Fraternal Orders and Lodges: A Complete History of Western Brotherhoods

Fraternal orders are voluntary associations of men and, in most modern cases, women who are bound together by ritual, symbolic kinship, mutual aid, and a shared code of conduct. The American and European traditions described here overlap heavily with the broader phenomenon of secret societies, but fraternalism is distinctive: its central purpose has always been the combination of social bonding with material benefits for members, including sick pay, funeral benefits, insurance, and widow-and-orphan support. From the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, fraternal lodges were among the most powerful civic institutions in the Western world, at their peak enrolling more than a quarter of all adult American men.

This page traces the long history of those brotherhoods, beginning with the medieval prototypes of the Knights Templar and the stonemasons’ guilds that helped give rise to Freemasonry, continuing through the great nineteenth-century boom in Odd Fellows, Foresters, Elks, and Moose, and concluding with the present era, in which the fraternal tradition survives in diminished form alongside newer private clubs and college secret societies of the kind surveyed elsewhere in this site.

What Defines a Fraternal Order

A fraternal order is a voluntary society that explicitly uses the language and ritual of kinship. Members are called “brothers” and sometimes “sisters,” and they progress through initiatory degrees that often follow a dramatic script drawn from a moral, religious, or legendary narrative. Lodges gather under a charter, recognize one another across jurisdictions, and maintain a hierarchical structure headed by a Grand Master, Grand Patriarch, or similar officer.

Three features tend to recur across the Western fraternal tradition. First, a body of secret or semi-secret ritual, drawing on a mythology that may be Masonic, chivalric, classical, or Christian. Second, an elaborate system of regalia, including aprons, collars, sashes, and jewels whose colors and degrees of ornamentation encode the wearer’s rank. Third, a mutual-benefit program that historically provided life insurance, sickness benefits, and burial funds to members and their families. Modern lodges tend to be less focused on insurance, but the ritual and regalia remain, and a great deal of attention continues to be paid to symbols, ritual, and initiation.

Most fraternal orders also maintain formal ties to a founding myth, a sacred text, or a patron figure. The Freemasons look to the craft of the medieval cathedral builder; the Knights of Pythias to the ancient Greek philosopher; the Knights of Columbus to Christopher Columbus and the Catholic faith. These stories give the order a sense of antiquity and purpose, even when, on inspection, the founding myth is a nineteenth-century invention.

Medieval Antecedents

The Knights Templar

The earliest Western order that resembles a modern fraternal society in many of its outward features was the Order of the Temple, founded in 1119 by Hugues de Payens and a small band of French knights who took monastic vows and pledged to protect pilgrims in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Templars’ Rule, granted by the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, blended the discipline of the Cistercian monk with the arms-bearing role of the knight. Over the next two centuries the order grew into a transnational organization, headquartered in the Temple complex in London and operating commanderies across Christendom.

The Templars developed sophisticated financial practices that anticipated early modern banking. They held deposits, lent money to monarchs, and arranged transfers of funds between commanderies that functioned much like modern bank drafts. Their financial role has sometimes been exaggerated—Templars were not the first bankers in any meaningful historical sense—but they were demonstrably an early example of a monastic-military order operating as a major international credit network. Their suppression in 1307–1314 by King Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V remains one of the most consequential political events of the late Middle Ages, and the myths and legends that subsequently attached to the order are examined in detail in Knights Templar myths debunked. The Templar legacy is central to a later wave of fraternal and chivalric orders, as discussed in the Knights Templar entry.

Other Military-Religious Orders

The Templars were one of several military orders. The Order of Malta, the Teutonic Knights, and the Livonian Brothers of the Sword all combined religious vows with military service and operated through a network of commanderies. After the Crusades wound down, the military orders lost most of their fighting function but preserved the trappings of hierarchy, ritual, and regalia. These ceremonial elements, divorced from their original purpose, were later borrowed wholesale by the speculative fraternal orders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Operative Freemasonry and the Stonemasons’ Guilds

Another medieval ancestor is the craft guild of the stonemason, the operative guilds that built the great cathedrals of Europe. Operative masons had their own initiation rites, secret words, and customs, and traveled under the protection of “charters” issued by lords and prelates. Whether or not there is a direct line from the operative guilds to speculative Freemasonry remains a matter of scholarly debate, but the early modern Freemasons of London and Edinburgh explicitly adopted the masons’ tools, vocabulary, and lodge structure, and they did so at a time when the operative guilds were in decline. By the early eighteenth century the speculative Grand Lodge of England had been founded (1717), and the pattern was set for a lodge-based fraternalism that would be imitated across Europe and the United States.

