The Country Club Set
“Jews and blacks are accepted everywhere here,” says a Main Line woman, adding, with almost a touch of pride, “except, of course, the clubs.”
The local clubs are five in number—the Philadelphia Country Club, the Merion Cricket Club, the Merion Golf Club, the Gulph Mills Golf Club, and the Radnor Hunt Club—and are strung out along the length of the Main Line. As they march westward from the Philadelphia Country Club (the least fashionable of the five), they are rated as increasingly exclusive and choosy, until one reaches the Gulph Mills Golf Club, where, they say, “someone has to die” before a proposed member can move off the waiting list; and “the dear old cozy” Radnor Hunt, which, as its name implies, is a paddock for wealthy members of the horsy set.
For years, America’s suburban clubs have managed to lead an almost charmed existence. They were there, they catered to their members’ athletic whims and fancies, they were restricted. The membership policies of the Gulph Mills Golf Club were no different from those of the Los Angeles Country Club—except that the Los Angeles Country Club restricts against Jews and movie people, on the assumption that they are one and the same breed. All over America, people who couldn’t join the clubs accepted the situation matter-of-factly, while those who could, whose backgrounds and pedigrees were up to club acceptability standards, waited patiently to be invited. Whether one could—or wanted to—join a club remained a strictly personal and private affair. Clubs’ policies went largely unquestioned. Freedom of assembly, after all, could be interpreted as freedom from assembly, and freedom of association as freedom from association. The feeling was: let people club as they choose.
Then, early in 1977, President-elect Carter announced that he “hoped” those in his administration would voluntarily withdraw from private clubs which had discriminatory membership policies, though he would not require that they do so. It was certainly an unprecedented statement in the history of American Presidents and Presidents-elect. All at once, membership in exclusive clubs became an intense public and political issue—private no longer. And it started with Griffin Bell, the man whom Carter had appointed as his attorney general, the highest-ranking legal official in the country. Mr. Bell belonged to two restricted Atlanta clubs—the Piedmont Driving Club and the Capital City Club—and after lamely complaining that he would lose something in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars if he quit these clubs, Mr. Bell eventually did as he had been asked and resigned from both. Suddenly, a can of worms was opened in clubs all over the country, where, it turned out, the can had been lying about for a long time—particularly in Atlanta.
In the mid-1950s, for example, a group of German students had been brought to Atlanta as part of a student exchange program and, as a matter of course, was invited by the German consul general to the Capital City Club. During the visit, one student happened to ask, “Are there any Jewish members of this club?” No, he was assured—perhaps on the assumption that this was what he wanted to hear. An extraordinary scene followed. One student burst into tears, and sobbed that the reason the club excluded Jews was the same reason six million had died. What started as a polite occasion turned into a rout, with students and club members shouting ugly accusations at each other. At the time, Atlantans who heard about the episode were shocked. But Atlanta, a city that considers itself the queen city of the South and prides itself on its hospitality, up-to-dateness, and efficiency, soon pushed the incident into the bottom drawer of its memory chest, and went about business as usual.
Now, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, the city is in an uproar again, calling itself unpleasant names. In addition to Mr. Bell, Carter’s ex-budget director, Bert Lance, turned out to have been a member of both the Capital City Club and the Piedmont Driving Club. He, too, elected to resign from both—again leaving the implication that membership in them ran contrary to the public interest. Did that mean, Atlanta wanted to know, that there was something wrong with its clubs? Suddenly Atlanta’s Capital City Club began to seem the quintessential city club, and the Piedmont Driving Club, on the outskirts of town, the quintessential country club, encapsulating all the problems of the American breed.
The immediate reaction to the dispute in Atlanta was not breast-beating or agonized soul-searching, but—as in the case of the German students—almost total confusion. Was there, for example, an actual policy against Jews or blacks or both at either of the two clubs? No one, it suddenly seemed, was entirely sure. Both the Capital City and the Driving Club quickly produced copies of their rules and bylaws, proudly pointing out that nowhere, in the sections pertaining to membership, was specific mention made of race or religion. On the other hand, both clubs conceded that there “probably” were no Jews and certainly were no blacks in either club—but on the question of Jews there seemed to be some doubt. “I’m sure we have some Jews in the Driving Club,” said Pegram Harrison, an Atlanta lawyer and Coca-Cola heir, “but I couldn’t tell you who they are. Frankly, I’ve never thought much about it until now.” Mr. James D. Custance, the Driving Club’s manager, did not clear things up when he said: “Any member who would invite a Jew or a black into his living room could invite a Jew or black to the club.” One wonders how many members of the club are the sort who would have Jews or blacks in their houses. Nor did the club’s president, Frank Carter, a prominent Atlanta real estate man, help matters much by asserting: “The Driving Club only takes in members of fine old families.”
