The American Jewish Social Club
American Jews, the latter-day descendants of the people of the book, are no strangers to pleasure. Some have found it in Torah study, others in cooking and eating, and still others in pursuit of what William James called the gospel of relaxation. From the lavish Purim balls of the 1880s to the modest dance halls of the 1900s, from Chicago’s stately Standard Club to its more humble cousin, the Aleph Beth Gymal Doled Club of Minneapolis, from lodges to landsmanshaftn, America’s Jews made ample room in their lives for the social whirl of things—for card playing, convivial conversation, a good meal, a turn on the dance floor, and, on occasion, even a Swedish massage. In the process of having fun, America’s Jews transformed sociability into one of the hallmarks of the modern Jewish experience, giving rise along the way to new forms of community such as the urban social club and its suburban offshoot, the Jewish country club, and to equally new forms of identity such as the club member.
It is to the history—and consequences—of sociability among late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American Jews that this essay attends. Focusing on the Jewish social club, a little studied social phenomenon of the modern era, it looks at how the organized pursuit of sociability, especially among upwardly mobile Jewish men of the 1870s through the 1920s, affected American Jewish life. As much a part of the landscape as synagogues and charities, Jewish social clubs with decidedly non-Jewish names such as the Harmonie, the Phoenix, the Elysium, and the Concordia could be found in virtually every fair-sized metropolis by the waning years of the nineteenth century, offering their members a congenial venue in which to assuage their loneliness, hone their social skills, multiply their business contacts, or simply relax.
But then there was more—much more—to the Jewish social club than that. Central to the enterprise was the creation of a new kind of Jew or, more precisely still, a new kind of American Jewish male. The antithesis of the Old World Jew with his wariness, bookish ways, and demanding religion, the American Jewish club member was at home in the world, a congenial and affable fella whose Jewishness was unobtrusive and discreet at best. More to the point, the American Jewish club member was a consummate gentleman, the kind of man who, to paraphrase Maurice Samuel, modulated his manners as well as his ties.1 Although gentlemanliness was never expressly described as the sine qua non of membership—nowhere—not in the charters, bylaws, minutes, or newsletters is this a stated objective—its pursuit and cultivation was the peg on which members hung their top hats and eventually their golf caps as well.
As much a collective goal as an individual one, gentlemanliness appealed handily to thousands of American Jewish men across the country. In Mobile they congregated at the Fidelia; in Cleveland, they dropped in for a nightcap or a hand of cards at the Excelsior; and in San Francisco they sought one another’s company at the Concordia Club, reportedly “one of the best-known clubs on the coast.”2 Appealing to the “finest type of Jews”—middle-class men in their early twenties and thirties, virtually all of whom claimed German Jewish descent—Jewish social clubs grew steadily throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s from a handful of members to several hundred; some like the Harmonie in New York or the Phoenix in Baltimore also maintained a substantial waiting list.3 Jewish by default, not design, they made a point of pursuing conviviality rather than chesed (good deeds), effecting a revolution in the process. In each instance the “aim and keyword” of these clubs was not the furtherance of Jewish tradition, the expression of religious devotion, or even the performance of charity—the customary elements of Jewish communal life—as much as it was “sociability” pure and simple, its very innocuousness a profound challenge, even an assault on, the established Jewish order.4
I
An artifact of the Gilded Age, the urban social club took hold in the years immediately following the Civil War. By the mid-1870s no American city was without one or two or possibly even three. “At no time, probably in the history of the metropolis, has there been a movement so marked in the direction of club-life,” observed Francis Gerry Fairfield in 1873, charting its rapid development.5 A number of factors accounted for the postbellum popularity of the urban social club. For one thing, the flush of prosperity that accompanied the postwar years led to an expansion in and growing appreciation of leisure time; for another, American men, having grown accustomed to one another’s company during the Civil War, continued to seek out exclusively male forms of camaraderie in peacetime, too. At the same time, the growth of cities, increasingly inhabited by immigrants, also had much to do with the increasing popularity of the private social club, prompting the well-heeled to turn inward, away from the street.
Surely it is no coincidence that urban social clubs took off at the very same moment that cities grew larger, more ethnically diverse and economically stratified, prompting a heightened attentiveness to manners. “On crowded streets, in shops and hotels, on omnibuses, streetcars, trains, and steamboats, and in elevators, strangers were promiscuously amassed in intimate proximity,” explains historian John Kasson. “Such scenes were ripe with potential obtrusions from which defense or escape could be difficult.”6 An exercise in social control, in keeping unwelcome exchanges at bay, etiquette helped tame the growing unruliness of the metropolis. So, too, did the urban social club. You might even say it was etiquette writ large.