The Eighteenth-Century Fraternal Boom

The Freemason Template

The English-speaking fraternal orders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries all draw, directly or indirectly, on the Masonic template. The Freemasons developed the now-standard structure: a Grand Lodge, a system of subordinate lodges meeting in private rooms, three (or in higher degrees, many more) initiatory degrees, a body of moral allegory, and an emphasis on brotherhood, mutual tolerance, and charitable works. The lodge meeting itself—the Tyler’s sword at the door, the Worshipful Master in the East, the Junior Warden in the South, the Senior Warden in the West—has been imitated so widely that most modern Westerners would recognize a Masonic lodge gathering even without being able to name any of the officers.

Freemasonry’s spread through the eighteenth century was remarkably rapid. Lodges were founded in France, the Low Countries, Germany, Scandinavia, the American colonies, the West Indies, and India. The new republic of the United States, in particular, became a Masonic stronghold. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and most of the other signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were Masons, and the order played an outsize role in the early civic life of the Republic. Masonic regalia appears on monuments, public buildings, and the currency of the early Republic—topics explored further in secret societies on US currency.

The Odd Fellows and the Friendly Society Tradition

The second great Western fraternal family is the Odd Fellows. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) traces its modern organization to the early nineteenth century in the United States, but the name is older: in eighteenth-century Britain, “odd fellows” was a term for journeymen of various trades who met in taverns to form mutual-aid societies outside the formal craft guilds. The Manchester Unity of Odd Fellows, founded in 1810, was the dominant English body, and American offshoots—the Thomas Wildey lodge of Baltimore (1819) and the parent Grand Lodge of the United States—became the largest fraternal order of the nineteenth century after the Freemasons. The Odd Fellows introduced the three-link chain of Friendship, Love, and Truth as their emblem, an iconography more directly emotional than the Masonic square and compasses, and they pioneered the practice of admitting auxiliary branches for women and youth.

The Foresters and Friendly Societies

In Britain, the Ancient Order of Foresters (founded in the eighteenth century and consolidated in 1834) was one of a constellation of friendly societies that provided sickness and burial benefits to working-class members. Other friendly societies—the Hearts of Oak, the Manchester Unity, the Ancient Order of Shepherds, the Royal Foresters—performed similar functions. By the late nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of British working men belonged to one or more of these societies, which together constituted an early welfare system outside the state. The friendly society tradition fed directly into the British National Insurance Act of 1911, which in many respects nationalized the functions the friendly societies had invented.

The Nineteenth-Century American Lodge Boom

The great fraternal surge of the nineteenth century was an American phenomenon, and to a lesser degree a Canadian and Australian one. Between roughly 1840 and 1920, more than 800 distinct fraternal orders were founded in the United States, and membership climbed to extraordinary heights. By 1900, the United States had roughly four million fraternal members; by the late 1920s, the figure was probably above ten million—about one-third of all adult men.

Why the Boom?

Several forces drove the lodge boom. Industrialization, urbanization, and migration broke up the older networks of kin and village that had provided mutual support. Fraternal orders offered newcomers a ready-made community, a regular social calendar, and a way to acquire the small but significant social capital that came with belonging. The Civil War further accelerated the trend: veterans’ organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic pulled millions of former soldiers into lodge life, and many of those veterans subsequently joined or founded auxiliary orders. The fraternal insurance system was, in addition, a practical response to the absence of any public welfare net: a member who fell ill or died could leave his family a benefit that ordinary savings could not reliably provide.

