Today it’s more prestigious to be a victim of the majority than a member of the aristocracy, Steve Sailer notes, but it’s no fun to be an actual victim, so the best thing is to be recognized as a member of a hereditary victimocracy — for instance, to be related to somebody who couldn’t get into an exclusive golf club:
The surprisingly common Jewish-American preoccupation with vague family legends of a grandfather being blackballed at a country club has led me to study up on the history of private clubs. It turns out that most of what we think we know is a retconning of American social history.
Contrary to mythos, as far as I can tell:
First, as early as 1925, a higher percentage of Jews than gentiles may have belonged to country clubs.
Second, Jewish country clubs were, on average, more luxurious and expensive than gentile clubs.
Third, a 1962 study by the Anti-Defamation League found that Jewish country clubs were more discriminatory than Christian clubs.
Fourth, historically, Jewish applicants were mostly excluded for ethnic reasons by Jewish country clubs.
Granted, it’s difficult to find hard information about any private golf clubs, since they value privacy, so my surmises aren’t always rock solid. In particular, Jewish country clubs are far more obscure on average than comparably big-budget non-Jewish clubs, because Jewish clubs stopped hosting major championships a half-century ago.
I had expected to find that traditionally Jewish country clubs don’t hold big tournaments because of residual anti-Semitism from the super-WASPy United States Golf Association and the less upscale Professional Golfers of America. But it turns out that the USGA and PGA had Jewish clubs host their major championships back in the bad old days of the 1920s and 1930s.
For example, Bobby Jones won the U.S. Open at Inwood on Long Island in 1923, and Gene Sarazen triumphed at Fresh Meadow in Queens in 1932. The PGA Championship also visited Jewish clubs in the Tom Buchanan era: Walter Hagen won at Inwood in 1921, Leo Diegel at Hillcrest (the famous movie industry club in Los Angeles) in 1929, and Tommy Armour at Fresh Meadow in 1930.
Ever since the civil rights movement turned its unwelcome attention upon the all-Jewish (and thus all-white) Brentwood Country Club in Los Angeles for planning to host the 1962 PGA Championship, it’s been hard to learn anything about the membership policies of Jewish country clubs.
I don’t know about the distant past, but I spent an afternoon at Ravisloe, a storied Jewish country club in Chicago, on a beautiful summer weekday in about 1995. Gorgeous, immaculate facilities, with lots of well-scrubbed, polite, competent teens (obviously the sons and daughters of less-wealthy members of Jewish community given the chance to make college money) to see to your every request. Unfortunately, I was dressed too informally to enter the clubhouse, which was a very sumptuous venue indeed.
“…more luxurious and expensive”? I’ve been to some exclusive yacht clubs and country clubs, but Ravisloe was at the top end of the scale. Jews were excluded from gentile clubs, but in creating their own facilities, they set a new standard of excellence. I wonder what gentile guests were thinking in the 1950′s, say, when they saw how well the excluded minority was doing.
I googled it and found that it had finally failed in 2010 and was now open to the public. I can’t see how it can be maintained in the same style as a public golf course.