The Mayflower should have been the end, but it wasn’t. The Baronial Order of Runnemede was founded for those who had an ancestor on a certain English meadow between Windsor and Staines on June 15, 1215, and the Order of Three Crusades “traces genealogy of persons descended from a participant in one of the first three crusades.”
It was fated that someone should remember the Crusades. They are ancient and, more important, they were martial. Military snobbery is one of the great spawners of American tribes. Any war will do—there are associations named for every campaign, including the Boxer Rebellion (Imperial Order of the Dragon) and the Archangel Expedition of 1918–1919 (Polar Bears)—though the two world wars have proved to be the most fertile. Quite apart from the big veterans’ organizations, we have the Seabee Veterans, American Ex-Prisoners of War, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, the Legion of Valor, for holders of high decorations; the Retreads, who wore the uniform in both wars; and the Fighter Aces, whose members have shot down five enemy planes.
Old soldiers are clannish everywhere, of course; one thing that sets America apart is the remarkable number of organizations for survivors of the home front. Tribes sound assembly for War Dads, discharged WAC’s, former nurses, even for conscientious objectors. Our women have established a kind of Valkyrie whose adjuncts include the Moms of America; the Gold Star Wives; two separate associations of Gold Star Mothers; Cosmo, for war brides; and the Lady Bugs, who beckon to relatives of men who have served abroad.
Most commemorative societies erect a plaque now and then and let it go at that. There are exceptions. The United Daughters of the Confederacy try to shame the descendants of Sherman’s soldiers into sending their loot back to Georgia. The D.A.R. has taken stands on everything from the United Nations and the Supreme Court to fluoridation, and one of its chapters once urged that women raped by the enemy in wartime be declared wounded in action.
Essentially, the difference between plaques and lobbying is of no consequence. The point is that every organization must have some purpose, must be about something. Goals may be quite vague. The Kiwanian motto is “We Build.” Lions growl, “We Serve.” League of Women Voter units study problems. Other leagues get down to cases. The National Sling Shot Association promotes “the sport of sling shooting,” the National Association of Gagwriters “the production of laughs,” the American Sunbathing Association “the advancement of nudism”; and 300,000 white-ribboned women of the W.C.T.U. have sworn eternal hostility to every form of bottled tragedy. Yet all these come down to the same thing. Each tribe needs a totem.
Certain aims are common. Most societies are vehemently American. In the 1950s a cluster of I’m-a-better-American-than-you-are tribes sprang up—Birchers, Christian Crusaders, Circuit Riders, Liberty Lobbyists, National Indignation Rallies. They offered nothing new to the social anthropologist. You can’t be an Elk and be, or ever have been, a Communist. The pledge of allegiance is mandatory at meetings of clubmen and brethren, including Klansmen, and sometimes it is accompanied by inspirational lyrics (“Lift up thine eyes! The flag passes by!”). An Eagle Haus in free Berlin helps escapees from the East, and Odd Fellows receive reports from underground lodges behind the Curtain. Anyone under the impression that the men of the Shrine are just a bunch of fezzed clowns was set straight when the Past Imperial Potentate served notice on the Kremlin that “the eight hundred thousand Shriners of North America, each having placed his trust in God and standing foursquare for God, for Country and our Flag, shall stand like a mighty phalanx, opposing this scourge from Hell until their arms shall strike no longer and their tongues shall speak no more, defiantly saying to the hordes of Communism, ‘Thou shalt not pass!’”
“Foursquare for God!” could be an interfraternal motto. In the brotherhoods piety is even more important than patriotism. It is rarely a sectarian reverence, but candidates must be prepared to testify that they believe in a Supreme Being, or, if they want to be Improved Red Men, in the Great Spirit. A Bible lies beside the flag in Eagle initiations, on an embroidered cloth in Knights of Pythias ceremonies, under crossed swords during sessions of the Scottish Rite’s Supreme Council. The mighty Grange devotes its fifth degree to the lessons of faith. Lions remind you that Jesus was the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and several fraternal names have had Biblical origins—Job’s Daughters (Job 42:15), for example, and the Neighbors of the Modern Woodmen of America (Proverbs 27:10). There was a time when Odd Fellows really believed that Odd Fellowship was builded upon the Rock of Peter, an illusion which understandably irritated theologians.
