fraternal orders

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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

fraternal orders organizations whose members are usually bound by oath and who make extensive use of secret ritual in the conduct of their meetings. Most fraternal orders are limited to members of one sex, although some include both men and women. The best-known orders are the Freemasons (see Freemasonry ) and the Odd Fellows, both of which originated in 18th-century England (although enthusiasts have placed the origin of the Freemasons at the time of the construction of Solomon's Temple). Most American fraternal orders were established in the 19th cent. Many were formed for a special purpose or for the benefit of particular groups; e.g., the Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange (see Granger movement ), was founded to improve the lot of the farmer and was for a time an important political force. To a large degree, though, these organizations expressed a desire to establish principally male rituals. The Knights of Columbus was formed (1882) to provide a fraternal order for Roman Catholics free of the oath-taking requirement to which they were opposed. Other orders, founded when commercial insurance companies did not extend coverage to workers, provided sickness and death benefits to members. That function of fraternal orders declined as insurance companies expanded their coverage, and today most fraternal orders serve mainly as charitable institutions and social centers. Other well-known fraternal orders and their years of founding in the United States are the Order of Hibernians (1836), Knights of Pythias (1864), and Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (1868).

Bibliography: See M. C. Carnes, Meanings for Manhood (1990).

fra·ter·nal / frəˈtərnl/ • adj. 1. of or like a brother or brothers: his lack of fraternal feeling shocked me. ∎  of or denoting an organization or order for people, esp. men, that have common interests or beliefs. 2. (of twins) developed from separate ova and therefore genetically distinct and not necessarily of the same sex or more similar than other siblings. Compare with identical (sense 1). DERIVATIVES: fra·ter·nal·ism / -ˌizəm/ n. fra·ter·nal·ly adv.

fraternal XV. — medL. frāternālis, f. L. frāternus, f. frāter BROTHER; see -AL1.
So fraternity XIV. — (O)F. — L. fraternize XVII, fraternization XVIII. — F.

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