“Club life is undoubtedly civilizing,” gushed one of its fans, writer Charles Page Bryan, taking to the pages of the Cosmopolitan in 1889 to welcome the addition of the Chicago club, the Union Club, the Calumet Club, and the Marquette Club to the Windy City.7 Bryan applauded their dignified and occasionally “baronial” surroundings where a premium was placed on manners, discipline, and a fidelity to rules and regulations; even the waiters, it was said, behaved like gentlemen. Although still in their infancy, these clubs already had a salutary effect, especially on the younger generation. “A marked improvement has taken place in the morals and manners of the younger men,” Bryan cheered. Where earlier generations of Chicago men, especially those who had jettisoned their “Puritan backgrounds,” tended to “rush headlong down the toboggan-slides to destruction,” contemporary gents practiced restraint, thanks in no small measure to the discipline exacted upon them by their club.8
After singing the praises of Chicago’s social clubs in the most general of terms, Bryan went on to catalogue their respective attributes: which one set the finest table, which one was most enamored of sports or especially keen on politics. Among those inventoried in this manner was the Standard Club. But its claim to fame, its inclusion in the list of distinguished clubs, had little to do with its bill of fare or roster of activities as much as its clientele: “The Hebrews have recently completed a massive edifice for their Standard Club,” Bryan noted. “It is built of granite, with an impressive, fortress-like exterior but containing the most luxurious appointments. It occupies a corner not far from the Calumet Club and is worthy in every respect of an intelligent and worthy membership.”9 With the exception of the revealing reference to the Standard Club’s “fortress-like exterior”—surely not even Bryan was unmindful of the implications of alluding to a Jewish institution as a fortress—he registered the existence of a club that catered exclusively to Hebrews with barely a hiccup. The need for a club peopled entirely by Jews occasioned no glum thoughts about the ills of discrimination or the perils of social segregation. By Bryan’s lights, one club for the Jews and a dozen more for everyone else was a perfectly natural part of the social order. No intelligent and worthy Jewish membership, he insinuated, would have it any other way.
But then, the Jews of Chicago had little choice in the matter. As a group, they were not welcome at the Union Club or the Century Club or even the Calumet Club just around the corner. Things were not much better in Atlanta, Cleveland, and Kansas City, either. Throughout the nation, rare, indeed, was the urban social club that accepted American Jews as members. From time to time an occasional aspirant of Jewish origins might be granted admission, but, by and large, gentlemen’s clubs were off-limits to those of the Mosaic persuasion. When it came to admitting a Jewish member, blackball was the norm, acceptance the exception. Put simply, the Jews were widely believed to lack a “clubbable disposition,” that indefinable yet indispensable blend of grace and charm that came with good breeding and hoary ancestry.10 Of course, clubbability was not the only thing American Jews seemed to be without. If the nation’s leading hoteliers were to be believed, the American Jew had absolutely nothing going for him, not when it came to his public demeanor. “In the art of annoying others, he is a past-master,” they said. “His favorite attitude is the ostentatious counting of yellow-backs; his secret whisper is vulgar loudness.” Worse still, the American Jew was thought to be the very avatar of disagreeableness and, in some instances, even close kin to the devil, for as the American Hebrew related, hotel proprietors all agreed that the American Jew “has everything except horns and cloven hoofs.”11
Not every late nineteenth-century American harbored such negative thoughts about the Jews or celebrated their exclusion from society. Some, like the editors of the Nation, rued this state of affairs but felt there was little one could do about it; prejudices were far too entrenched to be overcome. The exclusionary nature of the social club, it editorialized, “may be as sad and reprehensible as you please, but it is as notorious as the sun at noonday and is of long standing.”12 What’s more, explained the well-regarded magazine, the social club is “simply an extension” of a man’s home, giving him the prerogative to do as he pleases. “This right to select his guests and associate for reasons best known to himself is one which every man carries to his club.” In the end, no good would come of protesting; the gentlemanly thing, in fact, was not to try. “The part of good taste and good manners is to avoid fighting one’s way into clubs, private houses or society of any description in which one’s presence would be for any reason objectionable to any part of the company,” it counseled.
II
Much as they might bristle at the Nation’s advice, those American Jews eager for club life did not spend too much time nursing their wounds. Instead, they quickly formed a parallel universe of social clubs whose sensibility hardly differed from those institutions that had excluded them in the first place.13 A defensive response to antisemitism, at least initially, the Jewish social club nevertheless modeled itself, from top to bottom, after its non-Jewish counterpart. Its handsome appointments as well as its calendar of events—card games and billiards, dinner dances, stag parties, singing contests, bowling tournaments, and other “doings”—varied not a whit from the norm.14 So much did the Jewish club resemble its non-Jewish counterpart that one observer allowed how the “disciples of Confucius and the devotees of Buddha” would certainly feel at home there: nothing, apart from the names on the membership roster—all those Bernheimers and Loewensteins—distinguished it from a non-Jewish facility.15 Even Purim balls and masquerades, high-spirited annual events that drew throngs of “ardent Terpsichoreans,” held little appeal: their overt association with Jewish history and tradition rendered them far too Jewish for most club members.16 More strikingly still, the Jewish social club was not above brandishing its own form of exclusion, looking down its nose at east European Jews. Despite having been on the receiving end of exclusionary practices, its members persisted in keeping to their own kind well into the postwar era, prompting affluent east European Jews, in turn, to establish yet another universe of social clubs.
