Back in 1879, when the Union League Club was established in Chicago as a gathering place for upper-crust Republicans, women couldn’t attend many universities and were still nearly half a century away from getting the vote.
Now, almost 120 years later, democracy has either ushered the club into a promising new era–or despoiled its essence, depending on which members were commenting.
Standing at a lectern Tuesday evening giving an acceptance speech as the new president of the once all-male bastion was–a woman. And Chicago attorney Laura Hagen didn’t seem to mind raising a few eyebrows.
As the first woman president of the club, Hagen instantly proposed waiving initiation fees for prospective women members. Though it was perhaps largely a symbolic gesture–the $100 to $750 fees are pocket change to the folks who join such downtown clubs–Hagen’s proposal didn’t exactly sit well with some members.
“The women are aggressive. and they are trying to take things over,” said Gale Hedrick, a club member and vice president of Prudential Securities. “It’s blatant discrimination.”
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At a time when such private clubs are either fading or facing fierce competition from other entertainments, Hagen’s selection seemed part of an effort to invigorate the club’s image. After all, as late as 1987 the club grudgingly voted to accept women–“to go coed,” as opponents put it–when the Chicago City Council threatened to put clubs that discriminated against women out of business.
On Wednesday, Hagen professed surprise that her bombshell was still echoing from one overstuffed armchair to the next through the club’s wainscoted halls.
“I’m amazed–I guess we wanted to shake things up, and we did,” said Hagen, 47, one of the first women admitted to the Union League. “You can’t live in your cave anymore.”
Five years ago, Jonathan McCabe was brought in as general manager with a mandate to clear the Union League of a bit of its stuffiness. There is now a bar for business casual, where members sip drinks at lunch hour in polo shirts rather than the long-required coat and tie. Blue jeans–“neat” blue jeans, as the regulations put it–can be worn on Saturdays before 5 p.m. and on Sundays and holidays.
Bowing to the fact that capitalism has moved from the smokestack and stockyard era to the information age, the club now provides electronic hookups for laptop computers. Members can sit in a cavernous reading room bedecked with a Monet painting and surf the Internet.
“We’ve got to find a way to attract a generation of Baby Boomers sitting on a pile of wealth,” said Hagen.
All those changes–in the furnishings no less than the philosophy of the club–have led some members to move beyond nostalgia for the good-old-boy days. Most of the 2,500 current members (including 200 women) have accepted the idea of a woman president.
“I was one of the leaders of the anti-woman group, 10 years ago, the rebel group,” said Mike Hanlon, a Chicago insurance broker. “But I couldn’t think of a finer person (than Hagen) to be our president.”
Historically, Tuesday’s changing of the guard brings the Union League Club back to its roots on the side of the underdog. It began as the Union League of the Civil War years, founded to support President Abraham Lincoln at a time when pro-Southern sentiment was strong in Illinois.
In 1879, when the Union League was refounded as a Chicago social club, its charter members pledged themselves “to maintain the civil and political equality of all citizens.” Of course, in the context of that day “all” didn’t meant quite what it has come to. Women were allowed in the club only as the guest of a male member, though a Tribune reporter of the day noted that no tradition is forever.
“The time may come when she will not even be required to burden herself with a male escort,” the reporter wrote.
The club quickly became known as an in-town redoubt of Chicago’s wealthy. It was locally famed for its “millionaires tables.” Many of the deals that built Chicago’s skyline were cooked at those tables.
“Probably more enterprises have been started and corporations organized in the Union League Club than have emanated from another source,” noted Bruce Grant, in “Fight for a City,” a history of the club’s first 75 years.
Yet the Union League Club was also an early champion of political reform. Its motto was and is: “Commitment to community and country.” It recruited hundreds of volunteers from among its membership to serve as poll watchers in Chicago’s rough-and-tumble elections. Currently, it runs three boys and girls clubs in the inner city and makes grants to young people who want to study engineering.
In earlier years, the Union League Club was more conservative, though not necessarily sedate: When the grill-room ticker tape flashed the news of the defeat of populist hero William Jennings Bryan in the presidential race of 1896, “members took off on a game of follow-my-leader all over the clubhouse, upstairs and down, leapfrogging through the lounge, and scrambling over tables in wild triumphant hilarity,” according to one account.
As for the latest chapter in the club’s history, manager McCabe observed, “There isn’t an organization that doesn’t grow from change and controversy. The club has always wanted to be a leader.”
Hagen’s ascendance, he said, was “a very momentous day in the club.”