In the confusion, all sorts of odd stories began to emerge. There was the case of Michael Peter Rich, the young scion of the Rich’s department store fortune, and the great-grandson of the store’s founder, Morris Rich. Michael Rich’s father was Richard Rich, one of the city’s great philanthropists. During the Depression, when the city of Atlanta was close to bankruptcy and was forced to pay its employees with scrip instead of cash, only Rich’s of Atlanta stepped forward to say that it would cash the scrip. Depending on whom one talks to, Michael Rich has tried to get into the Driving Club one, two, or as many as a dozen times—all without success. The reasons given for his rejection vary. “He was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, which is a Christian fraternity,” says one Driving Club member, “but we heard that some of his fraternity brothers didn’t like him.”
Both Morris Rich and Richard Rich were practicing Jews, but Michael Rich converted to Christianity a number of years ago and is a baptized Presbyterian. He married, furthermore, a Christian girl, the daughter of William S. Woods, who is nothing less than an honorary life member of the Piedmont Driving Club. For years, Rich and his wife used the facilities of the club, signing his father-in-law’s name and settling accounts with Mr. Woods at the end of each year. “I was at the club so often, I’m sure a lot of people thought I was a member,” Rich says. Then, in 1972, by his own account, Michael Peter Rich was asked to join the Driving Club for the first and only time. (One is asked—one does not ask—to join such a club.) His name, with a proposer, a second, and a third, went up on the bulletin board beside the front desk. Some weeks later, Rich was informed, regretfully, that his membership had been turned down. “They told me at the time that it was because I’d supported Andrew Young for Congress,” Michael Rich says, “and I thought, well, that’s as good an excuse as any. Of course I knew the real reason—my Jewish heritage.”
In 1976, Rich and his wife were divorced. This means that as an “unmarried daughter of a member,” Rich’s former wife can enjoy full privileges of the Piedmont Driving Club, and so can her children. Rich himself, on the other hand, can enter the club only at the invitation of a member. “And I don’t go there often,” he says. “Ever since 1972, I’ve felt distinctly uncomfortable there, to say the least.” When the Rich children, part Jewish, reach age twenty-one and become eligible for membership, will they be asked to join? No one knows for sure.
Michael Rich wryly remembers when, a number of years ago, his father was invited to join the Driving Club. “Are you changing your policy, or making an exception?” the senior Mr. Rich wanted to know. “We’re making an exception,” he was told. “Then I don’t care to join,” Mr. Rich replied.
More recently, there was the curious case of Rule 18 of the Driving Club’s bylaws. Rule 18 covers “Persons Granted Club Privileges” who, though not members, are given full benefits of membership, and over the years, the Persons have included prominent local judges (though no Jewish judges), clergymen (though no rabbis), and, by tradition, the mayor of Atlanta. In 1970, however, Rule 18 was revised to read: “No new Persons will be granted Club privileges as presently allowed under Rule 18 after April 1, 1970.” What caused the raising of the drawbridge against new Privileged Persons in 1970? It seems to many Atlantans more than just a coincidence that this was the year Atlanta elected its first Jewish mayor, Sam Massell. And had Rule 18 not been revised to exclude Mr. Massell, it most certainly would have been when Maynard Jackson came to office a few years later.
Then there was the Leontyne Price incident. For years, the Metropolitan Opera Company has come to Atlanta, usually in late spring, and for years, one of the city’s most glittering society galas has been the opening-night party for the opera company and cast at the Piedmont Driving Club. On the night, several years ago, when Leontyne Price was scheduled to open in Atlanta with Tosca, Mr. Rudolf Bing was privately advised that while the rest of the cast would be most welcome at the party, the star would not. Bing replied that if Miss Price could not attend, neither could anyone else. Disappointed party-goers were advised on opening night that there would be no party, “Due to the fact that the Clubhouse is undergoing renovations.”
