The Golden Dream (12 page)

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.”

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 similar? 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.

As one Driving Club member says: “We love our club, and we
like it the way it is. People criticize it, but we don't really care. It's part of our lives and it was part of our daddies' lives. Some of my best friends are Jews and some of my best friends are blacks. But the club is an extension of our living rooms, you see, and our living rooms are private, like the club.”

To which a nonmember replies: “There are two questions I'd like to ask this friendly person. First, what is so secret in his living room that some of his best friends can't see it and, second, is he sure that some of his best friends are really his best friends?”

The club's president, Frank Carter, remains unfazed. “We've been criticized in the past and we'll be criticized again,” he says. “We shrug it off. People can point fingers at us and call us all a bunch of snobs and bigots. They can print it in the
New York Times
. We'll discuss it for a day or two, and then forget about it. We'll just say, ‘This, too, shall pass.'”

EAST

10

The Rockefellers on the Turnpike

It might be stated as an axiom of American life that nothing ever turns out exactly as planned, and that the more monumental the undertaking, the more disastrous are the unexpected side effects. This has certainly been the case with the multimillion-dollar stretch of pavement called Interstate 95 or, more familiarly, the Connecticut Turnpike, which lines the New England seacoast, and which serves as the primary access to hundreds of thousands of New York commuter bedrooms.

The turnpike was preceded, more or less, by the Merritt Parkway. When the Merritt Parkway—running from the state's southwest border roughly eastward to just outside New Haven—was completed in the middle 1930s, everyone who saw it had to admit that it was something of a showplace of a road. It curved gracefully about and across the low hills, offering to the motorist sudden and surprising vistas. Its wide center malls were grassed and landscaped with a great variety of trees. For a few weeks each spring, the parkway blazed coolly with pink and white flowering dogwood and azalea. Each of its many overpass bridges was of a different design. The Merritt Parkway made entering Connecticut a particularly pleasing experience, and caused suburban Connecticut to appear to be a singularly pleasant place to live. State officials claimed the parkway was worth its cost in public relations value alone. It would, among other things, lure new money into the state.

Of course, while it was being built, there were the usual allegations of corruption. Highway department officials, it was rumored,
had been paid off by wealthy estate owners in Fairfield County in order to ensure that the highway did not venture too close to their houses. In return for favors, other landowners had allegedly been advised in advance of the highway's intended path so that they could snap up land cheaply and then sell it, at high profits, to the state. And to be sure, when one studied the Merritt Parkway's gerrymandering course on a map, it did seem as though some of its pretty curves and digressions—it managed to avoid the rich “estate area” of Greenwich, for example—were not entirely arbitrary or aesthetic. Still, it was a handsome piece of roadmaking when it was finished, there was no denying that.

The years went by, however, and the Merritt Parkway did its job almost too well, tempting people in unexpected numbers from the city into the Connecticut suburbs, and it became inadequate. As automobiles got wider, the Merritt Parkway seemed to grow narrower. As automobiles traveled faster, the parkway, with its hills and turns, seemed to become slower. Friday and Sunday afternoons were the worst, with traffic jammed for miles as motorists struggled to get out of, or back to, New York on weekends. And so, in the early 1950s, as part of the Eisenhower administration's Interstate Highway program, construction on the new Connecticut Turnpike was begun.