The orders also responded to specific communities. The Ancient Order of Hibernians gave Irish Catholics a fraternal order of their own; the Knights of Columbus did the same for Catholic men of many backgrounds beginning in 1882. African American Masons formed their own Prince Hall jurisdictions; African American Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias lodges proliferated as well. Jewish fraternal orders like the B’nai B’rith (founded 1843) and the Independent Order of Brith Abraham filled a parallel role. The orders were, in short, a way for a heterogeneous society to organize itself into voluntary associations that cut across—but also sometimes reinforced—the lines of class, ethnicity, race, and religion.

The Major American Orders

The major nineteenth-century American fraternal orders include:

Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) — A mutual-aid society emphasizing charitable works, with a three-degree system and the three-link chain as emblem. The IOOF, examined in detail in the Odd Fellows and other lodges entry, was the dominant American fraternal body in the mid-nineteenth century.
Knights of Pythias — Founded in 1864 in Washington, D.C., the Knights of Pythias dramatized the story of Damon and Pythias to teach friendship, charity, and benevolence. Their “castle” (lodge) ritual was elaborate, and the order at one point had nearly a million members.
Modern Woodmen of America / Woodmen of the World — Founded in 1883 and 1890 respectively, the Woodmen were organized around the idea that members would clear a patch of forest and build a community—a frontier-evoking ritual that mapped naturally onto the insurance benefit the order actually provided. Woodmen of the World, in particular, is famous for the “Woodmen of the World tree monuments” in cemeteries across the American South and Midwest, distinctive carved tree-stone grave markers that remain a striking feature of American funerary art.
Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (B.P.O.E.) — Founded in 1868 as a theatrical-club side project, the Elks grew into a major social-and-charitable order. They are best known today for their large, often architecturally prominent lodge buildings on main streets of American cities, and for their charity work on behalf of disabled children.
Loyal Order of Moose — Founded in 1888, the Moose lodge was a similar working-class fraternal order with a strong focus on mutual aid, fraternal insurance, and a network of “Lodge” and “Chapter” levels. The Mooseheart child city in Illinois and the Moosehaven retirement community in Florida remain the most visible expressions of the order’s mutual-aid mission.
Knights of Columbus — Founded in 1882 in New Haven, Connecticut, by Father Michael J. McGivney, the Knights combined fraternal insurance for Catholic working men with explicit religious and patriotic purpose. The order has grown steadily through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and is today one of the largest fraternal organizations in the world.
Shriners (Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine) — Founded in 1870 as a Masonic side order, the Shriners are best known for their red fezzes, their parade units, and their network of children’s hospitals. The Shriners illustrate a recurring feature of fraternalism: an elite or recreational order nested within a larger fraternal body.
Order of the Eastern Star — The chief auxiliary body of the Freemasons, open to both men and women (with the men required to be Master Masons). The Eastern Star uses a five-pointed star and a system of five degrees dramatizing exemplary women from biblical, religious, and legendary history.
Rebekahs — The corresponding auxiliary of the Odd Fellows, named for the biblical Rebecca. Like the Eastern Star, the Rebekahs opened fraternal life to women on a systematic basis.
Ancient Order of Hibernians — A fraternal order of Irish Catholic men, with strong ties to the Catholic Church and the cause of Irish independence. The Hibernians, the Knights of Columbus, and the B.P.O. Elks together form the trio of large ethnic-Catholic fraternal bodies in the United States.

Ritual, Regalia, and Signs

Ritual Forms

Most fraternal orders work their members through a graded series of “degrees,” each accompanied by a dramatic ritual that may include dialogue, processions, oaths, blindfolding, symbolic objects, and the enactment of a moral or historical narrative. The Masonic three-degree ritual moves from Entered Apprentice, to Fellowcraft, to Master Mason, dramatizing the legend of Hiram Abiff, the architect of King Solomon’s Temple, murdered by three unworthy apprentices. Higher degrees—such as the Scottish Rite’s 33 degrees or the York Rite’s additional orders—dramatize episodes from biblical, chivalric, and Enlightenment history.

Non-Masonic orders developed their own ritual. The Knights of Pythias used the story of Damon and Pythias. The Odd Fellows dramatized lessons drawn from the Old Testament and from the history of English dissent. The Order of the Eastern Star adapted elements of both. The ritual of any particular order tends to draw on a small set of recurring motifs: darkness giving way to light, the journey of the candidate, the symbolism of working tools, and the duty of charity.

