A White Man’s Dance

If you were to call the Belle Meade Country Club a relic of the 1950s, you’d be exaggerating its modernity. Only white men comprise the hallowed ranks of the “resident members” who can vote and hold leadership positions. They have first names like “Doyle,” “Bradbury” and “Wilford,” and they can shell out the club’s $40,000 entrance fee like a college senior unloading his pockets for 25-cent drafts.

Women have their own special and quaint category: They’re called “lady members,” and while they pay less in club fees, they have no say in how the place is run. They can’t vote on club affairs or hold a club office. Blacks, meanwhile, weren’t admitted into Belle Meade until 1994, more than a generation after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. Even now the club has only one African American member—and, conveniently enough, he lives in Atlanta.

So it is against this backdrop of pride and prejudice that Gus Puryear, once seen as a safe bet to be confirmed as a federal judge for Tennessee’s Middle District, is struggling to defend his membership in the Belle Meade Country Club. Liberal members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hold the professional fate of this young GOP lawyer in their hands, as they examine the diversity and discriminatory practices of a creaky Southern country club whose weathered exterior and unremarkable grounds make its cachet all the more mysterious. But Puryear has fumbled his part in the query, raising questions about his honesty by choosing to give technical, misleading answers to very simple questions about the roles blacks and women play at this private bastion of Nashville privilege. And in the process, he’s put his own country club on trial for its antiquated ways.

After Puryear’s rocky appearance before the judiciary committee last month, during which he fielded testy interrogations about his lack of trial experience, Sens. Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy and Russ Feingold sent the nominee a series of written questions. The three liberal firebrands largely focused on his work as the general counsel for Corrections Corporation of America, a Nashville-based private prison company. The senators each asked him about the investigation into the mysterious death of Estelle Richardson, a CCA inmate found dead in solitary confinement with a cracked skull and four broken ribs.

During his initial appearance before the committee, Puryear seemed more intent on defending the company than being frank about the circumstances of her death. So in their follow-up questions, Leahy, Kennedy and Feingold each pressed the judicial nominee to reconcile his vague, self-serving account of what happened to Richardson with the more authoritative conclusion of the Nashville medical examiner, who ruled her death a homicide and indirectly pinned the blame on the four prison guards who came in contact with her in the final days of her life.

Compared to Puryear’s comments about Richardson’s murder and the subsequent $60 million federal lawsuit, his country club membership might have seemed like a footnote in the résumé of a judicial candidate. But both Kennedy and Feingold pestered Puryear about the practices of the elite social organization, with the Massachusetts senator himself asking four sets of questions about the place.

“Is it true that the Belle Meade Country Club does not permit female club members to vote?” Kennedy asked. “If not, please explain why, and state whether you have ever sought to change this policy.”

If Puryear wanted to give a transparent and accurate answer to the senator’s question, he would have simply said that while no bylaw specifically prohibits women from voting, they do not vote and never have. And this practice remains unchanged and unchallenged, even though this particular nominee joined the club seven years ago.

But such a statement about the role of women at the Belle Meade Country Club, though honest and cogent, would have compromised his seat on the federal bench. So instead Puryear, the 39-year-old appointee of President George Bush, offered something Clintonian when he submitted his answers last week.

“I understand that the only category that may vote is the ‘Resident Member’ category,” he wrote in a response to questions from both Kennedy and Feingold. “At present, there are no women who are in this membership category; however, I understand that the bylaws of the club do not restrict eligibility for the ‘Resident Member’ category.”

Puryear also added, “Thus, I do not believe there is a policy to restrict a woman from being proposed as a ‘Resident Member.’ ”

Like a good lawyer, Puryear provided a technically correct answer. But it’s not the most accurate, which Kennedy and Feingold will discover if they make a few well-placed phone calls to Nashville.

They could start with Ed Nelson, a civic leader, merchant banker and former club president. Asked flat-out if women could become resident members, which Puryear suggested was at least possible, Nelson says without the slightest hesitation, “No.” He adds that he’s not so much defending the practice as simply being honest about it.