The Incorporation of Fraternalism

[Tamrin]

The Incorporation of Fraternalism:
American Fraternal Orders
at the End of the Victorian Era
by Andrew McCain

[Excerpt - Introduction, Dept. of American Studies, University of Virginia - Linked Above]

An Introduction to Fraternal Orders

Reaching their zenith of popularity at the turn of the century, fraternal orders were associations based on the Masonic model of social brotherhood that, on a practical level, worked to insure the well-being of their brothers through organized systems of mutual aid. Brotherhood implied a class-transcendent inclusion of all men regardless of social rank in the world outside the lodge. On a more abstract level, fraternalism was a symbolically potent culture that created solidarity through grandiloquent titles, costumes, and secret handshakes. These rituals inculcated value systems while simultaneously offering escape from others. If fraternalism offered practical benefits as well as an abstract, ritualistic experience, what caused 5 million American men in 1897 to want to join a fraternal order?

Explaining an American fascination with associationalism, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840, "Among democratic nations, . . . all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another." Writing a century later, Arthur Schlesinger, in his "Biography of a Nation of Joiners" noted that, ironically, "a country famed for being individualistic [provides] the world’s greatest example of joiners." These observations would have seemed obvious to men of the late nineteenth century who, for whatever reason, rushed to join such associations as the Masons, the Independent Order of Oddfellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Improved Order of Red Men, the Knights of Labor, and the Ancient Order of United Workmen.

Recent scholarship has illuminated several reasons for the proliferation of fraternal orders in late nineteenth century America. The result, however, of these studies has been not a simplification of the matter, but rather a complication of it. Scholars cannot seem to agree on several points: whether fraternalism was an assimilation of or reaction against capitalist tendencies, whether it transcended or reinforced class/race/gender boundaries, and most elusively, whether the substance of fraternalism was its tangible role as a means to social stability through mutual aid or the intangible allure of symbolic ritual.