Regalia and Insignia

Lodge regalia is a small encyclopedia of symbolic objects. Aprons, sashes, collars, jewels, and gloves encode rank, degree, and office. The white lambskin apron of the Entered Apprentice Mason has been the subject of extensive commentary and is examined in detail in why Freemasons wear aprons. Sashes are typically worn over the right shoulder by officers and across the chest by members of certain degrees. The “past master’s jewel” and similar insignia are passed from officer to officer as they rotate through leadership.

The colors of regalia are not arbitrary. Purple signals Grand Lodge rank; sky blue is associated with the first three Masonic degrees; the colors of the rainbow appear in higher Scottish Rite degrees. Each order develops its own palette: the Odd Fellows use the three chain links colored white, blue, and scarlet; the Knights of Pythias use the letter F (for Friendship) on a white-and-black background; the Eastern Star uses the five-pointed star in white, blue, yellow, red, and green.

Secret Signs and Recognitions

Fraternal orders have historically used signs, grips, tokens, and passwords as means of mutual recognition. The Masonic grip was long thought to be a powerful secret; in practice it consists of a simple hand pressure combined with a word, and a great deal of lore about its occult significance is apocryphal. The origin of Freemason handshakes is examined elsewhere. The use of signs, tokens, and grips is a near-universal feature of fraternal orders, but in nearly every historical case they function as a token of membership rather than as a means of concealing real information.

The defining shift in the long history of fraternal orders is the decline of the fraternal-insurance function and the rise of the social-and-charitable order. In the nineteenth century, lodge membership was a practical matter: the Knights of Pythias and the Modern Woodmen of America and the Royal Neighbors of America all paid out substantial benefits, and a worker’s lodge card was, in a sense, a sickness policy. The development of state-backed social insurance, employer-sponsored health plans, and commercial insurance companies in the twentieth century steadily undercut the fraternal insurance business. By the 1960s, most fraternal insurance mutuals had either demutualized, merged with commercial firms, or transitioned to social-fraternal bodies that offered only minimal benefit programs.

A second major shift was the opening of fraternal life to women. Most nineteenth-century orders were men-only, but the Rebekahs, the Eastern Star, the Ladies of the Maccabees, the Women’s Benefit Association, and similar bodies admitted women either as auxiliary members or as full sister orders. After the mid-twentieth century, mainstream fraternal orders—the Freemasons, the Odd Fellows, the Elks—increasingly admitted women either through the establishment of co-equal lodges or through the integration of previously separate auxiliaries. Co-Masonry, regular Grand Lodge practice, and continental European practice all differ on this question, and a fuller treatment is included in the Freemasonry explained entry.

The Decline of Fraternalism in the Twentieth Century

Membership in the major American fraternal orders peaked around 1925 and entered a long, steep decline thereafter. The Elks lost about two-thirds of their members between 1940 and 1980; the Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias lost similar proportions; the Freemasons lost a larger share still. Several causes are usually cited:

The rise of mass media, mass leisure, and the automobile. Radio, cinema, professional sports, and the car all offered new forms of recreation and social life that competed with the lodge.
Two world wars. Military service brought soldiers into contact with non-fraternal networks of camaraderie, and the post-war world offered many of the same benefits (insurance, community, identity) outside the lodge.
Suburbanization and the decline of the small-town main street. The lodge was an institution of the small town and the walkable city, and the rise of the suburb and the highway moved much social life out of the geographical center that lodges had occupied.
Secularization. The fraternal orders were explicitly moral and often religious, and the long secularization of the twentieth century weakened the appeal of their symbolic vocabulary for many potential members.
Internal aging. Lodges failed to recruit younger members, and the existing membership aged out faster than it could be replaced.

The decline was not uniform. Some orders—the Knights of Columbus, the Shriners, the B.P.O. Elks, the Fraternal Order of Police, the Freemasons of certain jurisdictions—retained or grew their membership. The Knights of Columbus, in particular, has used its Catholic identification to build a stable, growing fraternal body with a strong charitable and insurance program.

