The Chicago Club, founded in 1869, is a private social club

Gentlemen's club

A gentlemen's club is a members-only private club of a type originally set up by and for British upper class men in the eighteenth century, and popularised by English upper-middle class men and women in the late nineteenth century. Today, some are more open about the gender and social status of...

 located in downtown Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

. Its membership has included many of Chicago's most prominent businessmen, politicians, and families.

Press coverage

The Chicago Club's by-laws specifically forbid working members of the press from entering the building. The one exception to this rule seems to have been in 1982 when a Chicago Tribune

Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...

 editor was able to obtain limited access. (The club's firm ban on press photographers apparently held as the Tribune produced four water-colour paintings of the club interior in lieu of photographs.)

"… [T]he interior splendor of the Chicago Club is as private as a stately home in England, which it much resembles in décor. Indeed, few pedestrians passing by the eight-story red-granite clubhouse at Van Buren and Michigan even know what the place is. Club members – with such names as Field, Pullman, Lincoln, McCormick, and Blair – may have shaped Chicago history. But they also have developed a sense of privacy that politely but firmly excludes: 1) The entire world, except for the club's 1,200 carefully selected members; 2) Until recently, women; and 3) Reporters and photographers. "We'll fight to the death on that one," growls one club board member…

An introduction into the business high society that runs the Chicago Club has the flavor of "being a debutante," as one member puts it. How do you get in? Don't ask. How tough is it to join? In a word, very. Not only is there a long waiting list, but an applicant needs a sponsoring member, a seconder, lots of letters of support, and a good deal of patience. Most applicants test the waters first, so formal rejections are few. But not even the well-connected can breeze in. As one recent entrant recalls: "I knew most leading members when I arrived in Chicago, and my sponsor was a senior club member. But he had to take me – personally – to the business offices of all 12 club directors. No, we couldn't do it by phone. We had to book appointements, then make small-talk for half an hour in each place."…

Historians might argue that the Chicago Club no longer has the power it wielded in the days when its "millionaires' table" was the lunchtime gathering place of Marshall Field

Marshall Field

Marshall Field was founder of Marshall Field and Company, the Chicago-based department stores.-Life and career:...

, George Pullman

George Pullman

George Mortimer Pullman was an American inventor and industrialist. He is known as the inventor of the Pullman sleeping car, and for violently suppressing striking workers in the company town he created, Pullman .-Background:Born in Brocton, New York, his family moved to Albion,...

, N. K. Fairbank

N. K. Fairbank

Nathaniel Kellogg "N.K." Fairbank was a Chicago industrialist whose company, the N.K. Fairbank Co., manufactured soap as well as animal and baking products in conjunction with the great meat packing houses in northern Illinois. The company had factories in Chicago, St. Louis, Montreal and...

, John Crerar, and a half-dozen others, each worth millions in the days when that sum meant something. "Everything to be done in Chicago was discussed by that group, and then word was passed out", as Stanley Field put it. … But a visitor, seated on a lobby sofa, and those who sweep in for lunch, could hardly disagree with the recent pecking-order manual, "Who Runs Chicago?" Its conclusion: "The Chicago Club is the center of power in Chicago. It is mandatory for the city's biggest executives to join it, unless they want to be considered not-so-big executives. There are some society matrons who rank the Casino Club above the Chicago. But hell, you can't make many deals sitting around playing bridge with a a lot of old biddies." "

University of California "Centrality Study"

G. William Domhoff

G. William Domhoff

George William Domhoff is a research professor in psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz...

, professor of sociology at the University of California

University of California

The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...

, ran a network analysis study on the membership of think tanks, policy-planning groups, social clubs, trade associations, and opinion-shaping groups across the country for a research project he was doing on San Francisco's Bohemian Club

Bohemian Club

The Bohemian Club is a private men's club in San Francisco, California, United States.Its clubhouse is located at 624 Taylor Street in San Francisco...

. The Bohemian Club turned out to be the 11th "most connected" organization in the country. Only three social clubs ranked higher: New York's Links Club (3rd), San Francisco's Pacific Union (7th), and The Chicago Club (8th).

Name of Organization	Type of Organization	Centrality Score (0-1)
1. Business Council	Policy-planning group	.95
2. Committee for Economic Development Committee for Economic Development The Committee for Economic Development is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan think tank based in Washington, DC. Its membership consists of some 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders...	Policy-planning group	.91
3. Links Club (NY)	Social club	.80
4. Conference Board	Policy-planning group	.77
5. Advertising Council	Opinion-shaping group	.73
6. Council on Foreign Relations Council on Foreign Relations The Council on Foreign Relations is an American nonprofit nonpartisan membership organization, publisher, and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs...	Policy-planning group	.68
7. Pacific Union (SF)	Social club	.67
8. Chicago Club (Chicago)	Social club	.65
9. Brookings Institution Brookings Institution The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and...	Think Tank	.65
10. American Assembly	Policy-planning group	.65
11. Bohemian Club Bohemian Club The Bohemian Club is a private men's club in San Francisco, California, United States.Its clubhouse is located at 624 Taylor Street in San Francisco...  (SF)	Social Club	.62
12. Century Association Century Association __notoc__The Century Association is a private club in New York City. It evolved out of an earlier organization – the Sketch Club, founded in 1829 by editor and poet William Cullen Bryant and his friends – and was established in 1847 by Bryant and others as a club to promote interest in...  (NY)	Social club	.48
13. California Club California Club The California Club is a private social club established in 1888 in downtown Los Angeles, the oldest such club in Southern California. Its building was erected in 1929 and 1930 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.- History :...  (LA)	Social club	.46
14. Foundation for American Agriculture	Think tank	.45
15. Detroit Club Detroit Club The Detroit Club is a private social club located at 712 Cass Avenue in Downtown Detroit, Michigan. The building was constructed in 1891 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.- History :...  (Detroit)	Social club	.44
16. National Planning Association	Policy-planning group	.36
17. Eagle Lake (Houston)	Social club	.33
18. National Municipal League	Policy-planning	.33
19. Somerset Club Somerset Club The Somerset Club is a private social club in Boston, Massachusetts, founded perhaps as early as 1826.The original club was informal, without a clubhouse. By the 1830s this had evolved into a group called the Temple. In 1851 the group purchased the home of Benjamin W. Crowninshield, located at...  (Boston)	Social club	.32
20. Rancheros Vistadores (Santa Barbara)	Social club	.26