America's Secret Aristocracy (32 page)

One reason J. P. Morgan was vilified by the press after his death was that, throughout his life, he had an aristocratic disdain for—even loathing of—publicity. Though his name was known all over the world, he never made a speech or attended a public meeting. He never granted interviews to reporters, and he dodged photographers. When Harvard, to whom he had been so generous, wanted to give him an honorary degree, he declined the honor, knowing that receiving it would involve an acceptance speech and dealing with the press. Publishers offered him huge sums for his autobiography, but he turned them all down and refused to authorize any book to be written about him in his lifetime. Even his son-in-law, Herbert Satterlee, was unsuccessful in trying to persuade him to be interviewed on the subjects of his life and business philosophy for posthumous publication. “He had,” said one of his former associates, “the instinctive shrinking from publicity of the man of breeding.” The closest thing to a public statement of his code occurred a year before his death, during the monetary trust investigation of 1911–1913 by a House committee, when Samuel Untermyer asked him whether commercial credit was based primarily on property or on cash. “The first thing,” roared Morgan in reply, “is
character
. A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.”

By the 1870s, Morgan had begun to question the role of the private men's clubs in the city. Their original purpose, he felt, was being subverted. Men's clubs in New York and
elsewhere had been originally founded on the model of the men's social clubs in London, designed as places to which men of similar backgrounds and interests could repair at the end of a business day and enjoy an hour or so of companionship unrelated to business. The Union Club had been organized on this principle, and indeed, during the early days of this so-called Mother of Clubs, it was considered poor form to discuss business on the club's premises. This had also been the basic tenet on which the oldest club in America had been established, the Fish House in Philadelphia, which was founded in 1732. To assure that the Fish House would always be assertively social, and nonbusiness, it was formed as a men's cooking club, with members taking turns preparing meals for the membership. (The Fish House, also known as the State in Schuylkill, was indeed a separate state in colonial times and was so recognized by colonial governors. For nearly two hundred years, the club kept the recipe for its famous Fish House punch—a potent mixture of rum, brandy, peach liqueur, sugar, and lemon juice—a closely guarded secret.)

Other New York clubs had followed the Union Club's example and were, in a sense, all offshoots of the Union. The Union League Club was organized in 1863 by disgruntled Union Clubbers who objected that the Confederate secretary of state had been allowed to resign from the club when he should have been expelled. The Knickerbocker Club had been formed in 1871 by ex-Unionites who felt the Union was taking in too many out-of-towners and not giving proper preference to members of Old Knickerbocker families. The Brook Club was founded in 1903 by two young Turks who had been ousted from the Union Club for attempting, or so they said, to fry an egg on the bald head of one of the Union's most venerable members.

But it was not frivolity or politics that Morgan found objectionable about New York's men's clubs. It was a trend he spotted developing in the post–Civil War era of capitalist expansion, in which the clubs were abandoning their initial precepts of gentlemanly good-fellowship among peers and were becoming places where business deals were put together. In this, he was foresighted, for this is exactly what the men's clubs have become, particularly in a financial city such as New York. The clubs have certainly wandered far from their original goals. The Links Club, for example, was first organized, as its names implies, “to promote and conserve
throughout the U.S. the best interests and true spirit of the game of golf.” Today, the Links, on East Sixty-second Street in Manhattan, is far from any golf course and has become a club whose membership consists of business leaders from all over the country—Minneapolis Pillsburys, Beverly Hills Dohenys, Dorrances from Philadelphia, and Kleenex-making Kimberlys from Neenah, Wisconsin.

The commercialization of the private clubs is now almost complete. As one New York clubman put it recently, “If I have a hundred-thousand-dollar deal to put together, I'll take my client to lunch at the Union or the Knickerbocker. If it's a million-dollar deal, I'll take him to the Brook. If it's ten million, we'll go to the Links. If there's no deal to discuss, we'll go to the University Club.”