Fraternalism Today

In the early twenty-first century, fraternal orders survive in a smaller but still significant form. The Freemasons of the United Grand Lodge of England retain a quarter of a million members; the Scottish and Irish constitutions are similar in size; American regular Freemasonry is somewhat larger. The Odd Fellows maintain a network of lodges across North America, and the IOOF’s charitable foundation remains active. The Elks, Moose, Knights of Columbus, and Shriners have substantial memberships and substantial charitable programs. The Ancient Order of Foresters has transformed itself into a modern mutual insurer in the United Kingdom. The Knights of Pythias survives in reduced form.

Contemporary fraternal orders serve a different social function than their nineteenth-century predecessors. Membership is recreational, social, and discretionary rather than economically necessary. Theatrical ritual and elaborate regalia have become the dominant feature, with the insurance and mutual-aid function now auxiliary. Many observers note that the fraternal order, having lost its monopoly on mutual aid, has returned in some ways to the original fraternal form: a brotherhood of men and women meeting regularly for ritual, conversation, and the maintenance of a tradition.

The Fraternal Tradition Outside the Lodge

Several institutions that are not formal fraternal orders nevertheless belong to the fraternal tradition and are best understood in its context.

College Secret Societies

The American campus fraternal tradition is rooted in the same Masonic and chivalric patterns as the adult orders. Phi Beta Kappa, founded at the College of William and Mary in 1776, was originally a secret debating society with a Greek-letter name, an oath, and a ritual that combined patriotism with Enlightenment morality. It is now an academic honor society, but most of the major American college secret societies — Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Wolf’s Head, Book and Snake, the Seven Society, the Flat Hat Club, the IMP Society, and many others—descend from this pattern. A comprehensive list of college secret societies is provided elsewhere in this site, and a deeper treatment of the Skull and Bones Society and the Yale senior societies is given in dedicated entries.

These campus orders are in many ways the most important fraternal societies of the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, given the outsized political and economic influence of their alumni. They are also, perhaps, the most studied and the most debated, and a long tradition of commentary has linked them to the conspiracy theories and suspicions explored in conspiracy theories and hidden power.

Private Clubs and Retreats

The fraternal ideal of a private brotherhood meeting in its own lodge has, in some American and British traditions, been taken up by social clubs that do not use the formal vocabulary of fraternalism but reproduce many of its features: initiation, regalia, closed membership, and a private meeting space. The Bohemian Club of San Francisco, founded in 1872, and its annual summer encampment at the Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, California, is the most famous example. The Bohemian Grove combines the recreational tradition of the all-male retreat with the elite networking function that lodges once performed for working-class men, and it has become a touchstone for theories about secret societies and government and the deep state.

A great many American clubs—the Pacific-Union Club of San Francisco, the Knickerbocker Club of New York, the Metropolitan Club of Washington, the Chicago Club—perform similar functions at a regional or metropolitan level, though few are as ritually elaborate as the Bohemian Grove’s summer encampment.

The Broader Fraternal Pattern

A few general observations close this survey. First, the fraternal order is one of the most durable forms of voluntary association in the Western tradition, surviving in recognizable form from the early modern stonemasons’ guilds to the present day. Second, the fraternal form has repeatedly shown a capacity for self-renewal: as the mutual-aid function declined, the social and ritual function expanded; as male-only orders lost members, mixed orders expanded; as the fraternal-insurance business became uneconomic, the order reinvented itself as a charitable foundation. Third, the fraternal order has, throughout its history, been a meeting point of religion, civic life, and sociability, and the fraternal tradition has influenced not only the secret and esoteric orders described elsewhere in this site—esoteric traditions and mystical orders such as the Rosicrucians, Hermetic orders and Theosophy, and the gnostic and mystical brotherhoods—but also the broader civic culture of voluntary association in which democratic self-government is rooted.

For the relationship between fraternal orders and the broader history of secret societies, the history of secret societies and famous secret societies provide a useful frame. For the symbol systems that fraternal orders share with other Western ritual traditions, see the symbols, ritual, and initiation entry, and for the modern descendants of the chivalric military orders, see the Knights Templar and the medieval secret societies cluster.

