The Dutch Treat Club is a society of illustrators, writers and performers based in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. Primarily social in nature, the club has had as members such leading literary figures and humorists as Robert Benchley

Robert Benchley

Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor...

, Rube Goldberg

Rube Goldberg

Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor.He is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complex gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. These devices, now known as Rube Goldberg machines, are similar to...

, Robert M. McBride

Robert M. McBride

Robert Medill McBride was the publisher of James Branch Cabell and the later books of Frank Buck .-Early years:...

, and Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash

Frederic Ogden Nash was an American poet well known for his light verse. At the time of his death in 1971, the New York Times said his "droll verse with its unconventional rhymes made him the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry".-Early life:Nash was born in Rye, New York...

.

Founding

In 1905, Tuesday was the day of the week when Life Magazine

Life (magazine)

Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....

's editors, such as J. A. Mitchell

John Ames Mitchell

John Ames Mitchell was a publisher, architect, artist and novelist. He was regarded as a Renaissance man who kept to himself but influenced many. A Harvard University educated architect who studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in 1883 he co-founded Life magazine with Andrew Miller...

 reviewed the drawings and writings of their regular contributors.

Every Tuesday morning Life's anteroom would be thronged with clever illustrators chatting together sociably as they waited their turns to be ushered into the sanctum of "JAM", and writers waiting similarly for interviews with Thomas L. Masson, the literary editor. Since many of these contributors lived in the suburbs, it was natural that, being in town for the day, they should feel like having a good time in each other's company. And so the "gang" got the habit of lunching somewhere together, each paying for his own meal.

Life contributors brought friends who had no connection with that magazine. Numbers grew till one Tuesday the bunch organized themselves officially as the Dutch Treat Club, with Masson as President.

The eleven founders included four writers, four illustrators, two editors and a publisher, among them:

• James Montgomery Flagg
  James Montgomery Flagg
  James Montgomery Flagg was an American artist and illustrator. He worked in media ranging from fine art painting to cartooning, but is best remembered for his political posters....
  
  , illustrator later famous for his Uncle Sam
• Rupert Hughes
• Julian Street
• Ellis Parker Butler
  Ellis Parker Butler
  Ellis Parker Butler was an American author.Butler was born in Muscatine, Iowa. He was the author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays and is most famous for his short story "Pigs is Pigs", in which a bureaucratic stationmaster insists on levying the livestock rate for a...
  
  
• Frank Ward O'Malley
• Will Irwin
• Wallace Irwin
• George Barr Mallon, then city editor of the New York newspaper The Sun.