Golf & Jews, I
I've come across some fascinating documents while researching New York City's golf courses for a Met Golfer story. This paragraph from an 1899 survey of Met-area golf courses in an upper-crust magazine called Outing titled "Golf in Gotham" manages to describe the Century Club in tones that effectively praise with faint damnation. On first reading I was healthily offended, but looking at it again, there is almost a sense of enlightenment amid the patronizing generalizations. Certainly odd, if not remarkable.
The nearest neighbor to the Country Club of Westchester is a new organization, 'The Century Club.' It is well supported, it has an excellent club-house, and excellent links running down to the Sound, but that is not its peculiarity. Its distinction amongst the clubs of the metropolis is that it is the one club of Hebrews devoted to outdoor sport. The Jews in all nations and times have produced, and never more so than to-day, more than their share of leaders in art, in drama, in literature, and in law, in fact, in all those walks of life in which intellectual acumen and close application to books, and to the study of mankind, is the main force; but they have hitherto, as a people, shown little apititude for, or application to, the sports of the field and of sustained interest in outdoor recreation. The members of the Century Club have somewhat broken away from tradition and recognize the value of the adage that though 'all work and no play' does not always make a dull boy, at any rate the more settled conditions resulting from their civic and religious freedom in America demand, as a corrective, more attention to the corporal upbuilding which comes from systematic outdoor exercise and relaxation.
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