I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a brid Egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg Friday, Frida Egg Egg, Frida Egg, Bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. Hello, and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about how and why country club life started in America. So the US Open is at the country Club and Brookline this week, and a Brookline is often said to
be the nation's first country club. Now, I'm not sure how accurate that claim is, but it was definitely one of the first. It's been active since the early eighteen eighties, and it's offered golf since the early eighteen nineties. Before that period, there just weren't many places like it in America. By the end of the eighteen hundreds, though it was a different story. The eighteen nineties in particular sought an
explosion of golf focused clubs in the US. And I've often wondered why this happened then, Why was it that about one hundred and thirty years ago, Americans suddenly wanted to go out and form country clubs and play golf. Well, the best answers to that question that I've found are in a book called Golf and the American country Club, which was written about fifteen years ago by Richard J.
Moss.
But believe it or not, everybody calls me Pete, Yeah, I tied just I taught college history for almost forty years, mostly in Maine at Kolby College.
Pete has also written other books, including The Kingdom of Golf in America and Eden in the Pines, a History of Pinehurst Village, both horrific as well. But in Golf and the American country Club, Pete gives his most concise argument as to why places like the Country Club and Brookline came about, and basically, he says it had a lot to do with big changes that were happening throughout the country in the late eighteen hundreds, the late Victorian period,
as we'll call it. The cities were getting bigger and more hectic, corporations were becoming more powerful, immigration was increasing, and essentially, many middle to upper class people in America wanted to get away. These people included what would become
known as the Apple Tree Gang. That's where Pete and I pick up in our conversation, and just as an FYI, we recorded this about a year ago for a bigger project that never quite came together, and so there are some references to COVID times that thankfully were more relevant than they are now. All right, let's get to it. So I know that you did most of your research years ago on this, but I was wondering if we could start by talking about the Apple Tree Gang, who they were and what they did.
You know, all I think of when I think about the Apple Tree Gang is that there were Scots to the for the most part, and they very often had some connections and went back to Scotland, and they wanted to play golf in America. And they started out really crudely. I think that's the main thing. I mean, they started
out playing in an apple orchard. You know, when I think about clubs, I always think about some sort of development that everybody thinks that these clubs are, you know, born in one day and the next thing, you know, one day you don't have Tubble Beach and the next day you do. The clubs in the eighties, the first clubs in the eighties and the nineties were really really didn't no word for how simple they really were. I mean,
the reality is they often rented the land. That was how That's the indication of how tentative they approached this. And you know, as personalities, they were upper middle class suburban New Yorkers, and they got together, they were friends, and they played on in a very crude fashion. Then the next thing, you know, they bought some land and the next thing you know, it was Saint Andrews of Yonkers, you know, uh. And and the history of the clubs
from that period are very often like that. Even if the people were very wealthy and could afford to just you know, gohole hog and buy land and get a designer and do that. But that wasn't the case. There was very modest investments. You know, it was a new It was sort of tentative. They didn't know if they could get a membership. I mean that varied, of course. I mean, I mean I think there are you know, there are places that were sort of born, uh you know,
a whole hog out of something else. I think Brookline was to be all about horses at one point, right, and and it wasn't and then you know, golf sort of crept in and it's not about horses at all anymore.
And and so when you talk about a group like the Apple Tree Gang, literally at the beginning, they're playing in an.
Apple orchard, right and rented land, I think from a butcher, if I'm not mistaken.
And so tell me about the style of golf that that they would play in that I did.
You know that that's just really hard to imagine. I mean, I think it's it's more, Uh, it certainly isn't about whacking the ball large distances. I think it's more, you know, it's a game of sort of gigantic coquette. Instead of wickets, you have a hole, and you know you're not hitting the ball very far. You're not playing in any sort of pristine conditions. You can only imagine how bad the greens were, you know. I mean, the greens are probably
just you know moan circles. Especially on the early municipal courses. They would just go out and you know, two hundred and eighty yards in moa circle, and then go three hundred yards in moa circle, and then they would go
one hundred and twenty yards in moa circle. I mean, it was just there was a process of refinement that was incredibly long from something I've had just tried to describe to you know, the perfect golf courses now you know the perfected golf courses that we have that are you know, unbelievably refined places that a lot of money has been lavished upon. The early ones were really cheap. Nobody wanted to really make any much of an investment, and it all grew from that.