Reacting to stories like these, stalwart members of the Piedmont Driving Club spring to the club’s defense with a variety of counterclaims. On the subject of restrictions against Jews, for example, there is what might be called the Eloise Pappenheimer Defense. “What about Eloise Pappenheimer?” is a stock response. There is also the Major John Cohen Defense. “Why, we’ve even had a Jewish president of the club,” says one member. Major Cohen was president of the Driving Club from 1930 to 1932. But Mr. De Jongh Franklin, a prominent Atlanta attorney who is Jewish, scoffs at this and says: “Whenever the Driving Club is accused of anti-Semitism, they trot out John Cohen. He came in during the depths of the Depression, when the club was desperate for money and members, and he was only half Jewish anyway. Besides, he’s been dead for years. So has Eloise Pappenheimer.”
As for blacks being excluded from the Driving Club, members point to the Lester Maddox incident because it was Maddox, of all people, who first brought blacks to the club as guests. (It is widely suspected, of course, that Governor Maddox did this to embarrass the club, since he himself would have been among those least qualified for membership.) The episode took place when Governor Maddox and the Georgia Commerce Department were holding a luncheon at the club for the media, and when everyone sat down to eat, it was discovered with horror that the guests included two black television newsmen from Atlanta’s station WAGA-TV. While guests watched apprehensively, the headwaiter rushed to consult with the maître d’, who went for the assistant manager, who went for the manager. For several minutes, the four men stood about wringing their hands. Finally—perhaps because it seemed simpler not to make a fuss—they returned to their posts and the luncheon continued without further disruption. Through it all, Maddox seemed blankly oblivious to the situation he had created.
Finally, members of the Piedmont Driving Club defend their membership practices and policies by pointing out that there are at least two fashionable Jewish clubs in Atlanta—the Standard and the Progressive—which exclude Christians. If blacks wanted a club, the reasoning goes, they could form one of their own. There is also the downtown Commerce Club, which is completely integrated. (Originally an all-male affair, it has recently taken in about ten women members.)
But there is also some confusion about the policies of the Jewish clubs. “If a Christian wanted to join the Standard Club, I could get him in tomorrow,” says Edward Elson, a prominent Jewish businessman. Not so, says Charles Wittenstein of the Anti-Defamation League’s Southern Council. The ADL considers the Standard Club just as discriminatory as the Driving Club, though the Standard did recently admit one Christian husband of a Jewish lady member. “The Standard Club was formed in reaction to the policies of the Driving Club,” says Mr. Elson. But this can’t be right, either, because the Standard Club was established in 1867—in the beginning as a club exclusively for German Jews—twenty years before the Driving Club’s founding in 1887.
One club that was established in reaction to the Driving Club was the Cherokee Club, but here again there were strange ironies. Several years ago, a group of young Atlanta couples impatient with the Driving Club’s exclusive ways, got together and decided to form their own club. Among the founders were Mr. and Mrs. De Jongh Franklin and Mr. and Mrs. Lee Ross, who are also Jewish. All seemed to go well until the Cherokee Club was ready to send out invitations for membership. The Jewish families, the Rosses and the Franklins, who had helped organize the club, received no invitations. “It would never get off the ground if it weren’t patterned after the Driving Club,” their friends explained.
Now that the capital of Georgia has become nationally conspicuous, Atlanta’s choosy clubs have become a local cause célèbre, and nearly everybody, pro and con, is up in arms on the subject. “Bob Lipschutz, the White House counsel, belongs to the Standard Club,” says one Atlantan. He has resigned. Another says jokingly, “What if they took Bell into the Standard and Lipschutz into the Driving Club? Would that make everybody happy?” Most critical of the Christian clubs’ policies, meanwhile, have been Atlanta’s Jews. Important business decisions, the Jews claim, are made within the confines of the Capital City and the Piedmont Driving clubs—decisions which affect Jewish businesses, and yet about which Jews have no say. The Jews argue that the clubs put Jewish businesses at an economic disadvantage. At the moment, feelings are particularly bitter because Atlanta has been undergoing a sharp business recession, out of proportion to what has happened elsewhere in the country. “The fastest-growing city in the South,” as it is called, has perhaps grown too fast. One enormous and ambitious office tower stands more than 75 percent unoccupied. “The world’s tallest hotel,” the staggering new Peachtree Plaza, is air-conditioning empty rooms. As far as some of the city’s prominent Jews are concerned, the WASP establishment—and its clubs—are at least partway to blame.