Centrally located, in the very heart of the metropolis, the Jewish social club boasted its own multistory building, which typically featured a number of distinctive spaces: a palatial ballroom, a library, a billiard room, a dining room, card rooms, poolrooms, as well as a series of lounges outfitted with smokers’ stands, small tables (“for a hundred club uses”), and cushy couches where members could comfortably recline while nursing their scotch.17 Most institutions also maintained “incidental accomodations . . . for the ladies”—usually a separate lounge or parlor—where, on those occasions when the opposite sex was welcome in the building, its members could tend to their appearance or just set awhile before appearing on the arms of their husbands, fiancés, fathers, or brothers.18 With the exception of this presumably feminine space, wood and leather abounded, as did the smoke from members’ cigarettes and cigars. Just as inviting as their parlors at home but better—after all, at the clubhouse men could smoke and drink in peace, without the nagging of wives or sisters—the clubhouse interior, through and through, exuded the “smart, comfortable, enduring” affects of masculinity.19
Many Jewish clubhouses, determined to be up-to-date in every way, also boasted their very own bowling alley. At the time, bowling was especially popular among the sporting set. “Pleasing to the eye and mind,” as well as a “healthy and invigorating exercise,” the game took off during the closing years of the nineteenth century.20 As S. Karpf, secretary of the American Bowling Congress, put it in 1903, the growing popularity of ten pins over the past ten years was nothing short of “marvelous.”21 Some attributed bowling’s newfound appeal to the standardization of its rules and the emergence of “regulation”-sized bowling alleys and bowling balls. Others attributed the game’s growing popularity to changes in the construction industry, which, resulting in sturdier foundations, made it possible to remove bowling alleys from the basement, where they had languished in the murk, to a sunnier and airier second story, where conditions were far more congenial. All agreed that bowling benefited every part of the body. “I don’t think medical skill can introduce any better elixir of life,” gushed Mr. Karpf. “It will lengthen one’s years to a certainty.”22
Even women took to the sport, prompting A. E. Vogell, another enthusiast, to note as early as 1895 that bowling was no longer a “pastime dedicated to masculine monopoly.”23 In cities throughout the nation, “women seem to take as much interest and derive as much enjoyment mentally and physically as the “sterner sex.’” The popularity of bowling was so assured among both men and women that Vogell believed it was only a matter of time before weekly bowling clubs superseded weekly dancing clubs. Spalding’s Official Bowling Guide, in turn, published a testimonial from one female bowler who acknowledged that, after bowling, “my blood tingles, my appetite is ravenous and I feel that it is good just to be alive.”24
Subsequent generations of club members felt the same way about golf, which, by the 1920s, had superseded bowling as the sport du jour; by then countless Jewish club members had succumbed to what one eyewitness called “golf fever.”25 Where the metropolitan Jewish social club cultivated an urban form of gentle-manliness, the Jewish country club cultivated that other perquisite of the modern gent: sportmanship. With growing wealth and increased mobility, many members of the urban social club, often the children and grandchildren of the founding generation, expressed interest in acquiring property in the country where they could experience the great outdoors and its sporting traditions. These American Jews, heeding the “call of the open,” took to the ways of the country club, to golf and tennis (and occasionally to riding as well), with such a vengeance that, during the early 1920s, major Jewish newspapers such as the American Hebrew routinely devoted an annual issue to “Country Clubs and Sports.”26 Within the past couple of years American Jews have taken to sport with great relish, related the weekly, explaining its decision to focus on the community’s newfound penchant for outdoor recreation. “This characteristic may be adjectived as a virtue or a vice, depending upon your point of view. We state it here merely for the obvious fact that is.”27
But then, the American Hebrew was being somewhat disingenuous. For implicit in its public discussion of American Jewry’s “astonishing turn toward outdoor life” was a real sense of pride at the speed and ease with which its sons and daughters had transformed themselves from bookworms to sports hounds.28 As much an occasion for celebration as an opportunity for sociologizing, the paper’s coverage of the Jewish country club scene emphasized the extent to which this institution, much like its predecessor, successfully normalized the American Jew. “Given half a chance and shown the way, the Jew proves himself [as] human out of doors as other Americans,” proclaimed the paper, noting that the “American love of sports, no less than the ardor for democracy, fair play and the square deal has entered the Jew’s soul.”29 By playing golf, for instance, the American Jew absorbed “many of the habits, customs and social amenities of the American non-Jew.”30 By playing golf, he learned now only how to relax but how to tone down his characteristic competitive streak. Success, he discovered while out on the links, was “not necessarily the concomitant of winning the game.”31 And if that weren’t enough to persuade thousands of American Jews across the country to wield a club, the American Hebrew insisted that the ancient Scottish game had the potential to put an end to what was often referred to euphemistically as clannishness, breaking down barriers between Jews and non-Jews. “eighteen holes of leisurely, pleasant, sporting rivalry tends to promote mutual good feeling and the in-between chats that develop as [players] wander over the fairways always add to their good fellowship.”32 Of all America’s institutions, the fairway, the paper concluded ringingly, offered the Jew and non-Jew common ground.33