Taking a step back, taking a wider view here for a second, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the kind of cultural mood in the late eighteen hundreds and specifically the factors in American culture that led to the rise of the golf focused country club. What were kind of those impulses that drove people to want to participate in something like this.
Well, I think there were a number of them, and they're sort of it's hard to arrange it by importance, but health was an important one. That the cities of the late nineteenth century were pretty ghastly places, again hard for us to imagine. Their disease was much more common, and there was certainly the idea that you wanted to participate horses and carriages and stuff. There are all kinds of subtle influences. But it was also in a lot of Histhorians have talked about this. It was a time
when everybody was forming clubs for everything. There was a lot of and a lot of associations. One I think that somebody has used the phrase and era of associations. I think the bar associations all are formeders, the American Medical Association is formed during this period, all kinds of I think the Boy Scouts were formed during this period, and there was the idea that you could improve your life. But being in these associations, they could provide clubhouses, and
they could provide events. One suspects they could provide romance, men and women met one another. And if you look at the individual towns. I know that a student of mine wrote a really good paper on Waterville Main and it was just Chocolate Block with organizations.
So I'd like to maybe explore a few other factors that you talked about in your book as well. I can prompt you on some of these. You refer to the promotion of mental and physical health that golf and the country club offered. Could you tell me a little bit about the about about late Victorian anxiety and depression.
Yeah, well they called it neurasthenia. And it's oddly something we recognize in ourselves that there's something about modern mechanized, urbanized, suburbanized society that just doesn't do this any good. I mean to say it makes us sick is sort of dramatic. Uh, you know, there are people who will say that. And the involvement in something outside and particularly this is going to be a new term from that I've thought about
since I wrote anything about golf called skilled practices. Taking up a skilled practice, so two of them that you might want to well, Tennis is obviously one, Golf is obviously one. Fly Fishing is one that has been much buttered about lately, and that a skilled practice outside is
good for you. It takes you away from the concerns of your job, or the concerns of your family, or the Russian pell mell of cities and makes you focus on learning how to hit a six irons or backhand, or you know, how to keep your fly line out of the bushes. You know, having that outside of your economic life and your social life is good for your mental health.
On another note, So there's the there's the mental health piece, which I think a lot of people will recognize. Now that's the big word on golf at the moment. We're all feeling cooped up, and you know, I sort of recognized that in these late nineteenth century Victorians that they were feeling kind of cooped up in their houses as
the cities were growing around them. I wonder if you could also talk about the decline in what people perceived as the traditional order in this era and how that factored into the rise of the country club.
Yeah. I think that that's really hard to I mean, I recognized that, you know, it was happening, and I think maybe the best place to see that as a gender, the whole idea that women should, you know, be domestic and stay at home, and that it was it was actually bad for them. It was prescribed in the late nineteenth century that you know, the first prescription for neurasthenia was to go home and be very calm, set in
your room. And you know, we have a lot of both fiction and nonfiction testifying to the fact that women were defined that way. And it's really interesting that in twenty five or thirty years the idea that they should be out and about and play golf, and people put a lot of emphasis on the limits that were imposed on women in golf. I think it's this is important that they were playing at all, and that they were
involved in it. I think it's crystal clear to me when I read all about all these clubs that while they may not have played the game as much as men did, they certainly were dominant in the clubhouse. The social life was was certainly not something that women shied away from, and they you know, they were part of
the whole thing. But they also played, certainly, you know, the USGA had tournaments for them, and there were you know, there were women playing, and by the twenties they were really good women playing.
