Groucho Marx, offered membership in a restricted country club on the condition that his family not use the swimming pool, reportedly quipped in response, “My daughter’s only half-Jewish—can she wade in up to her knees?”
Social discrimination against Jews in hotels, resorts, and clubs was, at least as a widespread and thorough phenomenon, a creation of the late nineteenth century. Before the famous Seligman-Hilton controversy of 1877, Jews were occasionally denied access to such establishments. But by the 1880s, many elite venues excluded Jews, and by the early twentieth century, a systematic pattern of exclusion had solidified. The pattern’s exact configuration changed over time. In the 1920s, hotel and resort discrimination weakened as the automobile made travel a mass experience and thereby expanded the leisure market. But early twentieth-century suburbanization also popularized country clubs, many of which were built by real estate developers to enhance the elite reputation of their home offerings. As an extension of the elite resorts’ leisure lifestyle, most country clubs employed rigid barriers against Jews of any economic station.
Just as Jews had established their own hotels and resorts in response to discrimination, Jews established their own country clubs—more than fifty of them by 1925. Initially, the clubs catered to German American Jews, many of whom hoped to demonstrate their assimilation of gentile values, tastes, and behaviors and to distance themselves from newer east European immigrants. During the depression, when many country clubs of all kinds closed under financial pressure, upwardly mobile east Europeans began to be admitted.
In 1865, Massachusetts had banned racial discrimination in public conveyances, accommodations, and places of entertainment, and New York State did so in 1875. By 1900, similar laws existed in eighteen states, including those where most Jews lived. But enforcement was lax, and courts interpreted these laws narrowly. Jewish organizations, especially the American Jewish Committee (founded in 1906) and the AntiDefamation League (founded in 1913), were active in efforts to expand state protections against discrimination in public accommodations. (Federal civil rights laws were not yet applicable to individual actions.)
Ethnic restrictions in country clubs persisted long after other areas of American social life opened up; restrictions on Jews were common through the 1950s. By the 1980s, more clubs opened up in response to pressure from prominent members and golf associations (racially restricted clubs cannot host Professional Golf Association tournaments) and as courts tightened the definition of “private” establishments exempt from new federal civil rights laws. In the meantime, Jewish country clubs helped integrate German and east European Jews in the creation of new patterns of Jewish philanthropy and defense activism.
—Amy Hill Shevitz
See also American Jewish Committee and
Antidefamation Efforts in the United States;
Ostjuden; Restrictive Covenants; Seligman-Hilton
Affair; United States
References
Higham, John. Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
Konvitz, Milton R. A Century of Civil Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
Levine, Peter. “The American Hebrew Looks at ‘Our Crowd’: The Jewish Country Club in the 1920s,” American Jewish History 83 (March 1995): 27-49.
World History
