A Bad Rap

Joanne: Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Joanne Freeman: Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m Nathan Connolly. Each week, Joanne, Brian, our colleague, Ed Ayers, and I, all historians, take a topic from the news and try to see how we got here.

Joanne Freeman: Well guys, I hope you’re hungry because if we’re going to start today’s show with dinner. And this is no ordinary meal because we’re in New York City and it’s 1881. We have fancy hors d’oeuvres. We have fine wines and the main course, the [foreign 00:01:03] is a rich lobster salad. And get this, it’s molded into the shape of a coffin.

Cara Giamo: And there are exactly 13 crawfish around each coffin lobster salad.

Brian Balogh: Sounds like a dinner to die for.

Nathan Connolly: Oh gosh.

Joanne Freeman: Cara Giamo is a writer for Atlas Obscura. She says the 13 crawfish on each plate had special significance. As significant as the 13 men who tucked into their coffin lobster salad and crawfish that night.

Cara Giamo: And then there are 13 candles and there’s a big banner and in red letters it reads, [foreign 00:01:41], which is Latin for, “We who are about to die salute you.” This was the first ever meeting of the 13 Club.

Nathan Connolly: That sounds auspicious. The 13 Club, what the heck is that?

Joanne Freeman: Well, it was a social club devoted to mocking superstitions, and not surprisingly given the name, especially those around the number 13.

Cara Giamo: The specific superstition at the time was that if 13 people sit down to dine together, one of them is going to die within a year. And this was based partially, I think, on the story of the last supper in which Jesus and his 12 disciples have dinner and then he dies soon after.

Joanne Freeman: The 13 Club was founded by a New Yorker named William Fowler, who was a very sociable kind of a guy. He owned a bar. He was always out with his friends and he loved New York social clubs. These were extremely popular in the late 19th century. Men gathered at the city social clubs to eat and drink and hang out with friends or to be with people who shared their interests in things like photography or politics. Fowler, appropriately enough, belonged to 13 different social clubs. He was particularly fond of the number 13 because he felt that it had been a good luck charm for him.

Cara Giamo: He went to Public School 13 in Manhattan. He was a builder briefly and he worked on 13 different buildings. He had survived 13 civil war battles when he was in the Union Army. He thought the number was getting a bad rap.

Joanne Freeman: Turns out plenty of New Yorkers agreed. Hundreds of people showed up for the club’s 13 course dinners. Members dine under ladders and sat at tables covered in spilled salt and opened umbrellas. The 13 Club even spawned various sub-clubs like the 13 cycle Club. That one was for bike enthusiasts who were also against superstition. Now the 13 Club actually caught on outside of New York.

Cara Giamo: So there was a branch in Chicago, there was a branch in Paris, there was a branch in London. A special women’s only branch opened in Iowa, and there was an announcement of the women’s only branch that said, “This seems a bolder move than the famous men’s 13 Club, women being usually much more superstitious than their brothers.”

Joanne Freeman: Oh please.

Brian Balogh: So it’s clearly an idea that speaks to all kinds of people across America. Joanne, what is the appeal of these clubs?

Joanne Freeman: In the late 19th century, superstition was losing its grip on American culture. It was an era of statistics and experts, but Giamo says the 13 Clubs were popular for another reason. They were fun.

Cara Giamo: Any endeavor that is so committed to its joke, it survived for years and years and got hundreds of people in on it. It must’ve just been a really good and unique time.

Joanne Freeman: 13 Clubs remained popular until the early 20th century. Giamo says that by the 1920s, the only mention you’ll really see of them is in member’s obituaries. But even though they’re long gone, the 13 Clubs may have had a lasting impact in at least one respect. Members fought against all kinds of superstition, not just fears around the number 13. Another one of their pet causes was Friday, which had long been thought to be an unlucky day of the week.

Cara Giamo: One BBC reporter recently was trying to figure out the origins of Friday the 13th as a bad luck day, and he traced it back to the 13 Club. His theory is that before the 13 Club, nobody associated Friday and 13 together, but since they were trying to rehabilitate the reputation of 13 and of Friday, they would do things like have an extra special dinner on Friday the 13th and he thinks that they actually accidentally kind of made this chimerical bad luck monster that exists to this day.