So this was a change in the social order that the country Club seems in many ways to support, or or or to even be a driver for. Even as the country club did distinguish the genders and keep them apart in some ways, it also gave the quote unquote new woman an outlet for kind of physical activity and social activity.
I mean, you certainly have one offs that are that are kind of important, Marion Holland's being one. I mean, Marion Holland's not is every where. It's a fascinating story, but it's just a one off. You know, a rich girl, her father loses all her money, so she goes out and becomes rich herself, and you know, she plays virtually every sport, and you know, I think horses and tennis
and golf being the three major ones. And then she goes to California, strikes oil literally and then builds builds past the tiempo has something to do with Cyprus Point, and I think the evidence is pretty clear she had something to do with Augusta. And so you know, that's
just the one off. And I think she's certainly gay, I don't think, and I think you know that that didn't seem to inhibit her in any ways, not to suingest that you know, there wasn't a vicious bias against gay in general, but certainly you can see that this club life had a room for that, or at least certain varieties of that club life. We're a lot more tolerant maybe than the general uh, you know, society. But and Marion Allen's is at least one piece of evidence of that.
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Okay, so we have the gender narrative here, which is which is incredibly interesting. You know, something that seems to have certainly been breaking down in the late nineteenth century, and that the club seems to be an attempt at a kind of bastion against, is the decline of local control.
And this might be kind of hard to define exactly, but the decline of that sense that you know, people who lived in a particular place were controlling their lives and the invasion of the national and the international and the corporate into people's local lives. Could you talk about that a little bit and how the how the country club responded to it.
Here's the deal I think you just did.
Sorry, that's my tendency when I ask questions.
Sometimes No, that's the perfect And certainly, you know, if we think about the iconic clubs, it doesn't that doesn't come through. But when you come through the idea and I try to find one, I think I found. I found there's all kinds of them. From say, nineteen oh five to nineteen thirty, I mean every small town and I don't mean village, but I mean, you know, with a substantial base of lawyers and doctors and middle class
people wanted to have their own club. And I think one of the reasons they wanted to have their own club was just exactly for this local control deal, this local control feeling. And you're absolutely right. This is a time when corporations, national corporations are taking over national transportation, railroads. Cert historians have generally accepted that as a team for the period well, you know, eighteen eighty to nineteen thirty.
In that fifty year period, you know, we went from a time when you know, you probably met the same people and dealt with them economically on the streets of where you lived every day. And by the end of the period, you didn't do that anymore. Ever, you work for a big corporation. The stores that soldier food weren't run by you know, a guy you knew, or owned by a guy you knew, that they were owned by a big corporation. Everything. And there's a famous book called The Incorporation of America.
Trying to think who wrote Alan Tracktenberg.
Yeah, Alan Trachtenberg, And you know, I mean it's all detailed in there. And you know the LLC funny. I just talked to a guy on the phony the other day, was doing a work on the idea that the rise of the LLC, the limited liability corporation, that corporation was the singular most important fact in American history, that it's the structural outline of life in America. And you know, he's got a point. And I think the country club was an attempt to assert or create a place where
local people stayed in control. They've made an investment and they ran it their way, and it became a matter of local pride, you know, it became almost I think one of the things was that there was a sort of civic pride element to a lot of small local clubs that if you had one, you were kind of on the map as a real city, as a real town, and to some degree people use those as to draw tourism.
So you that the country club in this vein was an attempt to recreate the long lost you know, maybe not completely real, but somehow culturally remembered village. And of course you don't literally mean that the country clubs were designed as villages. So what do you mean when when you say that the country club tried to recreate that?
It's it's first of all, it's just a matter of size. It's a matter of having a community of the size of which you determine how big is your club going to be? Is it going to be three hundred or three thousand or whatever. And it's also limited in space and scope. You know, people say, well, you know, that's kind of a weird idea, And I said, well, why did Jack Nicholas call his place, Mirfield village. It's not a village. It's a massive, you know, golf project with
suburban houses attached. You know, this gets even weird weirder. You know why is Greenwich village called Greenwich village. That doesn't make a lot of sense unless just the word village means a lot to people. It means something smaller, something more intimate, something limited in scope, something not particularly dynamic in terms of forging into the future, and you know, changing things that it's a commitments to traditionalism, you know. So it's really I mean, the village word gets used
a lot for things that really aren't villages. There's a weird psychological phenomenon going on there. And the only thing I've ever said is a sort of commitment to traditionalism, a commitment to stability, uh uh, you know, and the idea that this this isn't a dynamic urban place.
