The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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 discrimina
te. 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.”

  9

  Rules and Regulations

  Anti-Semitism and racial prejudice seem to billow in the suburbs, while they tend to lie dormant in the cities. Probably it is because who one’s neighbor is and what he looks like become more important in the country than in the anonymity of a city apartment building; in the country, one’s neighbor is more visible, you can see him come and go, watch how he tends his lawn and hedge and garden, and tell when his house needs paint. This is certainly why anti-Semitism and prejudice express themselves so readily in the American institution of the country club.

  In Rye, New York, for example, the children’s dancing classes were for years held in the gymnasium of Rye Country Day School—an upper-class enclave, to be sure, but one that was nonetheless a homogeneous mixture of Christian and Jewish children. (In fact, all Rye Country Day School students were invited to attend the dancing classes.) About ten years ago, however, the school decided that it was time to get out of the dancing-school business, and to concentrate its full efforts on educating the young in more important matters. The dancing classes—renamed, a little ominously, The Barclay Classes—moved to a new venue, the Apawamis Golf Club.

  All at once, when invitations to the reorganized classes went out, it was apparent that the class would assume a somewhat different texture: only selected Jews or blacks were invited to attend. The club’s rules, therefore, had taken over those of the community. As one member put it rather blandly, “Well, those are the club’s rules.”

  If there has been one result of the current brouhaha in Atlanta, it has been to cause club members everywhere to begin to come to grips with what their clubs really are. Up to now, institutions like the Piedmont Driving Club have been regarded, like Everest, as merely there, to be scaled by the most intrepid climbers. The clubs’ rules and regulations have been shrouded in Himalayan mystery. How, for instance, does one get into a club like the Driving Club? Well, one must be asked, and one must be passed by a five-man board of directors. Is there a blackball? Absolutely not, said the club’s manager, Mr. Custance. And yet the Driving Club’s by-laws state that “One negative vote in the Board shall prevent election of any person proposed for membership.” And the rules also state that it “shall be the duty of each member of the Club possessed of any information derogatory to the character of the member proposed … to communicate the same to the Board.”

  Membership in the Piedmont Driving Club is supposed to be restricted to one thousand men, and Mr. Custance speaks of a “long, long waiting list.” It has been noted, however, that when a company of the stature of Coca-Cola, or a firm with the standing of King & Spalding, imports a new executive from out of town or appoints a new partner, these people become members of the club rather speedily. At this writing, the Driving Club roster consists of exactly 999 names, not including Mr. Bert Lance, but including Mr. Griffin Bell, who has resigned—plus a long list of nonresident members, honorary members, and “privileged widows.” This would seem to indicate that the Driving Club has a vacancy right now.

  There has been a lot of talk in Atlanta in recent months of the morality, as well as the legality, of private clubs that discriminate. Here, of course, is a knotty issue. At every level of society, and at every point in history, humans have tended to band together with other humans who bear similar physical characteristics. We tend to like people who look like us, and to feel distrustful of people who are “different” in appearance. This may even be an ancient, animal instinct. An experiment with infant monkeys, undertaken by Professor Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin, had some interesting results. A set of monkey “mother” dolls were made out of terry cloth and placed with the baby monkeys. If, it was noted, the doll mother looked like a real monkey—was monkey color, for example—the baby would cuddle up to it. But if the doll was the wrong color—say, purple—or if its eyes were sewn where its ears should be, the live baby would reject it in terror. Perhaps this is the real reason why we have clubs of any kind—to protect us from our deep fear of outsiders who are different, who have different noses, different cheekbones, a different-color skin, or different hair.

  And yet, at the same time, clubs like the Driving Club have become objects of fear themselves. The Driving Club is feared by nonmembers and members alike. In Atlanta, it is astonishing to see how reverentially the club is treated, almost as though it were a supreme being in itself, and how fearfully its members react to any suggestion of change. “The club wouldn’t like it,” they say. And recently, when a visitor at the Driving Club asked to see the kitchen, the club member who was his host looked wary and said, “I don’t think we’re supposed to go in the kitchen. I don’t think the club would go for that. I believe there’s a rule.” It is as though the club, with its rules written and unwritten, has developed a life and character of its own, has become a kind of deity—always capitalized—a Big Brother who protects but who also directs and overpowers, and dictates what its members do and think and say.

  A thousand miles away from Atlanta, on the shores of Long Island Sound, stands the American Yacht Club, a prestigious club with an international membership. By tradition, the American Yacht Club—and its sister club in New York, the New York Yacht—have always taken in, as special honored members, skippers who have won the coveted America’s Cup Race. But when Emil (“Bus”) Mosbacher, Jr., became the first Jew to capture the coveted cup, there was a great deal of huffing and puffing at both clubs (eventually, he was taken in). Not long ago a member of the American Yacht Club was advised by another member—not by any official of the club—that it would “not be wise” to bring a visiting South Korean guest to dinner at the club. There might, it was suggested, be “objections.” The party dined elsewhere.

  On summer evenings, particularly on weekends, a feature of life at the American Yacht Club is “Picnic Point.” Picnic Point is a rocky spit of club property that juts out into the water; from it, on clear nights, the Manhattan skyline can be seen twinkling in the distance. Picnic tables and outdoor fireplaces are provided for members and their guests, who bring picnic suppers there. Because space and tables are limited, it is necessary for picnickers to make reservations for Picnic Point. That is a rule that makes sense. Others are more difficult to understand. If, for example, a picnic-packer has forgotten to pack the salt, it is considered a great breach of etiquette to ask to borrow the salt from another picnic table. Instead, one goes without the salt. Mrs. Robert Frisch, the wife of a Manhattan lawyer, was chagrined a while back to discover on Picnic Point that she had forgotten the butter for the corn on the cob. Her house was several miles away, and the grocery stores had closed. It was against the rules to borrow from a neighboring picnicker. Someone suggested that Mrs. Frisch step into the kitchen of the clubhouse, a few yards away, and request some butter from one of the staff. This was, after all, her club. Mrs. Frisch was aghast. “I could never do that,” she said. “I’m sure that’s against the rules. The club would never stand for something like that.” Her guests ate unbuttered corn.

  Will the situation ever change—in Atlanta, New York, or anywhere else, where country-club life is almost embarrassingly sim
ilar? Some people, like Atlanta’s former Mayor Ivan Allen, think that eventually the barriers will fall. Ivan Allen, during his term as mayor, was often cited as a great liberal and proponent of black equality (though his critics note that he has never given up his membership in the Piedmont Driving Club). Mr. Allen thinks that the barriers will fall first, but gradually, for Jews, and “maybe someday” for blacks. He hopes so, he says.

  Of course, the blacks of Atlanta, as in other cities of the South, have a special social problem, which most people don’t like to talk about. Many of the families in the city’s white establishment appear to have old ties with the black community. The Hamiltons, for example, are a prominent black family, and there are Hamiltons in the Driving Club. There are Yanceys in the club, and other Yanceys in Collier Heights, an expensive black suburb. There are Kings of King & Spalding; other Atlanta Kings produced Martin Luther King.

  Most Atlantans appear to disagree with Mayor Allen, and think that nothing will change. The present controversy will result in opening no doors, nor will it create a reactionary wave of tougher discrimination. The club, as they say, “wouldn’t go for” change. And the club is the Great Pumpkin, with a will and an impetus and a life—and very definite ideas—of its own. What must have seemed a charming and perfectly harmless notion in 1887 to fifteen young Atlanta dandies, who could remember the days of Scarlett O’Hara, young blades who squired their belles in their tally-hos, has become something they could never have imagined—a monster too mighty to be slain by mere mortals.