Clerics have been peeved at other societies too. Jurisdictional disputes were inevitable; with their regalia, ceremonies and teachings the brotherhoods often serve as informal sects. Their power has waxed as the power of the church has waned—it has waxed, indeed, for that very reason. In attempting to make the glory of the Lord shine round about the brethren, some ritualists have treated Scripture as a lodge tract and usurped the sacraments of the church. They have never baptized babies or performed marriages, but they have been in there at the end with their own cemeteries, burial rites, epitaphs, funeral chants. (“There is gloom upon each feature, there is sadness in each eye, as the lengthy train of brothers passes slowly, sadly by.”)
Once fraternal intrusions inspired wrath in the pulpit—Pope Leo XIII attacked Freemasonry as a “foul plague,” and one minister asked the women of his congregation, “Do you want your husbands and sons to be brought up under the influence of a ball-loving fraternity?” Today the cloth is more or less reconciled. The Vatican is on the best of terms with the Catholic Knights of Columbus, and many a clergyman has become a joiner himself.
***
The humanistic character of associations is their most admirable aspect. They are tribes, but they are benign tribes. The solace they offer their members doesn’t stop with the ritual. Funerals became important to them in the first place because frequently it was the lodge that was paying the undertaker. The understanding was that you paid a dollar whenever a brother died, and when you died, the rest of the brothers would pay to bury you. This chain-letter principle started a century ago with the Ancient Order of United Workmen, whose leader was felicitously named Father Upchurch. The concept evolved into cheap life insurance and is the core of such orders as the Knights of Columbus, the Vikings, the Maccabees, the Royal Arcanum and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Some members don’t want it, but ten million Americans know a good thing, and they are covered by a fourteen-billion-dollar bursary.
In a sense this is another dimension of the search for group protection which led the joiner to join in the first place. “You can spend a lifetime in Odd Fellowship,” the Odd Fellows say, and you can; there are sixty-four homes for men of the three links (Friendship, Love, Truth) who are old or down on their luck. Moose-haven, Florida; the Elks estate at Bedford, Virginia; the Pythian homes—all are sanctuaries where elderly brothers Awalt the last thump of the gavel.
Tribes have always worked this way. Men take care of others so that one day others will take care of them. In America, however, the light of collective benevolence takes on a brighter radiance. Dear as security is to the joiner, the happiness of children is even dearer, and so we find the Eagles providing college scholarships for the children of brothers killed in war, and the Moose running an entire city, Mooseheart, Illinois, in which it has raised more than five thousand orphans of the order.
Childhood has a special significance for brethren. At least one American fellowship was founded by men who just wanted to relive the boyhood excitement of Halloween. Later that lodge turned into the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, but elsewhere sentiment still rears its violin-shaped head. Whenever Moose are gathered at 9 P.M., they are expected to “stand with arms folded and heads bowed… and remember our children at Mooseheart,” and it was a Moose who said, “No man stands so tall or so straight as when he stoops to lift a child.” The Knights of Columbus specialize in “boyology”; the Shriners call their seventeen hospital
s for crippled children “temples of baby smiles.”
But tribesmen give far more than bathos, and no order confines its gifts to members of its own tribe. Nationally they build clinics, contribute to Boys Town, and run marbles tournaments and soap-box derbies, while local lodges provide eyeglasses for myopic students, subsidize Boy Scout troops, buy watches for playground supervisors, show movies at Christmas, and hide Easter eggs and give the finders prizes.
The joiner’s generosity isn’t confined to youth. If orphans need help, so do all who are homeless and friendless and sick. To true brothers and doers every call for help is a call to the clan. Some Samaritans specialize. The Tall Cedars of Lebanon fight muscular dystrophy, the Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm (also called the Grotto) help victims of cerebral palsy. The Lions concentrate on the blind and, being businessmen, keep an annual audit of their good deeds, of which there are over 500,000 every year.
Other associations aren’t so tidy, but charity is habitual with them; it’s one of the ways you can spot an American tribe. High-school sororities contribute to the Community Chest. The D.A.R. publishes a civic manual for immigrants. In emergencies the Legion is an arm of the Red Cross. Every day in every way clubs are beautifying communities, visiting the sick, giving blood, holding rummage sales to help poor farms in the county or working in other ways to insure domestic tranquillity and promote the general welfare. Even the KKK, plodding its lonely road, passes the wool hat for churches.
