on each others' doings � and
the battle of the clubs themselves are certainly two factors which have
brought both men's and women's clubs to their present somewhat diminished
state of social importance. The day when such a club as the Union League
could successfully abide by its rule of four � no women, no dogs, no
Democrats, no reporters" � has passed. The Club Idea � as it was conceived in
the nineteenth century � can only survive when everyone in Society agrees
that one club, and one alone, is the one that matters. College fraternities
and sororities, another nineteenth-century invention, have fared about as
men's and women's clubs have, and are quietly disappearing from one after
another of the best campuses. And yet, at Yale, there exists a club
institution that continues to seem indestructible.
There are two ranking senior societies at Yale, Skull and Bones, and Scroll
and Key � known affectionately as "Bones" and "Keys" � which occupy similarly
sinister and mausoleum-like structures on the New Haven campus. Membership in
either club is a portentous matter, and is said to cast a mystic influence on
a man's affairs throughout his life. Of the two, Skull and Bones, founded in
1832, is the older and definitely the grander. Even Scroll and Key men admit
that. A Bones man, hearing his club's name spoken aloud by an "outsider," is
supposed to get to his feet and immediately leave the room. A Keys man, whose
club was founded ten years later, can boast of no such strictures. To Skull
and Bones have belonged such men as Averell Harriman, Archibald MacLeish,
Robert A. Taft, and Henry R. Luce. On the other hand, Scroll and Key, by not
claiming the grandeur and distinction of Skull and Bones, by not protesting
its importance quite so much, often comes out a social notch or two ahead. To
Scroll and Key have belonged John Hay Whitney, Dean Acheson, Newbold Morris,
and any number of Rockefellers, along with many old-Society Browns, Delanos,
Potters, and Auchinclosses � a membership list hardly to be sneezed at. And
yet, when asked, a Scroll and Key member will always insist that his society
is less important than Skull and Bones. Scroll and Key, having always, and
with such perfect modesty, accepted second place, inevitably emerges
occupying a place considerably in front of first. It is a fact that
infuriates Skull and Bones, but there is nothing they can do. If the grown-up
world of big-city Society could have learned the lesson taught by Scroll and
Key on a college campus � that those who don't seem to care about being
Number One are usually those who make it � Society might have developed a
true Club Elite. But it never did.
And, in any case, while the city clubs were fussing over members and fighting
with each other, America was changing. The countryside was opening up. Travel
was easier. Resorts were building, people were on the move, and country
houses were going up. While men's clubs in the city were grudgingly letting
down their bars and admitting women, and women's clubs were doing the same to
men, a country club Society � with plenty of room for both sexes � was
developing on the rolling, wooded hills outside of town.
pps. 137-146
--[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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