Where Atlanta's 'Big Mules' Relax

"I have been angered and disgusted, not to mention sickened and saddened by my fellow newsmen," confessed Jack Tarver, publisher of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, in an indignant editorial last week. "It would serve us right if the judge were to tell us where to stick the attorney generalship and we wound up with another John Mitchell or Richard Kleindienst."

The judge, of course, is Attorney General--designate Griffin Bell. The cause of Tarver's outrage was the coast-to-coast outcry over the fact that Bell and two other top-level Jimmy Carter appointees belong to Atlanta's Piedmont Driving Club, which bars membership to blacks and Jews (the other appointees: Atlanta Banker Bert Lance, Carter's proposed budget director, and Houston Businessman Charles Duncan Jr., a former Atlanta resident who was nominated as Deputy Secretary of Defense). Bell and Lance have promised to resign, but at week's end Duncan had not yet decided what to do.

As the club's defenders correctly pointed out, many other cities also have clubs that bar Jews and blacks--and high-level officials of previous Administrations have belonged to them.

As for the Piedmont, Member Jack Spalding, editor of the Atlanta Journal, explains, "About the only way you can be assured of getting a membership is to be a son of a member." Ironically, the three Carter appointees are exceptions--all are self-made men.

The club, housed in a Tudor-style mansion a few minutes from downtown Atlanta, was founded in 1887 as a place for gentlemen to show off their fine horses. The club's 1,000 members are mostly business and social lions--known to Atlantans as "Big Mules"--who pay an initiation fee of $4,500 and annual dues of $750. Once mayors automatically became honorary members--if they did not already belong. The tradition was dropped in 1969 with the election of Sam Massell, a Jew. It was not renewed when Maynard Jackson, a black, became mayor in 1973.

Twelve years ago, the club quietly canceled its traditional dinner in honor of the Metropolitan Opera company, whose visits have been the peak of the city's social season since 1910. The club explained that its ballroom was being refurbished, but Atlantans figured the real reason was that Leontyne Price, a black soprano, was to sing Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Met Director Rudolph Bing let it be known that if Price was not invited to the Piedmont dinner, no member of the company would attend.

Jews have been admitted as occasional guests for many years, but black visitors continue to be a rarity. As Club Manager Jim Custance once explained to a reporter: "[Members] call this their home away from home. If somebody feels they want a black in their home, they can bring him here."

Blacks and Jews in Atlanta regard the club as an irritant but not cause for much outrage. Since 1867, Atlanta's Jews have had their own Standard Club, which admitted its first gentile member only last September. In fact, Atlanta's Big Mules could take some comfort from the fact that one of Standard's members, Lawyer Robert Lipshutz, plans to resign his membership as soon as Carter names him White House counsel.

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