Golf did wonders for intra-Jewish relations as well. By spending time together on the links or around the card table, Jewish club members created an exclusively male world that made little room for women. Now and then—at a ball, an occasional family dinner, a golf or tennis tournament, or during “Ladies’ Day” when they had the run of the club for an afternoon—mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives were admitted on the premises, but only in the company of their menfolk. Otherwise, they were conspicuously—and deliberately—absent or, alternatively, segregated in the ladies lounge. To be sure, middle-class Jewish women did not want for social outlets. Between the demands of the synagogue sisterhood, whose combination of socializing and social welfare activities energized the American Jewish community at the tail end of the nineteenth century, or the press of logistical arrangements that characterized the opening and administration of sanitary fairs, another popular pastime of the Gilded Age, between the intellectual demands of a literary society and the physical demands of female bowling leagues and cycling clubs, those American Jewish women “dowered with leisure” could easily fill their calendars with a wealth of extradomestic pursuits.34 There’s also little evidence to suggest that at any point between the 1880s and the 1920s women begrudged their menfolk’s club membership, let alone demanded that they be admitted to one; that would come later—much later. Though surely not above criticizing this aspect or that of the club (“Late again for dinner, darling?”), Jewish women seemed to have accepted the all-male Jewish social club as part of the established order of things much as Jewish men had made their peace with the all-Jewish roster.
Even so, not everyone within the American Jewish community of the late nineteenth century looked favorably upon it. On the contrary. The social club’s very existence, especially during its formative years, gave rise to a spirited, even fierce public discussion about the limitations of club life and the moral shortcomings of its members. Are club members “capable of advancing no cause save the dance and the card table?” wondered some of their critics as early as 1873, noting the social club’s penchant for frivolous activities whose sole objective was fun and games.35 More alarming still was the social club’s determination to chart its own course, to hold itself aloof from communitywide affairs or, as the Jewish Messenger put it, to bid “good-bye to charity balls.” Club members, the weekly explained, no longer “participate in stately or social balls or entertainments, whose delightful object was to aid the needy.”36 By absenting themselves from these events, the revenue from which helped to support American Jewry’s network of charitable organizations, they limited the latter’s effectiveness : the “cause of charity suffers.”37 And that was only the half of it. When, in 1881, Isaac Mayer Wise, for one, welcomed Jewish social clubs into the fold, claiming in a sermon delivered at the dedication of a new building on the campus of the Hebrew Union College that they were as vital to “self preservation” as the more traditional institutions of Jewish communal life, his remarks kicked off a firestorm of protest. Said Wise in part (his speech took the better part of several pages in the American Israelite): “As a religious denomination we feel the duty of self preservation. Therefore, our co-religionists all over this country, at very heavy expense, have organized and supported congregations, societies, lodges and even clubs; have erected temples, synagogues, schoolhouses.”38
The rabbi’s decision to include social clubs within the moral taxonomy of Jewish communal organizations infuriated a number of those who read of his speech in the paper. “We are not willing to believe that [Judaism in America] has fallen so low that cards and billiards are essential to its vitality,” editorialized the American Hebrew, responding quite negatively to Wise’s endorsement. “The mere suggestion is an insult to every intelligent Hebrew.”39 One such intelligent Hebrew expressed concern about the type of Jew the social club tended to produce, young men who “dabble in silly fashions, drink and gamble, swear and make bets . . . spend more money on clothing and jewelry for their own persons than their fathers would absorb in supporting a whole family and never entertain a thought of religion or duty, synagogue or God. Their days are spent in business speculation, their nights a succession of dissipations.”40 Fearful lest American Jewish men develop into feckless and dandified youths rather than solid citizens, he strongly encouraged them to look elsewhere for camaraderie. A third detractor, an “American Hebrew from Philadelphia,” went even further, urging that Jewish social clubs be abolished completely. Having nothing to do with either faith or ritual, they offered American Jews little of value. “Pray, what is that religion which is to be preserved by clubs? It was certainly not Judaism.”41 Still other critics wondered about the club’s impact on the family as more and more men seemed inclined to spend the better part of their evenings at the clubhouse, in the company of other men, instead of spending time with their loved ones. Club members are “weaned from home by the influence of the Club—How do the nights pass for their wives and children?”42
