Masonic and Fraternal Ritual Objects from the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library

Starting February 5, 2014, one of our hallway cases will feature a selection of Masonic and fraternal ritual objects from the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library collection. 

Among the more than twenty objects on view will be favorites such as a trick chair, one of our ritual bells and a ritual beehive thought to have been used in a Masonic lodge.  We will also be showcasing two altars, as well as several officers' staffs and ritual props.  In addition to objects used in Masonic lodges, material from the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Modern Woodmen of America, the Daughters of Rebekah and other fraternal organizations will be exhibited. 

Masonic and fraternal organizations teach new members about their groups’ values and symbols through ritual. These ceremonies often feature props, special furniture and other paraphernalia. All of the intriguing objects that will be exhibited were designed to not only help convey certain concepts and illustrate important symbols, but to also focus initiates’ and members’ attention.  Imaginatively-wrought ritual props were often oversized and brightly decorated. Ritual props did not need to function as the actual objects that inspired them did.  For example, static metal feathers and gold-painted dowels represented arrows in the whimsically colored and ornamented quiver pictured here. Combined with a darkened lodge room, dramatic lighting and bright costumes, props and other specially-designed objects enriched the presentation of Masonic and fraternal ritual.  In the accompanying photograph members of a York Rite chapter that met in Baxter Springs, Kansas, many wearing regalia, posed for a portrait in the lodge room where they likely presented ritual.  Shutters covering the buildings’ windows both protected members’ privacy and assisted them in creating an appropriate setting for ritual. Along with a suitable venue, ritual objects helped make the time initiates and members spent in the lodge room--and the lessons they learned there--memorable. 

Photographs:

Independent Order of Odd Fellows Ritual Quiver and Arrows, 1850-1900.  American.  Museum Purchase, 96.050.  Photograph by David Bohl.

Royal Arch Degree Team, 1890-1900. Baxter Springs, Kansas. Special Acquisitions Fund, 88.42.112.

 

New to the Collection: Modern Woodmen of America Banner

The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library recently added a collection of Modern Woodmen of America objects and documents to its holdings, including this banner. As we explained in a previous post, banners were an important component of American fraternal activities. These colorful textiles were used inside lodges and also in public parades, at cornerstone layings and at other ceremonies. This banner was originally used by Modern Woodmen’s Belknap Camp in Tilton, New Hampshire. Unfortunately, we know little about the history of this camp today. A photograph from our collection, showing a Modern Woodmen of America drill team from an unknown location, shows that fraternal groups often included their banners when they posed for a formal picture.

As mentioned in previous posts, Joseph Cullen Root founded the Modern Woodmen of America in 1883 in Lyons, Iowa, as a fraternal benefit society. The organization’s rituals and symbols mixed “Roman dignity and forest freedom.” By 1910, the Modern Woodmen numbered one million members. Today, the Modern Woodmen of America are the third largest fraternal benefit society in the United States and count more than 773,000 members.

References:

Barbara Franco, Fraternally Yours: A Decade of Collecting, Lexington, MA: Scottish Rite Masonic Museum of Our National Heritage, 1986.

Albert C. Stevens, The Cyclopedia of Fraternities, New York: E.B. Treat and Company, 1907.

Modern Woodmen of America Banner, 1890-1930, unidentified maker, United States. Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library purchase through the generosity of Louis L. Williams, 2012.016.1. Photograph by David Bohl.

Members of Modern Woodmen of America Camp 7742, 1895-1920, unidentified photographer, United States. Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library purchase, 2003.022.1. Photograph by David Bohl.

Modern Woodmen of America Postcards: Then and Now

In 1883, Joseph Cullen Root (1844-1913) founded the Modern Woodmen of America.  Root held the opinion that Freemasonry and other fraternal organizations were crucial to the promotion of human welfare.  He belonged to the Masons, Scottish Rite, Knights Templar, Knights of Pythias, and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

 Root wrote the ritual and served as the first “Head Consul” for the new order, which was established as a fraternal assessment society.  In 1888, the Royal Neighbors of America was established as the women's auxiliary to the Modern Woodmen of America.  By 1889, there were 42,694 members of the MWA organization.  This fraternal organization was prosperous and by 1913, the year of Root’s death, the membership had increased to 700,000.

In 2011, The Scottish Rite Museum and Library acquired several MWA postcards by donation.  These donations complement the growing collection of postcards with images from the Modern Woodmen of America.  Most of these postcards date from 1908-1912.  This was the height of membership for MWA and also coincides with the “Golden Age” of postcards which ocurred from 1907 through 1915.