And an attempt to create tradition out of thin.
Air, right out of names.
Yeah, instant tradition, which was just so American. Another piece of this seems to be the rise of immigration in the late eighteen hundreds from Eastern and Southern European countries as well as from Latin America and the desire to create a more racially homogeneous zone away from this city. Would you say this was an important factor and could you talk about it a little bit?
Yeah, Well, I mean I think there are two things, and it's ethno religious and that I think the conflicts are as much as Protestant leadership class trying to have a space without Jews or Catholics, and in a much smaller sense Catholics and Jews trying to have some spaces without Protestants. But the conflicticularly between Protestants and Jews was ferocious. I mean in the Pinehurst books, I mean I ran across.
I mean they had a program I was going to say massive, but a very substantial program to keep Jews out of the hotels, from ever coming here. And then the deeds here forbid anyone to sell land to Jews or obviously African Americans or Indians. And so the idea of creating these sort of free of Jewish influences and free from Jews by Protestants was a tremendous factor in
big projects like Pinehurst, in smaller country clubs everywhere. Vance Packard actually came up with a couple of examples from his research that I used where Jews were perfectly integrate in the town, they did business with one another because they simply had to. And then when the Protestants created a country club, they excluded them all, they refused to have memberships, which he thought was a real important sort
of thing. That these new inventions like huntry clubs kind of reinvigorated the conflicts.
So do you think that these we could use the term racially homogenous or ethno, religiously homogeneous clubs. Do you think they're in some ways a direct response to rising integration in the other spheres of society?
Oh yeah, Oh do you mean, did you say integration or immigration?
Well, I guess both. I did say integration as any. So you know that one of the you know, there was this there was this really thorough attempt to try to keep Jewish people out of Protestant clubs, while at the same time, in many ways Jewish people were making in roads in society and politics.
No, no, I think that's true, and I think it's true. Of I think the sharp lines between Catholics and Protestants blurred a lot, and I think obviously one of the secrets here is intermarriage. You know, and I think the statistics show that, you know, the twentieth century, intermarriage between
the three main religions has gone up pretty steadily. It used to be a big issue, and it just you know, well it still is to some extent, I think, but it isn't like it used to be, where the three groups are sort of heyometrically sealed off from one another. You know, certainly a whole different world in nineteen twenty one when you were putting a club together, you know, I mean, the assumption was you just wouldn't have Jews
or Catholics. In some few cases, you know, Jews made clubs for Jews, and there were a few Catholic clubs. There are even a few Black clubs. You know, it gets complicated with a lot of forces. But I think you're probably right that integration in a larger society led inexorably kind of heart, you know, and in our own time, you know, I mean, it took augusta seventy years to
finally you know. And then I think the gender issue is a separate issue, you know, I think there are all male clubs left, but you'd be hard pressed to name them. They don't have a very high profile.
And in fact intentionally keep a lower profile. They want to stay out of the public discourse because they saw what happened with Shoal Creek and Augusta. But you know, so that's one aspect of the club's purpose and one that perhaps has not aged well or not had a great impact on either golfer or American society. But the other part of the club's purpose as a place for golf is more appealing. And I wonder if you could
talk about that a little bit. You know, surely part of the reason for the rise of the country club in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century is simply the appeal of golf as a game, and specifically the appeal of golf as a game to Americans. So what was it about golf?