But the most frequently heard complaint in Atlanta is: Why us? “There are thousands of clubs all over the country that have been restricted against Jews and blacks and Orientals and what have you for years!” says one indignant woman. “Why is everyone picking on poor little Atlanta?” What she says is of course true. But in the case of Atlanta, the situation is a little different. The position and the power of the Piedmont Driving Club—and, to a lesser extent, the Capital City Club—are somewhat special. The Driving Club is without exception the Atlanta Club. And how it achieved, and continues to wield, its immense social power in the city are worth examining.
To begin with, “Driving” has nothing to do with driving golf balls. The club has no driving range, and no golf course. It offers only tennis, squash, swimming, a men’s health club, a number of dining rooms, bars, rooms for private parties, and a ballroom for quasi-public functions which has an unsupported ceiling so large that, not long ago, it fell down all by itself—fortunately late at night, when no one was around. The club was formed by a group of young, well-born Atlanta men who enjoyed driving their four-horse tally-hos through what is now a neighboring park, and was known as The Gentlemen’s Driving Club. The original clubhouse has been much added to but most of the early building stands today. It is not particularly grand. Decorated in warm pastels and furnished with antiques and Chippendale reproductions and several fine Oriental rugs, it has an atmosphere that is intimate, cozy, old-shoe, and—well—clubby. Its smiling staff (mostly black) knows not only its members’ names but also their preferences in food and drink.
Its members rave over the Driving Club’s “marvelous” food. But a glance at its buffet table reveals nothing that is beyond country-club ordinary—or what might be called American Rich Predictable, the kind of bland and unsurprising fare that the wealthy eat and serve in their own homes: deviled eggs, cocktail onions, waterlogged lobster halves with Hellmann’s mayonnaise, cold collapsed broiled tomatoes, peas, Parker House rolls, roast beef with rubbery Yorkshire pudding, sweet desserts ladled over with cherry syrup.
Strictly speaking, it has always been a men’s club, though a group of women has been granted membership as “privileged widows.” Wives and children of members are also given “privileges,” but should a group of men wish to use a tennis court on which women are playing, the men merely step onto the court, say, “Thank you very much, ladies,” and the women depart. A few wives of members have grumbled about this high-handed treatment, but most accept it as their mothers and grandmothers did, and regard it as just another of the club’s traditions—quaint, but sacred. Some women actually defend it, saying, as one wife does, “After all, there are only a few hours in a day when a man can have time to play tennis. They deserve to have priority.”
From the earliest days of the Driving Club, it has served as the scene of Atlanta’s most gorgeous social events, topped by the annual Piedmont Ball, an invitation-only affair that benefits the Piedmont Hospital. For years, no Atlanta girl could be a debutante unless she was a daughter of a Driving Club member, and for years, the Atlanta Junior League was composed of wives and daughters of Driving Club members. Atlanta society says it has no use for a Social Register. The Driving Club membership list suffices. (For a while, the Social Register Association in New York published an edition for Atlanta; it was abandoned for “lack of interest.”) Perhaps the most dazzling party in the club’s history was the famous breakfast tossed at the club in 1939, following the world premiere of Gone With the Wind, with Margaret Mitchell, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, and le tout Atlanta in attendance. (Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen were not present.)
As an example of the cachet membership in the club carries, an Atlanta woman was shopping recently for a gown to wear to the Piedmont Ball. “Shame on you for going to a party at a club that discriminates,” said the salesgirl, who quickly added, “I’m only kidding. I’d give my eyeteeth to go to the Piedmont Ball! Even just to set foot in the club!”
