Patriotic Societies

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PATRIOTIC SOCIETIES

Coming together, mostly as young men, to fight the Revolutionary War, the officers of the Continental Army considered themselves the essence of the nation. While enlisted men came and went, the officers had served for up to eight years, frequently without pay and at their own expense. The war had been the peak—and for the younger ones, the only—experience of their adult lives. The officers had been promised pensions of half-pay for life, later commuted to five years' full pay, but the new nation was bankrupt. To lobby for benefits and to preserve the memory of their service through meetings and correspondence, on 13 May 1783 the soon-to-be-demobilized officers formed the Society of the Cincinnati, named after a Roman general who returned to his plow rather than be rewarded for his outstanding service. Modeled on the French army's Order of St. Louis, it offered participants badges, ribbons, reunions, and hereditary membership for their descendants.

Aspiring to be a well-respected group whose members would acquire honor and office, the Cincinnati instead provoked a huge public outcry. As a hereditary society the Cincinnati smacked of aristocracy; as an organized lobby it fell under the rubric of "faction," a special interest that set itself against the general good. The public also identified it with other signs of what seemed to be impending military rule: unruly enlisted men had forced Congress out of Philadelphia when they failed to receive their wages, and many officers themselves took part in what is known as the Newburgh Conspiracy of 1783, threatening a coup d'etat (scholars argue whether they intended to carry it out) that was forestalled only by General Washington's intervention.

In response, the Cincinnati adopted a low profile. It never attained more than 2,300 members, and although President Washington and five members of his cabinet belonged, its partisanship was limited to electioneering on behalf of some Federalist candidates. Identified with the Federalists, the Cincinnati declined after the War of 1812 and by 1832 were active in only six states. They would remain moribund until the 1880s.

The Masons were another prominent society to which George Washington lent his prestige. Imported into the American colonies from Britain in 1733, the order of Freemasons still exists, uncontroversially, in the early twenty-first century. However, during the eighteenth century it was identified with Enlightenment ideas: belief in a Supreme Being rather than the Christian God (many Jews belonged) and the brotherhood and equality of mankind—all members called each other brother and were treated as equals with respect to the order. In the 1830s the prominence of many Masons in economic and civic life led to the creation of the anti-Masonic political party. Although it failed to rival the Democrats and Whigs, the anti-Masons were successful in persuading the Masons to protest that they were merely a fraternal, apolitical order, devoted to social betterment and general civic virtue.

Enlisted men, lacking a society of their own, joined the Sons of St. Tammany and, during the 1790s, Republican societies. For a time, George Washington provided an element of unity by serving as the Tammanies' president as well. During these early years, the Tammanies were a general patriotic rather than a partisan group. Unlike the exclusive Cincinnati, these forerunners of modern political clubs were open to most adult white men and produced the first modern political machine in New York under the leadership of Aaron Burr and later Martin Van Buren. In response, young Federalists formed the Washington Benevolent Societies during the early 1800s. Celebrating Washington's birthday (which only became a national holiday much later) by holding festivals and parades, they copied Tammany in many respects, although the latter favored the Fourth of July as its principal holiday. Like the Cincinnati, they too declined after 1815 and were all but extinct by 1830. Reformer societies continued, however, to seek the prestige of the first president, as in the Washingtonian Temperance Societies (Washington himself did not shun alcohol), or the use of mediums by the American Peace Society to evoke Washington's ghost to prove he had converted to pacifism.

In the early Republic voluntary associations, to which Alexis de Tocqueville called attention in Democracy in America (1835, 1840), proliferated. Most were fiercely patriotic: volunteer fire companies, for instance, painted beautiful emblems of American heroes and symbols on their engines. In a nation that feared a standing army, private military organizations flourished. They regularly drilled in public, held competitions, and hosted holiday festivals. Entire cities would plan elaborate parades for the Fourth of July in which social groups participated, arranged by occupation—including the clergy, professionals, and artisans. Although frequently excluding blacks, Roman Catholics, or immigrants, their activities otherwise linked people of different classes and religions in a common civic culture.

In the late nineteenth century, Americans descended from the British, German, and Dutch inhabitants who fought in the Revolution feared that their nation's survival and culture were in jeopardy from the foreign influences of new immigrant groups from southern and eastern Europe. John Adams's descendants, for example, included three major historians who feared that European Jewish money and the pope's Catholic minions would soon swamp the declining percentage of "real" or "hundred percent" Americans.

Beginning in the 1880s, new organizations that required members to prove descent from Revolutionary soldiers or other groups emerged as part of a general movement of the traditional elite to insulate and secure itself from the newcomers. These included the Sons of the American Revolution (1883), the Daughters of the American Revolution (1890), the Daughters of the Cincinnati (1894), attaching themselves to that reactivated order, the Society of Colonial Wars (1892), and the Society of Mayflower Descendants (1894). Looking even farther back to European roots were the Aryan Order of St. George or the Holy Roman Empire in the Colonies of America (1892), and the Baronial Order of Runnymede (1897). Other long-established immigrant groups climbed on the bandwagon to distinguish themselves from recent arrivals and to commemorate their ancestors' role in the Republic's formation: the Holland Society, for descendants of Dutch New Yorkers (1885), the Scotch-Irish Society (1889), the Pennsylvania German Society (1891), the American Jewish Historical Society (1894), and the American Irish Historical Society (1898).

Among the initiatives sponsored by these societies was the promotion of laws to prohibit activities the new immigrants imported from Europe. Games of chance (held to benefit Roman Catholic churches), entertainments and saloons open on Sunday, and aid to parochial schools all came under attack from the largely Protestant "old American" groups.

Genealogy was a major preoccupation of these societies. Organizations such as the New England Historic Genealogical Society and other research libraries expanded their publications and space. Numerous histories of towns, counties, and states appeared, most with lengthy sections devoted to biographies of ancestors whose uniform probity boggles statistical probability. The newly formed American Historical Association, after selecting five outstanding scholars as president, turned to John Jay II and William Wirt Henry, descendants of the founders whose sole notable works honored their ancestors, in 1890 and 1891, to demonstrate its approval of filiopietistic scholarship.

The traditional elite's effort to unite with its ancestors was matched by an equal determination to isolate itself from its contemporaries: exclusive boarding schools, colleges, clubs, communities, and even cemeteries ensured that long-established families did not have to associate with those whose labor made their comfortable lives possible—except, of course, to service their personal needs as clearly delineated inferiors. Although schools no longer exclude Jews or Catholics, exclusivity lives on in country clubs, secret college associations, and the still-flourishing hereditary societies. Far from being quaint or irrelevant, these are important places where the elites meet and continue to influence American history.

See alsoFourth of July; Freemasons; Society of the Cincinnati; Society of St. Tammany .

bibliography

Baltzell, E. Digby. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. New York: Random House, 1964; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.

Cunliffe, Marcus. Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968; New York: Free Press, 1973.

Davies, Wallace E. Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783–1900. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955.

Fischer, David Hackett. The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy. New York: Harper and Row, 1965, 1969.

William Pencak