Well, I do There's a couple of things. One is it was Scottish. Now, whether it was or not, you know, you can you could get an argument, but scott things Scottish were just deemed to be acceptable. Then I think it had allure that anybody could play the game, that you didn't have to be a big male, you didn't have to be fast, And I think it was I think it really good. Good question is is it benefits a little bit from being totally nonviolent. You know, I've
played golf for seventy years. I doubt you could tell me a sport that I could play for seventy years. I'm certainly not going to play football for seventy years, or baseball or basketball or hockey, for God's sakes. But I've played golf quite successfully and it's gotten me out and it's been very satisfying to me. I think that's a big thing, you know, and in an odd way,
it's democratic physically, you know, the game's accessible physically. Actually, I read a book the other day and it was really weird, and he talked about the fact that, well, what happens when people come up and they want to learn a sport In America? Most sports humiliate you in the beginning. I mean, you know, the first time you go out to play tennis, I mean it's humiliating. And golf maybe might not be so humiliating because everybody is humiliated.
It also has a set way of teaching the game that's pretty good in comparison to other games, you know, and the club was perfect for that. The club was a way in which you could go learn the game, keeping the humiliation down to a minimum. You could do it kind of in private, and then until you could, you know, actually really play, you could, you know, kind of work on it. But you golf had a lot of benefits compared to the other sports that you might
have taken up at the time. You know, it's a cliche, but it is a lifelong sport.
And one of the funny things that I learned in reading your book is that compared to many other upper class leisure pursuits, golf was in fact quite cheap. And so that's another way in which it was democratic. I guess.
Yeah, well, I think that the municipal courses very often were free, the early ones. You know, I think the idea that is expensive is is just simply looking at you know, the Cypress points and the Augustas and the vast sums of money. And I mean, so that's where that comes from. But early on, I grew up in Jackson, Michigan. I don't know if that rings any bells to you, but it was a real golfy town that too municipal
golf courses that were really inside the town limits. And when I was young, my mother used to give me fifty cents and then drive me out to Elsharp Park. She'd slow down to about five miles an hour and push me out of the car and tell me that she'd be back at about five point thirty to pick me up. And you know, I would go give my fifty cents and I would just play and play and play and play and play all day long. So it you know it, I guess the way to put it is, it can
be cheap, and it has been cheap. The idea that it's through and through a game only for rich men is just, you know, not the case.
So the last subject I wanted to talk about to get us back to one hundred years ago was just a kind of general sketch of how country clubs took on complexity between the eighteen nineties and the beginning of the depression. So, you know, in your book you refer to this as a as a process of gathering kind of complexity. What do you mean by complexity when it comes to country clubs.
There was a lot of stuff done with grass. Grass just became more sophisticated. The United States Department of Agriculture even got into the business of Britain and there was I forget how it all worked, but there was breeding, cross being grass, especially for golf courses, the search for the perfect green grass, putting green grass. That took place in a variety of ways, depending on climate. So people began to spend a lot more on greens. They've been
spend a lot more on on fairways and grass. I mean, as you know, Crump went broke putting in Pine Valley and a lot of it was problems with grass, and then I think clubs became better. Good question is when did steel shafts actually begin to change the game. But complexity goes back. In my view. Number one thing was the ball, and that was the invention of the wound ball.
You could literally, you could legitimately with a gut of perch ball have a legitimate forty yard golf course, and that would be fine because you couldn't you really, children and women couldn't hit the ball very far and really couldn't play very much. And the wild balls seemed to me to have changed a lot. It made the distances of the game roughly equivalent to what we have today,
though you know we have our problems with that. But the big jump was in the early right, was it nineteen oh one nineteen oh two when they first began to appear. And that changed the game, and so people had to build longer, more sophisticated courses to respond to that,
and the clubs became became more complex. For another reason that I'm cutting to the number one things here, and I think it was the acceptance of death, this tentative quality that I talked about in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, where you rented some land and your apple tree gang or or you know, you put in a
few holes and you gave it a try. You went into the thing now where you collected a couple one hundred people, and you collected some money, and you went out and you made a down payment on four hundred acres of land, and you promise people who gave you the money that you were going to build a clubhouse and the money that had been borrowed would be paid for by dues over and you know, this is a
perpetual institution and so on. And it's really clear to me, and actually in this article that I will send you in the International Journal Sport and Layout, how in the twenties, particularly the acceptance of debt, which had been seen as only what conmen and other such people there, you know, and debt comes to American life in lots of ways. People tend to buy their cars by the late twenties with car loans, auto loans and so on. And the
clubs us debt very creatively to get going. The idea here was you could you could get a instead of you can get a club together. If you get three hundred people signed on a dotted line, you know you could get into the club, build a course, build a clubhouse, and you know you had the dues to pay it off with. And that has a lot more complex and that's really the pattern that you get an unbelievable rush of golf courses between nineteen twenty two and nineteen thirty.
