Cosmos Club

The Cosmos Club is a private club in Washington DC founded in 1878 by John Wesley Powell and a circle of scientists and explorers who wanted a Washington equivalent of New York's Century Association. Unlike most city clubs, its membership test is explicitly achievement-based: the club says a candidate must demonstrate distinction in an artistic, scientific, literary, public-service or professional career. It has occupied the Townsend House at 2121 Massachusetts Avenue NW, a Beaux-Arts mansion built by Carrere and Hastings, since 1952, together with the adjoining Hillyer House and an annex. Programming is intellectual as much as social: lectures across disciplines, concerts, literary conversations and study groups sit alongside brunches, wine tastings and dinner dances, and the club's library holds over ten thousand volumes, most of them available for loan. The club runs guest rooms, the Garden Dining Room and Garden Bar, and private rooms for events, and offers reciprocal privileges to members of other clubs. The public website carries no membership page, application form or fee schedule.

How it works

Members use one clubhouse in Dupont Circle for dining, lectures, concerts, study groups and social events, with guest rooms in the Mansion, the Hillyer House and the Annex. Reciprocal club members may book overnight rooms -- each stay includes a full breakfast for two -- and use the fitness centre, which is closed to one-day guest-pass holders; the clubhouse is open to reciprocal members daily from 7am to 11pm except on listed holidays. The club is named on the reciprocal lists of other city clubs, including the Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh.

Typical member

Members are people with a record of distinction in science, literature, the arts, a learned profession or public service. The club says its members have included three US presidents, two vice-presidents, 14 Supreme Court justices, 36 Nobel Prize winners, 61 Pulitzer Prize winners and 55 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The Cosmos Club is the clearest American example of a club that selects on accomplishment rather than wealth or trade, and it says so plainly on its own site, which distinguishes it from nearly every other club in this batch. What it does not publish is how a candidate is proposed, who decides, what it costs or how many members there are: there is no membership page at all, so the criterion is public but the process is not. Wikipedia's figures -- about 3,089 members in 2017 and roughly $2,000 in annual dues around 2015 -- are the only numbers in circulation and are recorded here at low confidence. The club's dress code is among the strictest still enforced in Washington, with jackets required in the clubhouse from October to April and ties in the Garden Dining Room at lunch, dinner and Sunday brunch, and phone use is confined to designated spaces.

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