The newly acquired postcard above bears the insignia or emblem of MWA and several of their symbols including the axe, mallet, wedge, five stars, and branches of palm.  These are all displayed on a shield.  There are lumberjacks or “woodmen” cutting down trees in the background.  This was symbolic for MWA as the clearing of forests refer back to clearing away problems of financial security for member’s families. 

From our exisiting collection is a photographic postcard of a man in his MWA uniform and is dated   about 1910.  This man belonged to a MWA “camp”, No. 513, probabaly from Montana.  His jacket has the MWA symbols of the axe, mallet, and wedge.  The man is also posing with a parade axe. 

When the MWA was founded it excluded men with risky or dangerous occupations such as:  firemen, miners, wholesalers and manufacturers of liquor, sailors, plow grinders, and brass workers.  The organization also sought low-risk members and excluded men from the largest urban centers such as:  Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati. 

Today, MWA is solely a fraternal financial company named Modern Woodmen.  It provides life insurance and disability insurance for its members.  Life insurance totaled over $34.2 billion in 2011.   It now has a modern office building, on the Mississippi River, in Rock Island, Illinois, which it has occupied since 1967. 

Captions:

Modern Woodmen of America Postcard. Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, Gift of Michael T. Heitke, A2011/35/8. 

Modern Woodmen of America Postcard. Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, A97/053/1. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Banner Project!

Last spring, the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library received an American Heritage Preservation grant of almost $3,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support conservation treatment and archival storage housing for three fraternal banners in the collection. The Museum was one of only four institutions in Massachusetts to receive an award.

The IMLS grant is particularly important to the Museum & Library because of the nature of its Masonic and fraternal collections. Many of the objects in the Museum’s collection are not widely collected by other history museums, so the staff often has to devise creative solutions to store the objects and to protect them through conservation. Pursuing best practices for our collection and working to conserve and preserve delicate materials are highly prioritized stated goals in our Collections Plan.

By 1900, over 250 fraternal groups existed in the United States, numbering six million members. Banners were an important component of American fraternal activities. These colorful textiles were used inside lodges and also in public parades and at cornerstone layings and other ceremonies. Photographs and prints from the Museum’s collection show us just how widespread the use of these banners was. An image clipped from a newspaper or magazine around 1868 shows a group of Odd Fellows taking part in a public parade (see below). Their banner is clearly shown in the picture near the center of the group. Many fraternal groups made sure to include their banner when they took formal portraits. For example, a Modern Woodmen of America Axe Drill Team from Kentucky prominently showed off their banner in an early 1900s photograph (see below).

The banners that were treated are all double-sided, allowing their respective groups to advertise themselves to audiences in front of and behind them during parades and processions. Two of the banners covered by the grant are from the Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, U.S.A., the Museum’s parent organization. The third banner was originally used by the fraternal group known as the Journeymen Stonecutters Association. The oldest active union in the United States, the group formally organized in 1853. Members were (and are) working stone cutters and carvers. This particular banner was used by the branch in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It was locally made by the William H. Horstmann Company in Philadelphia, a company that made regalia and props for many American fraternal groups during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

One of the Scottish Rite banners received much-needed conservation treatment (above left). It showed signs of age, as well as damage from long-term exposure to the environment and stress from gravity. The surface was rippled throughout and the painted sections were worn, with some loss. The banner showed structural damage and staining. The treatment, performed by Windsor Conservation of Dover, Massachusetts, provided conservation cleaning and stabilization of the most critical structural damage. The banner has been surface cleaned, with special attention paid to mitigating the stained areas. Detached fringe trimming on the edges and the detached valance at the top were re-attached. The banner’s decorative tassels were also repaired and stabilized.

The second Scottish Rite banner and the Journeymen Stonecutters banner (at left) - both of which show significant areas of split silk that could only be treated at great cost – have been rehoused in specially-fabricated archival boxes. This archival storage treatment provides a preventive measure for the banners, which were previously stored uncovered on large, heavy pieces of plastic. The banners are now tacked to a padded fabric-covered board that can be used safely for occasional display and for handling. The new storage boxes protect the banners from light damage and the added resting boards prevent the need to move the banners from one flat surface to another, cutting down on the risk of further damage.

We are currently working on plans to exhibit at least one of the banners this coming summer, so please check our website for upcoming details!

Scottish Rite Banner, 1890-1930, American. Gift of the Supreme Council, 33°, Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, U.S.A., 2011.017. Photograph by Windsor Conservation.

Journeyman Stone Cutters Association of North America Parade Banner, 1891, William H. Horstmann Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gift of Jane Hilburt-Davis in memory of Ellen Vinnacombe Francis, 98.014. Photograph by Windsor Conservation.