It's really incredible. It's really incredible.
Yeah, and all the old courses were renovated in that time as well.
Yeah. And a lot of people who had built a course in a city, in a smaller city or whatever, sold out, took the money, spent it on a down payment on a big patch of land in the suburbs. You have a lot of clubs that their initial format very modest, and in the city very often nine holes, modest club us sold that got a big profit and moved out into the suburbs.
Well, this is this frame for understanding this part of golf history. It may surprise you, but it actually could be quite provocative for certain aficionados of golf course architecture who, for many legitimate reasons, lionized the twenties as the golden age of golf course architecture. And I'm among those. I mean,
I love those courses, the ones that survive. But you know, the story that you're telling here is almost like the dot com bubble or the housing bubble, where these clubs really got deep into debt in an attempt to get bigger and more complex, and it came back and bit them.
Then they got wiped out in the thirties, right, the ones that plunged too far got wiped out, and we don't even know about them anymore. The city's expanded and just over random and the ones that were, you know, had to wherewithal to deal with the debt. Over time, you know, survived and became icons. But the decline in the number of private clubs between say, nineteen thirty two and nineteen forty eight, he had fifteen years of depression
of war, and it was just murder. And if you were left out and you had too much debt and you started to lose your membership, I mean Saint Andrews for example, the Yonkers, the Yonkers, Saint Andrews, they were really in trouble. They just they just didn't have the membership to pay the debt, and they, you know, end up. I forget exactly all the things to do, but I know that Nicholas. They hired Nicholas to come in and
redo the whole thing. And and part of the deal was he got some land to build some houses on. But there are a lot of places where people manage to have kept the you know, invidious social influences to a bare minimum and put golf forward as we're collectively making the best course we can make for us to play on. And that's it, and that's good. I have no problem with it. I think that's you know, I think that's a great part of American sport life, and which is not doing that well the best. The one
thing I've been doing there is trucking. In statistics about sedentary Americans, we don't even have jobs anymore. Where we stand up. Everybody's sitting down. Kids sit down in school more, and you know, you sit down on your job, you know. And there's some statistics that suggest that there are twenty five to thirty percent of adult Americans who don't don't do any physical activity whatsoever. And you know, golf is a good way to I know, it's kept me active.
You know, I'm seventy seven years old and I'm reasonably healthy, and I still go out and walk around a golf course and it keeps me going.
So just a couple of quick thoughts here. Part of what I took away from this interview was that there's a light side and a dark side to the beginnings of country club life in America. The positive legacy is that these clubs were about mental and physical health, going outside, moving and playing what I think is the most wonderful, beautiful game ever invented. That's good, obviously, that's that's something that the early country clubs wanted to cultivate, and it's good.
The us wholesome part of it is that most of the clubs were exclusionary racially, religiously, socioeconomically, and in fact, many country clubs were explicitly meant to be spaces apart from the modern world. They were meant to be an escape from diversity. So I guess when we think about the future of golf and country club life in America, all we can really do is look to the past and consider what's worth preserving and what we need to
leave behind. All Right, that's it. Make sure to check out the Father's Day sale and the Frida Egg pro Shop. That's proshop dot the Frida egg dot com fifteen percent off everything except for photography. Lots of good deals in there. Enjoy the rest of the US open at the country club and thank you for listening.