To offset what seemed to Morgan such an alarming and unaristocratic trend, his answer was the tiny Zodiac club: twelve gentlemen selected on no other basis than, as one member has put it, “good-fellowship and good genes.” For nearly a hundred and fifteen years, twelve Zodiac members have met on no regularly scheduled basis, but at least two or three times a year. For each gathering, a member is designated “caterer” to the other eleven and is expected to provide a dinner, either in his own home or in one of the private rooms of one of his clubs. No female guests have ever been invited to meetings, though once a year a dinner is held to include the wives of members. For years, Zodiac members met in full evening dress, white tie and tails, wearing medals and decorations where appropriate. Today, that dress code has been relaxed somewhat, and Zodiac dinners are black-tie. Conviviality and conversation are the only orders of the evening. Business is never to be discussed.

Not that Zodiac members are necessarily men who lead lives of idleness. Their gatherings are intended to be marked only by “congeniality and conviviality,” but there is an underlying, more serious theme: the cultural and civic betterment of the city of New York. Membership in The Zodiac is supposed to be kept very secret, as Mr. Morgan wished it, but this author has been able to ascertain the names of ten of the current dozen members. These are:

• Robert G. Goelet, of the old New York real estate family, related to Astors as well as to Vanderbilts, a trustee of the
American Museum of Natural History and former president of the New York Zoo.

• John Jay Iselin, descendant of John Jay and former president of New York's WNET/Channel 13 public television station.

• S. Dillon Ripley, retired head of the Smithsonian Institution and married to a Livingston.

• Schuyler G. Chapin, former dean of the Columbia University School of Arts and a Schuyler descendant.

• Daniel G. Tenney, Jr., a descendant of Massachusetts Sedgwicks, married to a Philadelphia Lippincott, a partner in the old New York law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, and a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation.

• Robert S. Pine, president of L. F. Rothschild & Company.

• August Heckscher, former New York City Parks commissioner and The Zodiac's secretary and only officer.

• Arnold Whitridge, occupation “gentleman,” and the club's oldest member.

• Howard Phipps, Jr., of the Pittsburgh steel family.

• J. Carter Brown III, director of Washington's National Gallery of Art.

The observant will note a preponderance of Harvard and Yale alumni among The Zodiac's membership. The even more observant will spot the fact that many of these men are graduates of the Groton School. Mr. Morgan would have approved of that, too.

Today, only three men's clubs in America survive that are dedicated principally to good-fellowship and good times. There is the ancient State in Schuylkill, still a men's cooking club, which was obviously the inspiration for Morgan's Zodiac. The State in Schuylkill calls itself “The oldest formally orgainized men's social club in the Anglo-Saxon (which is to say civilized) world.” The governing qualifiers here are the words “formally orgainized.” Such famous London clubs as White's, Boodle's, and St. James's would appear at first glance to be older, but State in Schuylkill members point out that these private clubs started out as public coffeehouses, until White's became “formally orgainized” in 1736, thus making the State in Schuylkill four years older. As for its informal name, the Fish House, this stems from the fact that the club was originally a “Fishing Company” of Philadelphia men who fished the banks of the Schuylkill River in the eighteenth century and enjoyed cooking their catches afterward.

The Fish House meets thirteen times from May to October for its home-cooked luncheons, and periodically during the winter months for dinners. Each course of each meal is the responsibility of an individual member, meaning that members get a chance to try their hand at various dishes—with an emphasis on hearty, outdoorsy fare such as boola-boola soup (made with mussels), planked shad, and pressed duck—throughout the year. As with The Zodiac, there is a dress code at the Fish House. Preparers of the dishes don long white aprons and odd-looking wide-brimmed straw hats called boaters, but which look more like Chinese coolie hats. Members explain that “these hats are of a pattern brought from China early in the last century, and were worn by a high Mandarin caste.”