To be sure, Jewish social clubs were not the only target of sustained criticism; the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), another institution whose mandate was manifestly recreational rather than religious, was also tarred with the same brush. Time and again, throughout the early 1880s, the pages of the English-language Jewish press took the YMHA to task for “aping” its Christian counterpart, the YMCA, “without even the pretense of fostering any religion [and] reclaiming any sinners” or doing good works.43 “The enterprise of the Harlem Y.M.H.A. is commendable; but how many of its members belong to the Harlem synagogue?” wondered the Jewish Messenger, hinting broadly that those who made use of the Y stayed clear of the sanctuary.44 Echoing its competitor, the American Israelite also roundly criticized the Y and those who sought it out. If a member was asked to point out what he liked best about the institution, would he point to its reading room? Surely not, insisted the weekly. He would extol its facilities, sports programs, and annual dance instead. “Gymnastics, bowling and dancing are in their way excellent things, but their successful practice hardly requires a Young Men’s Hebrew Association,” it opined. “Why such an association should be called ‘Hebrew,’ we are unable to find out.”45
Were things not bad enough, the press also gave voice to grave disappointment about the sort of men who, in Chicago, Buffalo, and San Francisco, formed the backbone of the social club or the Y, depicting them as callow and shallow dandies more familiar with the latest lingo than with the verities of the Torah. Chicago young men, it was said, “all know how to dance and can repeat minstrel jokes by heart. They have all the slang that permeates Tony Pastor’s New York Theater at their fingers’ ends and employ it on every conceivable occasion.”46 More damning still, these young men, many from upstanding Jewish families, had little use for Judaism, rarely, if ever, attending synagogue. Equally disturbing was their apparent disdain for kultur. “They go to the opera rarely and to minstrel or variety shows frequently. Of concerts and music as an art they know nothing. Our Jewish maidens are much better educated. Taken as a whole, there is much to improve in our Jewish young men.”47 In Buffalo, meanwhile, it was reported that the “absorbing history, the rich literature of Israel [were] neglected for dancing and fun.” It is high time “that our youth lost sight of mere money making and adopted a profession in which they could soon push to the front. The ranks of business are overcrowded; the ranks of the literary army welcome every accession.”48 Things, it seemed, were no better in San Francisco or, for that matter, in the rest of the country. On the West Coast, related one eyewitness, Jewish social clubs contributed to a “state of mental stagnation which seems to have captivated the Jewish mind all over the United States.”49
Fighting words, indeed. Were things really that bad? Were Jewish social clubs and the slang-spouting, fleet-footed men who frequented them truly a blight on the Jewish community? Might the fulminations against them simply reflect the views of an impatient older generation uncomfortable with change and the unfamiliar ways of the young? Reading these fiercely worded critiques more than a hundred years after they were first written, one can’t help but wonder how to interpret them. Are they to be taken at face value, as an accurate reflection of a community gone wrong, or should they be seen as an expression of sour grapes, of bitter institutional competition? Complicating matters still further is that, apart from the press, the identities of those who publicly excoriated the Jewish social club—all those “intelligent Hebrews”—is elusive. Were they representing themselves or some larger affiliation? It’s hard to say.
What is clear, though, is that the clubhouse and the sanctuary did not always hold one another at arm’s length. As William Toll’s research into the history of Portland, Oregon’s Jews suggest, those who belonged to that city’s leading Jewish social club, the Concordia Club, also made sure to contribute to the building fund of Congregation Beth Israel.50 While they themselves may not have attended synagogue, Concordia’s members were sufficiently galvanized either by peer pressure or by a strong sense of communal responsibility to lend their support. In this case at least, the clubhouse and the sanctuary were not mutually exclusive. Even so, cooperation between the two institutions may well have occurred only in smaller cities like Portland where, given a relatively contained Jewish population, face-to-face exchanges were common and, conversely, broader opportunities for social exchange were limited. But in the larger Jewish urban centers things developed differently. There the clubhouse and the sanctuary not only claimed different constituencies but, more important still, held out entirely divergent objectives.
By offering growing numbers of young Jewish men an alternative social realm, one in which the traditional restraints of communal and familial responsibility were cast off in favor of the brand-new rewards of pleasure and release, the convivial but undemanding regimen of the Jewish social club threatened the traditional scheme of things. Its mandate, after all, was not a Jewish one, certainly not as many American Jews would have it. Talk of good deeds, of social justice and of ritual performance, of the family and of Jewish history—all this was conspicuously absent, its place filled with “doings” and other gentlemanly pursuits that took place at considerable remove from the bosom of the family and the heart of the community. Even the club’s leaders seemed to have been cut from different cloth, chosen not because of their standing as “representative Israelites but for their proficiency in bowling.”51 Under these circumstances, the Jewish community was right to worry. It wasn’t just that the social club siphoned off new recruits to the “househo1d of Israel,” distracting them along the way with all manner of seductive, easy pleasures. That was bad enough. Worse still was how it stood the time-honored notion of inclusiveness, of the Jewish collective, on its head. An example of privatization at its most extreme, the Jewish social club of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned its back on the rest of the community, earning its opprobrium in the process.
