What if I told you the Country Club wasn’t just a place for golf and tennis? For a century now, the Country Club has been a haven to some. It has been an outrage to others. It is one of the very few social institutions that have survived their founders’ world.
The country club was invented a little more than a century ago. Affluent Americans were the inventors. The overwhelming majority of them were then Protestant. They also had British, Dutch, or German ancestry. Today the Country Club has spread to virtually every ethnic and religious group. It is now in most other nations around the world. The Country Club has had a profound effect on the development of American society. It has influenced the most dynamic part of the American social scene in the twentieth century. This dynamic part is the suburbs.
Ironically, the Country Club got its start because the mostly British-descended American rich of the post-Civil War era lacked one of Britain’s central social institutions. That institution was the country house. The British upper class had been centered in the country since feudal days. They often went up to London for politics, business, or the season. However, they lived most of the year on vast estates. These estates were the source of their wealth. They entertained one another lavishly there.
The American rich had no such deep rural roots. For the most part, their fortunes were no more than a generation or two old. They had their origins in commerce, manufacturing, and transportation, not land. America’s was an urban elite. When the Civil War and the consequent rapid industrialization of the country began to produce the vast rush of wealth that fueled the Gilded Age, the country’s rich began to look about for ways to display it and enjoy it.
Exactly which was the first Country Club is an argument that has long raged among those who have nothing better to do. One institution that has long claimed the honor is The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Early in 1882, a wealthy Bostonian named J. Murray Forbes called together some friends to meet in the dining room of his Boston town house. There, he proposed renting Clyde Park. It was a farm on which a horse-racing track had already been laid out in then-rural Brookline.
Almost immediately, similar clubs sprang up on the outskirts of other major American cities. They drew their original members from each city’s wealthy, largely WASP elite. One sport conspicuously absent from the early country clubs is the one today most associated with them: golf. Golf was played in this country in early colonial days. It practically disappeared around the time of the War of 1812. It did not reappear until the 1880s, just when the country club was coming into being.
By the turn of the century, country clubs were well established near every major American city and in every fashionable resort. The inclusion of women and children in the activities of the country club was revolutionary. It separated country clubs from all other kinds. The Country Club immediately became a social center as well as a sports center. As the suburbs expanded in the 1920s, country clubs came to serve more and more as the social centers of their communities.
So, as you stand here, remember the Country Club’s rich history. Think about its evolution from exclusive enclaves to more inclusive community hubs.