Women and Fraternalism

The fraternal order was for most of its history an overwhelmingly male institution, but the question of women’s relationship to the lodge has shaped the movement from the early nineteenth century. Three patterns have prevailed. First, parallel auxiliary orders for women: the Rebekahs of the IOOF, the Order of the Eastern Star, the Ladies of the Maccabees, the Royal Neighbors of America, the Women’s Benefit Association, the Ladies Auxiliary of the Elks, the Ladies of the Orient, the Daughters of the Nile (a Masonic appendant body), and many others. These auxiliaries were typically administered by the parent fraternal order and gave women a full ritual life of their own. Second, separate parallel orders for women: the Independent Order of St. Luke, the National Ideal Benefit Society, the Court of Honor, the Mystic Workers of the World, the Women’s Catholic Order of Foresters, and similar bodies. Third, co-equal orders: in the late twentieth century, a number of historically male orders—Masonic Co-Masonry, the Order of the Eastern Star’s mixed practice, the Swedish and Norwegian orders, the French Grande Loge Féminine de France, the British Co-Masonic Order—opened full fraternal life to women on equal terms.

The fraternal order was in many respects a pioneering institution for women’s voluntary association in the United States. The Rebekah degree of the IOOF, established in 1851, was an early example of a women’s fraternal body, and the Order of the Eastern Star, established in 1876, became the largest such body. The American women’s fraternal orders provided their members with insurance, sick pay, and funeral benefits, and they played a particularly important role in the African American community, where Black women’s fraternal orders—the Household of Ruth, the Court of Calanthe, the Daughters of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, and the Woman’s Annex of the Pythian—provided an important institutional space.

The historical legacy of women’s fraternalism is uneven. Most of the women’s auxiliaries and parallel orders declined along with their male counterparts through the twentieth century. A small number have continued to operate, often as charitable foundations. The largest of the women’s fraternal bodies, the Order of the Eastern Star, has roughly 100,000 members in the United States, and a substantial membership abroad.

The Fraternal Insurance System in Detail

The fraternal insurance system, often called the “lodge system” of insurance, deserves a fuller account. A fraternal insurance body differed from a commercial insurer in three ways. First, the fraternal body was a mutual benefit society, owned and operated by its members. There were no outside shareholders, and the surplus was returned to the membership in the form of increased benefits, reduced assessments, or improved lodge facilities. Second, the fraternal body was governed by a representative system. Local lodges elected delegates to a Grand Lodge, and the Grand Lodge set the assessment rate, the benefit schedule, and the financial reserves. Third, the fraternal body’s identity was bound up with its ritual and its social life. A member of the Modern Woodmen of America received his death benefit, but he also received the Modern Woodmen’s fraternal literature, attended the Modern Woodmen’s picnics, and voted in the Modern Woodmen’s lodge meetings.

The fraternal insurance model was, in many respects, a successful institution. The fraternal bodies handled the bulk of working-class life insurance in the United States between roughly 1880 and 1920, and the fraternal assessment model was the basis of substantial actuarial innovation. The fraternal bodies pioneered the use of the “lodge system” of peer monitoring, in which a member who fell ill would receive visits from his lodge brothers, who would verify the claim and provide informal care. The fraternal assessment model also provided a financial education for working-class Americans, who learned to manage small monthly contributions over the course of a working life.

The fraternal insurance model declined through the twentieth century for three main reasons. First, the actuarial basis of the fraternal assessment was challenged by the rise of long-term commercial insurance. The fraternal assessment relied on a stable membership pyramid, with new members entering at the bottom and the assessment rate determined by the age distribution of the membership. When the fraternal bodies began to lose members, the assessment rates of older lodges increased, which in turn led to further resignations, which led to further assessment increases. This “demographic death spiral” consumed the financial resources of many fraternal insurers. Second, the fraternal insurance business was, in many jurisdictions, subject to state regulation that was unsympathetic to the fraternal model. Insurance commissioners required fraternal bodies to maintain reserves that were inconsistent with the fraternal assessment system, and the courts sometimes required fraternal bodies to convert to commercial insurers. Third, the welfare state and the employer-sponsored health plan provided a substitute for the fraternal insurance function. By 1960, the fraternal insurance business was a small fraction of the total insurance market, and most fraternal bodies had either demutualized, merged with commercial insurers, or transitioned to a social-and-charitable form.