The State in Schuylkill clings determinedly to the notion that it is a separate state, and no part of Pennsylvania. Its members are called Citizens, and among its elected officials are a secretary of state, a secretary of the treasury, a governor, counselors, a sheriff, and even a coroner. Meals traditionally begin with a toast—“To the memory of General Washington”—followed by a second, “To the memory of Governor Morris,” who was Samuel Morris, Jr., governor of the State in Schuylkill from 1765 to 1811. After other past governors have been toasted, there is a toast “To the President of the United States,” though during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt this part of the ritual was conspicuously omitted. The club's bylaws permit no more than thirty Citizens, or members, at any one time, though at its meetings a certain number of carefully screened Apprentices—or hopeful members-to-be—are invited. While the Citizens do the cooking, the Apprentices do the serving. As a result of the thirty-Citizens-only rule, there have been fewer than five hundred Citizens of the State of Schuylkill in the more than two hundred and fifty years of its existence. Citizenship, it may go without saying, is nearly always conferred upon members of old Philadelphia families.
*

During Prohibition, the State in Schuylkill reminded itself that it had never actually ratified the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, it saw no reason to be bound by the strictures of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Then there is San Francisco's remarkable Bohemian Club. Since San Francisco is a much newer city, the Bohemian Club cannot claim the great age of many eastern men's clubs, but it is nonetheless a spiritual descendant of both the State in Schuylkill and New York's Century Association, which in turn was another of the splinter groups to emerge from the old Union Club. Formed in 1847, the Century's first membership consisted of gentlemen who felt that intellectual and artistic endeavors were being slighted by the Union. (At the time, one Union Club member grumbled, “There's a club down on Forty-third Street that chooses its members mentally. Now isn't that a hell of a way to run a club?”) From the State in Schuylkill, the Bohemian Club has borrowed its emphasis on the great outdoors. From the Century, the Bohemian has taken its emphasis on matters of the mind, or at least the imagination.

Every Bohemian Club member is expected, no matter what his actual calling or profession, to demonstrate some sort of artistic talent—whether it be writing doggerel, playing a musical instrument, or singing a passable baritone. When “other qualifications have been met,” a candidate for Bohemian membership can even make a willingness to paint flats for the scenery of the club's stage shows pass for a “talent.” In the city, the Bohemian Club occupies a handsome red brick Georgian clubhouse on one of the flanks of Nob Hill, and among the facilities here is a 750-seat theatre, where members prepare and present regular amateur theatricals. But the club's most celebrated institution is its annual two-week summer “encampment” at Bohemian Grove, a twenty-eight-hundred-acre tract it maintains high in the Sierra wilderness. Each Bohemian encampment begins with a campfire ceremony called The Cremation of Care and continues with such events as lectures, poetry readings, musical productions, spectacles of
son et lumière
, and concerts presented by the club's own seventy-piece symphony orchestra. All these productions are written, produced, directed, and performed by the club's membership, and a high degree of professionalism is expected and often achieved. In between these cultural events, there is plenty of time for entertainment of a more bibulous nature.

By eastern standards, the Bohemian Club is large, with some twelve hundred members, but it is also in one sense exclusive. Because social San Francisco has been accused of being both parochial and provincial (as well as a bit
nouveau
),
and to offset the fact that some older-established eastern families still tend to think of San Francisco as being at the end of the Anglo-Saxon (which is to say civilized) world, the Bohemian Club likes to think of itself as a national, not just a city, club. Though plenty of Old Guard (which is to say late-nineteenth-century) San Francisco names such as Crocker, Flood, Spreckels, and de Young are represented in its membership, the Bohemian Club welcomes members from other cities. Thus, while prominent San Franciscans and other Californians often have to wait for years to be invited to join, men from Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington go sailing in with no delay at all. The club also has members from Canada and from European cities. To each encampment, a small, carefully screened list of out-of-town guests is invited. These have included Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. But otherwise the encampments are members-only, and assertively all-male.

For a long time, the location of the Bohemian Grove was a jealously guarded secret, which led to stories and speculation—particularly among wives of members—about wild goings-on, involving loose women, at the grove. Naturally, members did nothing to scotch these lurid tales. But eventually the secret leaked out. Today, wives and children of Bohemian Club members are permitted to visit the grove, though never during an encampment. They find it a peaceful spot for picnics, and if there were ever orgies there, no sign of them remains.