The club has come, meanwhile, to represent an interesting axis of power in the city. The firm of King & Spalding is Atlanta’s most prestigious law firm. (Griffin Bell was a partner in King & Spalding, as was Charles Kirbo, President Carter’s old friend and troubleshooter.) King & Spalding drafted the Driving Club’s original Petition for Charter, and remains the club’s official counsel. In a city the size of Atlanta, such a law firm can become virtually a second city government, a law unto itself. There are three Kings and two Spaldings in the Driving Club today, and Kings and Spaldings decorate the boards of Atlanta’s biggest banks. Hughes Spalding, Jr., is now a senior partner at King & Spalding. His brother, Jack Spalding, meanwhile, is editor of the Atlanta Journal, which, with the Constitution, is one of the two Cox-owned newspapers which serve Atlanta morning and evening. The publisher of both the Journal and the Constitution is a hot-tempered gentleman named Jack Tarver, another Driving Club member, and so it is not surprising that both newspapers have supported the club’s membership policy, and opposed Mr. Bell’s need to resign. In 1969, when Jim Montgomery, who was business editor for the Constitution, produced a story on discrimination in clubs, naming names and citing examples of how major business decisions in Atlanta were made within a tight-knit little group of members, hackles rose in the business community. Hackles rose even higher in Jack Tarver’s office. After angrily telling Montgomery that he had embarrassed the paper, Tarver added, “Jim, I think you’re getting stale.” Montgomery was subsequently transferred from business editor to general-assignment reporting—which meant that his income dropped sharply, since he was no longer able to accept free-lance assignments. Montgomery got the message, and left the paper shortly thereafter.
Atlanta’s most powerful society woman, meanwhile, is Mrs. Ann Cox Chambers, heiress to the Cox newspaper fortune, who has been a pivotal figure behind—among other things—the Piedmont Ball. Mrs. Chambers also provides what might be called the Coke Connection, linking the already great coalition of Atlanta forces with another giant power: the Coca-Cola Company. The two great Coca-Cola families are the Candlers and the Woodruffs—there are seven Candler families and two Woodruffs in the Driving Club—who live on large estates in Atlanta’s grandest northwest suburbs (with other Coca-Cola money), on Chatham Road, Pace’s Ferry Road, Normandy Drive, and Manor Ridge Drive. Two Candler brothers—Asa W. Candler and John S. Candler II—are lawyers in yet another powerful firm, Candler, Cox & Andrews, where, needless to say, Mrs. Ann Cox Chambers has close relatives. The Piedmont Driving Club, in other words, represents a four-sided axis of the press, society, and two large legal firms. It is a combination, Mafia-like in its interlocking complexity, that might seem rather difficult to beat. Not just millions, but billions of Atlanta dollars are represented here.
Efforts have been made, of course, to beat it, particularly by prominent Atlanta Jews, such as Edward Elson, who can produce a thick file of letters written to civic organizations urging them not to hold meetings and functions at the Driving Club. The club’s claim that it is “purely social” is, he says, a lie. For several years, the Anti-Defamation League has been working to dissuade charitable and other groups from hiring the club’s rooms for meetings, and it recently succeeded in having a convention of the American Bar Association reschedule a series of functions elsewhere. Jewish businessmen, aware of the Driving Club’s strong power with the press, note that Atlanta newspapers show no reluctance to accept Jewish advertising. The biggest advertiser in the Journal and the Constitution, for example, is Rich’s. If Rich’s were to discontinue advertising on the issue of club discrimination, the papers would be dealt a severe financial blow. But this, Michael Rich says, would be “a negative approach.”
A more serious threat may come from the Internal Revenue Service. At the moment, a number of the top banks, law firms, and corporations pay club initiation fees for their executives, and then deduct these as business expenses. It can be argued, therefore, that the United States Government is indirectly supporting clubs that discriminate. Of course, there are a number of ways by which corporations could get around an adverse IRS ruling. They could, for example, raise executives’ salaries to cover club memberships. But this could open them up to stockholders’ suits. At least one Atlanta lawyer says that he could make a good case on such an issue before the United States Supreme Court.
Among the black community, meanwhile, there is less concern. Most Atlanta blacks would agree with Andrew Young, who feels that blacks have far more pressing priorities—better housing, schools, jobs, and so on—and that for a black to fret about not being able to join the Piedmont Driving Club is “silly.” But at least one Atlanta black, Jesse Hill, the president of Atlanta Life and one of Atlanta’s wealthiest and most respected black citizens, said recently that “the time has come” for blacks to storm what he calls “the last bastion of discrimination in America.”