It’s a lucky thing our tribes are eleemosynary, because if they ever took another tack they’d be hard to stop. They have vitality, men in power, and immense wealth—some ten billions in assets, including the land under Yankee Stadium, which belongs to the Knights of Columbus. Quiet as they are, they have altered American life in countless ways. “Under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance at the insistence of the Knights. The D.A.R. started teacher oaths, the Lions introduced white canes for blind men. Clubwomen started juvenile courts. Until recently the Legion of Decency had a lot to say about the movies you see, and if “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played in public, you will rise, because Colonial Dames spread the word that sitting was disrespectful. Authors cowed by the Daughters of the Confederacy call the Civil War the War Between the States. Newspapers attentive to the S.P.C.A. run pictures of lost dogs, and Rotary was responsible for Chicago’s first public comfort station.
The Grange gave us rural free delivery and Cabinet rank for the Secretary of Agriculture. The Eagles screamed for the Social Security Act, and Brother Roosevelt, in signing it, acknowledged the fact by presenting the pen to the order. Lately, balding Eagles have been trying to outlaw employer discrimination against older men. They are working through fraternal lobbies, which is the way most tribes get things done—or rather, the way they get things done now. During the War Between the States the Knights of the Golden Circle tried to seize Indianapolis Arsenal, and in 1866 fifteen hundred Fenians actually invaded Canada with a hazy plan for liberating Ireland.
Another Irish order, the Hibernians, was blamed for the Molly Maguire murders in Pennsylvania. The connection was denied, though the Mollies were all members of that Ancient Order and used its passwords. In the end the leaders of the Mollies were caught by Pinkertons and hanged. The captain of the Pinkertons had an odd fate. To obtain evidence he had posed as a member of the society and adopted its customs, which included the drinking of tremendous draughts of cheap liquor. Unhappily, he was allergic to bad whiskey. After the trial all his hair fell out.
Today the chief Hibernian activity is marching in St. Patrick’s Day parades—a grand sight and one of our great tribal feasts, ranking with Mother’s Day (another Eagle first) and fraternal conventions. All conventions are tribal, and all tribes have conventions. The pressure to convene is irresistible. Each year ten million Americans head for twenty thousand blowouts, where they don celluloid badges, subsist on a diet remarkably like that of Federal penitentiaries, and consume enough setups to harrow the ghost of the hairless Pinkerton. Chicago, with as many as twenty-seven conclaves on a single day, is the convention capital of the country, but clans can assemble anywhere. Lawyers have convened in London, Rotary met in Tokyo one year, and several festive clans have sailed off on Caribbean liners.
Cruises are out for most tribes, not because of the expense but because there isn’t a vessel afloat that could meet the delegates’ requirements. Every occasion has its special demands. Veterinarians must have cages for animals. Bowlers want miles of alleys. Dining-car stewards look for vast kitchens to serve them elaborate meals, and the hairy-chested orders need arenas for he-man-sized blasts.
Parades alone may last seven hours—a Shriner march engages over a hundred bands, twenty-five thousand Nobles and assorted troops of horses, camels and jackasses. One ball for Lions and their lionesses filled Madison Square Garden and two hotels; one clan hired a new cement mixer to shake up the tossed salad. Even if a ship had the resources, the problem of nomenclature would remain. Conventions are rarely called conventions. They are Camporees, Jamborees, Encampments or Wrecks, and the trembling ground beneath each becomes an Oriental Kingdom, a Realm or a Desert. How could the Red Men hold a Hunting Ground on a boat deck?
***
Some tribes are pallid. They park their wives in hotel rooms, huddle demurely and listen to speakers over closed-circuit television. No firecrackers for them, no nonstop busts, no cocked hats or flashing satin pants. They never get drunk and chase drum majorettes down corridors, never derail streetcars or steal a traffic cop’s revolver. The memories they carry home are a montage of ashtrays, water pitchers and aspirins. Obviously these dull bands lack the true joiner spirit. The business of tribal America is more likely to be non-business, at least when the faithful assemble. It is slapstick, showmanship, and Barnum burlesque, and it reaches its gala, confetti-sprinkled summit in the annual jousts of the show-off orders.
