That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture

5. Gender, Protestants, and Freemasonry, 1850–1920

125 Over the last half of the nineteenth century, the chastened Masonic fraternity recovered its losses in membership and grew at a pace that resulted in more than 5 percent of the adult native white male population joining the brotherhood by the century’s end.1 This occurred within a large burgeoning of all manner of fraternal orders in what came to be called the Golden Age of Fraternity.2 As the century progressed, industrialization , urbanization, and immigration shattered well-established patterns of family, work, and religious life. Outside the home, women and men sought new gender-defined associations, African Americans and new immigrants responded to the erosion of traditional communal networks by forming new organizations, and native-born Americans created societies to reform themselves and “outsiders.”3 By the 1910s, the great majority (59 percent) of America’s voluntary associations were fraternal organizations.4 In this great profusion, Freemasonry occupied a distinctive position as the oldest and most respected of the middle-class orders. Though the fraternity did not reachieve the public prominence of its post–Revolutionary War days, it did continue to provide its members with an intimate private world of brotherhood, ritual meaning, and entertainment apart from the competitive marketplace and the female-dominated home. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, accommodations between women and Masons resulted in the growing convergence of their social worlds. By the end of the century, only a small minority of chapter 5 Gender, Protestants, and Freemasonry, 1850–1920 126 | European American Freemasonry Protestants and official Catholicism remained opposed to Freemasonry. Though the attraction of some Masons to antimodern beliefs and practices marked a clear boundary between the fraternity and late nineteenth -century liberal Protestantism, Masons appear to have been so welcome by the early twentieth century that some churches began borrowing from the fraternal framework as part of a broad-based remasculinization of American Protestantism. the golden age of fraternity Like Freemasonry, the new fraternities provided men with a sense of order and group belonging in response to an expanding society built on mobility and individualism.5 Men who had recently arrived in a city could create the kinds of face-to-face relationships and values formerly associated with family and community. Immigrants could find both the close-knit bonds of their hometowns and socialization to American values .6 Through lodge membership, businessmen could make contacts, cultivate credit sources, and gain access to a nationwide network. Moreover, lodges provided essential economic benefits at a time when families could no longer rely on communal and kinship networks and before the advent of government-sponsored social welfare.7 Whatever the racial, gender, or ethnic makeup of these societies, all were committed to moral uplift and self-improvement. In late nineteenth-century America, this meant inculcating into their members the middle-class values of sobriety, thrift, piety, industry, self-restraint, and moral obligation . Finally, through distinctive regalia, grand titles, and in some cases an ever-ascending hierarchy of degrees, late nineteenth-century fraternal orders responded to the various desires of Americans to join exciting new groups, increase their social prestige, imaginatively use leisure time, and satisfy spiritual needs. New fraternal orders began to emerge as early as 1819. In that year, the British immigrant Thomas Wildey founded the Independent Odd Fellows of North America after advertising in his Baltimore newspaper for fellow immigrants who had joined the English Odd Fellows before coming to America. In 1834, the first indigenously spawned fraternal organization, the Improved Order of Red Men, evolved from a Baltimore -centered “tribe.” Claiming descent from the Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party, the Red Men employed what they believed to be Native American rituals and regalia to create a Masonic-like brotherhood . Following the Civil War, Americans made use of the now readily Gender, Protestants, and Freemasonry | 127 available Masonic manuals to produce their own “ancient” histories and ceremonies.8 The Knights of Pythias (est. 1864), the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (1866), the Ancient Order of United Workmen (1868), the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (1871), the Knights of Honor (1873), the Royal Arcanum (1877), the Knights of the Maccabees (1878), and the Modern Woodmen of America (1883) were all formed on the Masonic model.9 Conversely, Freemasons pushed beyond the limits of their organization to create new fraternities . Masons who wanted to move beyond the lodges’ new ban on alcohol...