Fraternal Organizations. Voluntary associations organized around secret rituals and seeking to create close, familial ties among their members enjoyed enormous popularity in nineteenth‐century America. Freemasonry, the earliest and largest of these societies, provided the model for many of these groups. Imported from England about 1730, the
Masonic Order grew rapidly after the
Revolutionary War, but faced a massive AntiMasonic movement in the 1820s and 1830s. Masonry's temporary decline allowed other fraternal organizations to take root. Odd Fellowship, another English import, grew dramatically after the 1830s. Following the Masonic model of using regalia, initiation rituals, and symbolism to encourage fraternal bonding, mutual aid, and universal brotherhood, the Odd Fellows by the end of the century rivaled the earlier society in popularity. Many other national orders, including the Knights of Pythias, the Improved Order of Red Men, and the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, also developed in the mid–nineteenth century.
Typically claiming mythic origins and sponsoring convivial eating and drinking, moral training, mutual aid (sometimes including but almost always going beyond formal
insurance), and networking (both business and political), the fraternal order became a primary form of social organization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The form was increasingly used for specific purposes—labor organization (the
Knights of Labor and the
Granger Movement), politics (the
Grand Army of the Republic and the
Ku Klux Klan), mutual insurance (the Modern Woodmen of the World), college life (Greek letter fraternities), and ethnic solidarity (B'nai Brith, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and many other organizations). The Knights of Columbus, founded in 1882, provided fraternal fellowship for Roman Catholic men.
African Americans, excluded by almost universal racial discrimination, formed their own groups, including Prince Hall Freemasonry. The Fraternal Order of Elks removed their formal white‐only restrictions only after a series of court battles in the 1970s. Women more often belonged to the ladies auxiliaries of national orders (the Odd Fellows formed one of the first such orders, the Daughters of Rebekah, in 1851). By 1900, probably more than 20 percent of all adult males (though many fewer women) belonged to a fraternal group.
These orders declined later in the century, undermined by the welfare state, the decline of single‐sex sociability, and the broadened horizons offered by the automobile,
radio, and (later)
television. In the 1920s, a number of popular service organizations like the Rotary appropriated fraternalism's ability to encourage business contacts and public benevolence but stripped away its elaborate symbolism and rituals. The economic and social upheavals of the Great Depression dealt a more direct blow. Nearly all the orders lost substantial membership during the 1930s—and most never recovered. The size of the Odd Fellowship, for example, dropped by some three million members, nearly 90 percent of its total, in the sixty years after 1915. Although Freemasonry gained ground in the 1940s and 1950s, it and other fraternal orders subsequently declined markedly.
See also
Anti‐Masonic Party;
Voluntarism.
Bibliography
Mark C. Carnes , Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, 1989.
Mary Ann Clawson , Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism, 1989.
Steven C. Bullock