These are the lodges for joiners with tired blood. They have been created out of older associations; candidates must belong to the parent order first. The idea is that men need to let off steam after the strain of fraternal duties. Some brethren are elevated by the ruffles and flourishes of marching units—the drum corps of the Grand Aerie, say, or the Knights of Columbus Zouaves, or Odd Fellowship’s Patriarchs Militant, whose dashing uniforms are approved by Congress, and whose general is entitled to wear five stars in a circle, like a General of the Army.
Other brothers prefer Keystone Cop buffoonery. For them there are the playground organizations, where a man can take pratfalls without tarnishing the sacred name of the true fraternity. A Knight of Pythias on a toot is a Knight of Khorassan. A Legionnaire dons a light-blue hat and is transformed into a member of the Forty and Eight. The Ancient Mystic Order of Samaritans is the rumpus room of Odd Fellows, and Master (Third Degree) Masons are eligible for the Grotto and the Tall Cedars. The most spectacular playground of all, the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, is for the Masonic elect, and even this has foaled its own society-within-a-society, the Royal Order of Jesters, whose motto is “Mirth is king.”
Shriners are kings of mirth. If Legionnaires fire live ammunition in a hotel lobby, the Nobles go one up by populating other lobbies with exotic animals. If Georgia Elks try to buy souvenirs with Confederate money, members of the Ancient Arabic Order appear wearing twenty-dollar bills as eyeshades and riding horses fitted with horn-rimmed spectacles. They are past masters of the boutonniere that lights up, the exploding cigar, the paper bag of water dropped from the second-story window, and the misplaced men’s room sign. A bearded Noble in a passing taxi removes his fez—he is a chimpanzee. Male bellies throb like bellows in a fleshy hula—it is the faithful from the Honolulu Oasis, performing for the Imperial Potentate and his Divan. And when the Pote arrives for his Enthronement, an electric carpet gives him a fiendish shock.
Shocks are also designed for feminine pedestrians. To convening funnymen, every skirt is a challenge: somehow its hem must be lifted. Buzzer s
ticks, jets of air and sprays of freezing ethyl chloride usually inspire satisfactory leaps, and if these don’t work, a bunch of fellows can always form a circle around a woman and make her leap over their interlocked arms.
Convention cities are tolerant toward these raffish digressions. No one believes they mean a thing. Yet it is just possible that they mean more than all the bells, books and candles in all the rituals in the land. A key to any tribal society is its regulation of sex. Primitive sects lock up virgins and regard matrimonial decisions as a privilege of the men’s lodge. American tribes don’t work that way, and the joiner sallying forth to pinch a leg may be a creature of atavistic instinct, grimly avenging all his lost rights.
He has lost more than authority; he has lost its very symbol. The lodge is no longer his domain. In its heyday, American Freemasonry was as virile as the Eskimo’s kozge. Morgan, the squealer, said that the order forbade the initiation of “an atheist, irreligious libertine, idiot, madman, hermaphrodite”—or, last on the list—“woman.” After his disappearance, the wives of Masons began to rebel against this sexism. Morgan had disclosed that no brother was permitted to violate another brother’s women, and it was argued, with some logic, that the only way to make assurance doubly sure was to give the ladies the Masonic sign of distress.
They never got it, but they formed the Eastern Star anyway. This celestial body now has three million followers. Womenfolk of other Master Masons may join the Amaranth or the Golden Chain or, if their husbands are Shriners, the Daughters of the Nile. A rib of the Improved Order of Red Men is the Degree of Pocahontas; Maccabees are married to Ladies of the Maccabees; women of the Moose gather under the spreading antlers.
Some men continue to be sour about mixed societies. After nearly seventy years the Cincinnati refuses to affiliate with the Daughters of the Cincinnati, and the Knights of Columbus remain aloof from the chesty tribettes of Ladies of Columbus and Columbiettes. But these holding actions are as futile as the struggles of a black widow spider’s mate. Experience suggests that while the world may little note nor long remember the high jinks of the Forty and Eights, it will be listening to their ladies for some time after the last legionnaire has blown his last spitball at his last spree.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 29