International Fraternalism

The fraternal order is, in addition to the Anglo-American and European tradition described above, a global phenomenon. The German Gesellenvereine, the French Compagnonnage, the Italian and Spanish mutual aid societies, the Russian artel, the Jewish landsmanshaftn of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the South African mutual aid societies, the Latin American mutualistas, the Australian and New Zealand friendly societies, and the Asian fraternal orders all share the basic fraternal pattern: regular meeting, ritual, mutual aid, and a fraternal identity. The most important of these for the fraternal orders of the English-speaking world were the Jewish fraternal orders—B’nai B’rith (1843), the Free Sons of Israel, the Independent Order of Brith Abraham, the Order of the United Hebrew Brothers, the Knights of Joseph, the Sons of Benjamin, the Progressive Order of the West, the Knights of the Maccabees, the Modern Order of Prutah, the Independent Western Star Order, the American Star Order, and many others. The Jewish fraternal orders were, in many respects, the Jewish version of the fraternal tradition, and they adapted the lodge system to the specific needs of Jewish immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The German-American fraternal orders were also important. The Sons of Hermann, the Order of Hermann’s Sons, the German Order of Harugari, the Teutonia, the Sons of the Fatherland, the United Ancient Order of the Druids (a British fraternal order, founded in 1833, with branches in the United States), and the Sons of the American Revolution were among the largest German-American fraternal bodies. The Sons of Hermann, in particular, was a major German-American fraternal body with substantial fraternal insurance and a strong tradition of social and cultural preservation.

The Chinese-American fraternal orders, the African American fraternal orders (the Prince Hall Masons, the IOOF Black jurisdictions, the Black Knights of Pythias, the Household of Ruth, the Court of Calanthe, the Black Elks), the Latin American mutualistas, the Filipino fraternal orders, the Pacific Islander fraternal orders, and the Native American fraternal orders all add to the international fraternal picture. The fraternal order, in short, is one of the most universal of Western voluntary institutions, and its history is an important part of the history of modern global migration.

The Fraternal Order in Historical Memory

The fraternal order has had a complicated reception in modern historical memory. The Victorian and Edwardian era, in which the fraternal order reached its peak, is also the era in which the fraternal order was most thoroughly studied and most thoroughly ridiculed. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and his The Mysterious Stranger (1916) are representative satires of the fraternal order; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear (1915) uses the fraternal order as a setting for a murder mystery; the American political cartoonist Thomas Nast made the fraternal order a frequent subject; the American writer Sinclair Lewis made the fraternal order a target in Main Street and Babbitt. The twentieth-century American reception of the fraternal order, on the other hand, has been a mixture of nostalgia, sociological interest, and conspiracy theorizing. The fraternal lodges of the late twentieth century, in their reduced form, are often more tolerated than celebrated, and the architectural legacy of the fraternal order—the Elks’ lodges, the Moose’ “Heart of the Moose” facilities, the Shriners’ temples, the IOOF halls, the Knights of Columbus buildings—has been variously preserved, demolished, repurposed, and re-inhabited.

The fraternal order’s persistence, in a much-diminished form, is a reminder that the fraternal pattern of voluntary association has deep roots in Western civic life. The fraternal order was not the only form of voluntary association in the West—the church, the union, the political party, the professional society, the cooperative, the mutual aid society are all part of the same general pattern—but it was a particularly durable one, and the institutional habits that the fraternal order cultivated—regular meetings, open election of officers, written bylaws, the fraternal handshake, the lodge’s ritualized celebration of civic life—have been an important part of the Western civic inheritance.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly history of American fraternalism is Mark Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989) and Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (1989). For Freemasonry specifically, David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry (1988) and Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (1991). For the British friendly-society tradition, Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914 (2003). For the social-science tradition, G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (multiple editions), on the continuing role of private clubs and networks in American elite formation.

The history of secret societies treats the fraternal order as one current of the broader secret-society tradition. The Freemasonry explained, Odd Fellows and other lodges, Knights Templar, and college secret societies clusters treat the major fraternal families in detail. The Bohemian Grove explained treats the modern private-club continuation.