| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James M. Mayo. The American Country Club: Its Origins and Development. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 1998. Pp. x, 243. $25.00.

The text of this book is as straightforward as its title. James M. Mayo begins conventionally with the origins of the American country club in London's socially exclusive, eighteenth-century "city clubs." Mayo describes the early-nineteenth-century transit of this institution from London to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other northern U.S. cities whose male possessors of mercantile wealth sought a place to socialize with their peers. (Such clubs were not popular in the plantation South.) The first chapter carries the story of the urban social club to the end of the nineteenth century, by which time the urban athletic club had also become an important institution. 1

The athletic clubs receive some attention in chapter two, "The Country Life." (For some reason, Mayo fails to mention the most important athletic clubs: the New York Athletic Club and the Chicago Athletic Association.) The chapter's focus, however, is on the spa (e.g., Saratoga Springs), the seaside resort (e.g., Newport), and the forest lodge (e.g., the Adirondack Club). There was considerable overlap between the athletic club on the one hand and the spa, resort, and lodge on the other. Athletic clubs like the famed Knickerbocker Base Ball Club were noted as much for their lavish dinners as for their baseball games; sports were a major attraction at most spas, resorts, and lodges. Nonetheless, Mayo considers Brookline's eponymous Country Club, founded in 1882, as the first of its type. J. Murray Forbes and his associates were "the first organizers to put key historic practices together as a coherent approach to the private club in the suburb" (p. 66). Among the Country Club's innovations was the limited acceptance of the members' female relatives. . . .

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