III
Within a generation or so, the Jewish social club changed its stripes, opening its doors to all sorts of manifestly communal activities it had once shunned as unduly parochial. “Gone are the Friday night bowling clubs, the amateur shows, the billiard room and the German Bierstube, which the older members remember with nostalgic delight,” wrote a historically minded member of the Harmonie Club. “In their place we have a Club that is modern, democratic, forward looking and above all else capable of change.”52 But then, in the aftermath of World War I, it was hard not to. For one thing, the challenges facing the American Jewish community both during and after the war’s end were exigent and many; no responsible institution could afford to ignore them. For another thing, in the wake of the Great War an ethos of democratization had taken hold of the American body politic, rendering elitist enterprises like the Jewish social club increasingly suspect, if not out-of-date. What’s more, east European Jews as a group had begun to enter the ranks of the middle class in growing numbers during the 1910s and 1920s, making the class-based animus of German Jews seem silly, if not downright irrelevant. Little by little, then, the universe of Jewish social clubs began to position itself within the American Jewish public square or at least to take note of it. Atlanta’s Jewish Progressive Club, for one, became a veritable “boon to weary Jewish travellers,” while Philadelphia’s Mercantile Club lent its “handsome hall to shows” sponsored by the Jewish Welfare Board whose chaplains ministered to Jewish servicemen.53 Brooklyn’s Unity Club extended a “cordial welcome and its enthusiastic support to every worthy endeavor and undertaking in the field of Jewish charity and social welfare work.”54 Chicago, meanwhile, could boast the addition of a brand-new Jewish social club, the Covenant Club, whose charter spoke exuberantly of the “advancement of the social, cultural and physical well-being of its members, the fostering of ideals of American democracy, and the encouragement and stimulation of Jewish culture and tradition.”55
The Covenant Club was first established in 1917 as a downtown meeting place for local members of B’nai B’rith. A few years later it opened its membership even wider to what it called “Jewish men of good character,” among them the former members of a noontime card game who, picking up where the Aleph Beth Gymal Doled Club in Minneapolis left off, had styled themselves the Hey Vov Club.56 East European in origin, Covenant Club members prided themselves on their inclusive, democratic sense of fellowship. The “Covenant Club,” they declared, “recognizes no caste, no aristocracy except for the fundamental aristocracy of the Jewish integrity.”57 Rejecting partisan politics and pedigree in equal measure, even as it thumbed its nose at the snobbish German Jewish establishment, the Covenant Club, as its name implied, sought to provide common ground for Chicago Jewry’s growing middle class.
Much like its longstanding counterparts, this downtown clubhouse also radiated a sense of prosperity.58 Likened to a “symphony in rich colors and gold,” it contained a lounge, a library, a capacious ballroom that accommodated a thousand people as well as a series of smaller dining rooms and a bar known, tantalizingly enough, as the “Florida Palm Room.” A euphemistically called “recreation room” where guests could “concentrate on the intricacies of pinochle or contract bridge,” handball courts, pool tables, a fully equipped gym along with a pool or “natatorium,” whose water, it was proudly said, was “cleaner and purer than Lake Michigan—filtered, irradiated with ultra-violet light, tempered and freed from germs”—such pleasures were placed at every member’s disposal. Monday and Thursday mornings were set aside for their wives, sisters, and daughters, who were encouraged to take advantage of the splendid pool. The clubhouse also boasted a “Ladies Bath department,” which, it was said, “permitted them to build up a strong, graceful, well-poised carriage.”
Good posture and a supple spine were not the only concerns of the Covenant Club. Great pains were also taken to gratify the palette. Its (non-kosher) food, boasted a membership brochure from the late 1930s, is the “ultimate in cuisine and embellishment. Not merely cooks but Artists [sic] prepare it.” The food was indeed “memorable,” recalled a former member, citing the culinary magic of a Mrs. Maxfield whose creations ranged from a colorful cream cheese loaf, studded with olives and pimentos, to “squares of jello with floating pieces of fruit and a dollop of some mayonnaissy stuff on top,” which, he confessed, “I always pushed aside.”59
Jello and mayonnaise notwithstanding, the Covenant Club exuded a strong sense of Jewishness. Jewish books and magazines were available in the library while the artwork of known Jewish painters and sculptors, from that of Boris Schatz to Enrico Glicenstein, hung on the club’s walls and stood on its pedestals. An annual Passover seder and Hanukkah party as well as frequent lectures on and noted appearances by celebrated Jewish personalities—the “great men of Israel,” they were called—created a pronounced “Jewish spirit” in the clubhouse. Later still, during the post-World War II years, Jewish organizations, from the Jewish Book Council to those seeking to raise funds for Israel, routinely held meetings at the club while families, just as routinely, celebrated their children’s bar and bat mitzvah receptions in one of its many dining rooms, firmly planting the Covenant Club within the cultural geography—and social consciousness—of Chicago Jewish life.
Although the creation of the Covenant Club and other institutions like it led some observers of the 1920s to speak enthusiastically of a renaissance of Jewish club life, the reality was something else again. By then, many Jewish social clubs had lost their sparkle, becoming in effect little more than “lunch and card clubs,” a place to socialize during business hours rather than the fulcrum of a varied and lively nocturnal culture.60 The popularity of the country club had much to do with diminishing the importance of its urban counterpart, as did suburbanization more generally. In the first instance, the metropolitan club was increasingly supplanted by the likes of the Beresford Country Club and the Hollywood Golf Club, which offered a wider range of activities and a more spacious setting in which to pursue them than anything the Harmonie or the Excelsior could provide. Once the dernier cri in stylishness, the urban social club of the 1920s could no longer hold a candle to its country cousin. All but “doomed,” it came alive only during the winter months when opportunities for swimming, golfing, and tennis were limited.61 Even then, the social club functioned as a pale shadow of its former self, no thanks to suburbanization, which had an equally deleterious effect on its fortunes. As growing numbers of affluent American Jews forsook the city for the suburbs, the prospect of dropping by their club of an evening grew increasingly untenable. Scrambling to catch the 6:14 or anxiously contemplating the prospect of a long drive, they no longer had the time or the inclination to spend a leisurely hour or two nursing a drink before heading home; besides, the “club car,” an amenity provided by the suburban commuter train, took care of all that. As for visiting the club on, say, a Sunday afternoon, perhaps for a dinner en famille, that, too, was increasingly a thing of the past. “One does not jump into one’s automobile for a run into town,” observed one eyewitness. “On the contrary, one takes his family and motors into the wide spaces of the country.”62
And if that weren’t enough to send the urban club into eclipse, its entire raison d’etre—gentlemanliness as a social and cultural idea—no longer seemed quite as compelling or nearly as urgent as it had back at the turn of the century. Among the young, gentlemanliness, in fact, was held in ill repute. Long since attained by the members of the Harmonie Club and the Concordia Club and the Standard Club, the display of good manners and the practice of restraint in America of the Jazz Age, the era of “anything goes,” were now seen by their children as old-fashioned virtues to be honored exclusively in the breach. Those who came of age during the 1920s were “making mincemeat” of the nation’s moral code, observed Frederick Lewis Allen in his wryly detailed account of postwar America, Only Yesterday. As a result, “manners became not merely different, but—for a few years—unmannerly.”63 Standards had fallen so low that Allen even went so far as to propose that the 1920s might live on in the popular imagination as the “Decade of Bad Manners.”64
That said, the strongest challenge to the Jewish social club came not from within but from without: the movies. Rendering the older rituals of sociability obsolete, the chance to see and immerse oneself in a feature film, especially when screened in a deluxe movie palace such as the Paramount or the Orpheum, represented the fullest and most unfettered expression of modern America, a place where imagination rather than pocketbook or pedigree held sway. With their marbled and velvet interiors, acres of seats and “swirl[s] of color and splendor,” these grand theatres outdid even the most sumptuously appointed clubhouse.65 More to the point, they offered a sense of life’s possibilities that no social club or even country club could possibly ever duplicate. “In the isolation of this twilight palace,” breathlessly related the New Republic in 1929, the audience abandons itself to “adventure with a freedom that is simply impossible [elsewhere].”66 There, amid the flickering light of the silver screen, one could fantasize about being Cleopatra or the Sheik of Araby, not just chairman of the club’s finance committee or coordinator of its annual dinner dance.
Offering an escape from the pressures of daily life, the movie palace also heralded a new form of democracy, one that cast the clubhouse even deeper into the shadows. Where the social club embraced distinctions of class, social background, and ethnic origin and institutionalized them, the movies stood these distinctions on their head, subverting them. Once inside the deluxe movie palace where ticket prices were the same for the banker and his barber, the “differences of cunning, charm and wealth that determine our lives outside are forgotten,” related one enraptured moviegoer.67 No wonder, then, that the clubhouse became increasingly marginal to the lives of so many American Jews or, for that matter, that the rituals of sociability became increasingly intertwined with those of commercial entertainment, of going to the cinema, which, by the 1940s, sold a hundred million tickets a week. In its appeal to the senses and its embodiment of democracy, the movies offered a vision of daily life that was hard to beat. What was fellowship, conviviality, politesse, and the occasional good deed when compared with the glories of Hollywood? Nothing the clubhouse might offer could come close to what the movies, that “temple of day dreams,” had in store.68
NOTES
1. Maurice Samuel, The Gentleman and the Jew (New York, 1932), 10.
2. “Clubs Everywhere: Centers of Jewish Life from Coast to Coast,” American Hebrew, February 1, 1924, 378.
3. Ibid., 373.
4. “New York City Clubs Where Gothamites Find Recreation and Entertainment,” American Hebrew, February 1, 1924, 369. See especially Rudolph Glanz, “The Rise of the Jewish Club in America,” Jewish Social Studies 31.2 (April 1969): 82–99, an invaluable source for the study of the Jewish club movement in nineteenth-century America. For an imaginative and provocative look at the joys of sociability more generally, see Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York, 1999).
5. Francis Gerry Fairfield, The Clubs of New York (New York, 1873), 8.
6. John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990), 115.
7. Charles Page Bryan, “The Clubs of Chicago,” Cosmopolitan, 7.3 (July 1889): 211.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 224.
10. Fairfield, The Clubs of New York, 11.
11. Elias Lieberman, “That Summer Hotel Problem,” American Hebrew, July 6, 1923, 156. See also Jenna Weissman Joselit, “Leisure and Recreation,” in Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (New York, 1998), 1:818–827.
12. What follows is drawn from “Club Candidates,” Nation 56 (1893): 86.
13. Some Jewish social clubs such as the Harmonie were actually founded in the years prior to the Civil War to tend to the needs of German Jewish immigrants, many of them single men.
14. “New York City Clubs,” 369.
15. “About Clubs,” Jewish Messenger 33.10 (1873): 1.
16. “New York: The Purim Ball,” American Israelite, March 25, 1881, 306.
17. “Furniture for Man’s Club,” American Hebrew, February 1, 1924, 350.
18. “New York City Clubs,” 366.
19. “Furniture for Man’s Club,” 350.
20. S. Karpf, ed., Spalding’s Official Bowling Guide (New York, 1903), 5.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 25.
23. A. E. Vogell, Bowling (New York, 1895), 19.
24. Karpf, Spalding’s Official Bowling Guide, 27.
25. “Clubs Everywhere,” 373. On the relationship of American Jews to physical activity, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington, 2005).
26. Untitled editorial, American Hebrew, May 3, 1929, 955.
27. “Renaissance of the Town Club,” American Hebrew, February 1, 1924, 352.
28. Ibid. See also Peter J. Levine, “The American Hebrew Looks at ‘Our Crowd’: The Jewish Country Club in the 1920s,” American Jewish History 83.1 (1995): 27–49.
29. “The New Art of Recreation,” American Hebrew, May 4, 1923, 789.
30. Gene Sarazen, “The Common Ground of Golf,” American Hebrew, June 5, 1925,
31. Ibid., 178.
32. Ibid., 135.
33. See also “Sports and Sportsmanship,” American Hebrew, June 5, 1925, 133. “We believe that there should be no segregation or separatism under God’s sky,” editorialized the paper. “We hope for the advent of the day when men and women will be welcomed in a country club by virtue of their sportsmanship, not their religious affiliation.”
34. Mrs. Enoch Rauh, “Women Suffrage and Jewish Women,” American Jewish Chronicle 2.22 (April 6, 1917): 721. See also Jenna Weissman Joselit, “The Special Sphere of the Middle-Class American Jewish Woman: The Synagogue Sisterhood, 1890–1940,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (New York, 1987), 206–30.
35. “About Clubs,” Jewish Messenger 33.10 (1873): 1.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Isaac Mayer Wise address, American Israelite, April 29, 1881, 337.
39. American Hebrew, May 20, 1881, 1.
40. “Clubs in Cincinnati,” Jewish Messenger, January 24, 1873, 4.
41. “Clubs in Judaism,” American Hebrew, May 20, 1881, 4.
42. “About Clubs.”
43. “Correspondence: New York,” American Israelite, June 3, 1881, 381.
44. Jewish Messenger, May 13, 1881, 4. For more on the Jews of Harlem, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870–1930 (New York, 1979).
45. “Correspondence: New York.” Not to be outdone, the Jewish Messenger agreed, writing, “It should not be forgotten that the term Hebrew means Hebrew and not athletic, terpsichorean, dramatic, etc.” Jewish Messenger, May 20, 1881, 4.
46. “Chicago,” American Israelite, March 25, 1881, 306.
47. Ibid.
48. “Buffalo,” American Israelite, June 10, 1881, 390.
49. Hebrew 16.2 (1878/79): 2.
50. William Toll, The Making of an Ethnic Middle Class: Portland Jewry Over Four Generations (Albany, 1982), 33–34.
51. Untitled editorial, Jewish Messenger, May 20, 1881, 4.
52. The Harmonie Club, One Hundred Years, 1852–1952 (New York, 1952), 48.
53. “Clubs Everywhere,” 355, 376.
54. “New York City Clubs,” 369.
55. Information about the Covenant Club is drawn from “The Covenant Club, 1917–1986,” an exhibition presented by the Spertus institute of Jewish Studies, 2003. Its curator, Joy Kingsolver, generously provided me with the text of the exhibition’s labels from which this quote is drawn.
56. See www.geocities.com/txsynvr/superior/covenantclub.html, 1.
57. Joy Kingsolver, “The Covenant Club,” in From the Chicago Jewish Archives, 6 (2003), courtesy of Joy Kingsolver.
58. The citations that follow are drawn from “The Story of the Covenant Club,” 1938, Chicago Jewish Archives. The text, a membership brochure, is unpaginated.
59. See www.geocities.com/txsynvr/superior/covenantclub.html.
60. “Clubs Everywhere,” 374.
61. “Renaissance of the Town Club,” 352.
62. Ibid.
63. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York, 1931), 89, 120.
64. Ibid., 120.
65. Lloyd Lewis, “The Deluxe Picture Palace,” New Republic 58 (March 27, 1929): 175.
66. Ibid., 176.
67. Ibid.
68. IBID.