Semi-Centennial Celebration of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, ca. 1868, Theodore R. Davis, New York. Museum Purchase, 96.042.3.

Modern Woodmen of America Axe Drill Team 1908-1912, Schroeter Studio, Green River, Kentucky. Museum Purchase, 2003.022.2.  Photograph by David Bohl.

The Royal Neighbors of America

In 2006, the National Heritage Museum received a set of five fraternal banners that had originally belonged to the donor's grandmother.  When they were sent to us, the donor explained that his grandmother, Elsie Hlava Meek (1886-1969), was an active member of the Order of the Eastern Star and suggested that the banners were related to that group.

Initial examination quickly established that they were not Eastern Star banners, but determing their correct origin took some effort.  Each banner depicts a symbol and has a word painted above: Endurance; Faith; Modesty; Unselfishness; and Courage.  By searching for these terms on the internet, the group of origin was identified as The Royal Neighbors of America.  Initially founded in 1888 as a social group, Royal Neighbors was chartered in 1895 as a fraternal benefit society for women "to bring joy and comfort into many homes that might otherwise today be dark and cheerless...by affording the mother an opportunity to provide protection upon her life."  The group's first "Camps" were established in Iowa and Nebraska.  Initially, Royal Neighbors was a ladies' auxiliary to the Modern Woodmen of America, but dissolved its affiliation with that group in 1929.

By 1910, RNA had 250,000 members and was the leading women's benefit society in the United States.  As early as 1911, the group supported the cause of universal suffrage, well pre-dating the achievement of the vote for women in 1920.  In 1931, the Royal Neighbors National Home opened its doors to provide "the comforts of a home...for deserving members of our society, in need of such a service," pursuing this goal until the home closed in 2004.  The organization remains active today, providing life insurance and pursuing community service activities. 

Elsie Meek, the last owner of the banners, probably belonged to Ivy Camp #1806 in Ravenna, Nebraska.  From 1920 to 1923, she was also a member of Aster Chapter #258 of the Eastern Star.

Royal Neighbors of America Banners, 1910-1940, American, National Heritage Museum collection, gift of A.J. Meek, 2006.003.6, 9.  Photographs by David Bohl.

The Brief, Sanctioned Life of the Modern Woodmen's Trick Chair

The Modern Woodmen of America (MWA) is a fraternal benefit society that was founded in 1883. They are still around today, existing as an insurance company - one of the many that started as a fraternal benefit society, complete with initiation ceremonies and rituals, but which eventually focused primarly on providing insurance. They are part of a larger groups of fraternal insurance companies, and by way of recognizing their fraternal roots, they still emphasize both fraternity and community.

But set your minds back nearly a hundred years ago, when the Modern Woodmen's drill team, the Foresters, would deftly spin, toss, and wield axes in unison as they marched in parades, and when joining a fraternal benefit society meant learning secret ritual work and promising to uphold certain moral values. All of this ritual work required props and costumes, and during the heyday of fraternalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, companies that supplied fraternal regalia and supplies did a booming business. Sometimes the fraternities themselves were the suppliers of all the material culture needs of a local fraternal group (the MWA calls these "camps" - which are synonmous with lodges in Freemasonry and other fraternal groups). Pictured here is the cover to the official 1911 supply catalog of Modern Woodmen of America.

The inside cover of this catalog has a few interesting notes, one entitled "Trick Chair Eliminated."

In 1894, in a revision to their ritual, the Modern Woodmen of America introduced the "Fraternal Degree," a degree which involved a series of mock-somber ceremonies all involving various trick or gag props designed to make the candidate look foolish (or humiliated, depending on your point of view) while making the other members laugh. Although it was, at the beginning of the 20th century, a sanctioned gag within an officially recognized degree of the Modern Woodmen of America, by 1909 the Trick Chair was deemed to have violated one of the organization's by-laws which prohibited the use of "hazardous appliances." And so the MWA committe in charge of degree work wrote the Trick Chair out of the official ritual in 1910, officially - although not necessarily in practice - banning its use. Pictured below is a page from the "Premium Book," a supplemental supply catalog that was published by the Modern Woodmen of America for its members. Although undated, because this catalog states that "the new Ritual permits the use of the following articles," we know that this particular supply catalog was published before the 1909 revisions to the ritual, which eliminated the Trick Chair.

A history of the Modern Woodmen of America, written and published by the group in 1935, put it more succinctly in their comment on the 1910 revision of the ritual: "a number of the hazardous and undignified parts of the fraternal degree were dropped." In addition to the elimination of the Trick Chair, the 1911 supply catalog also notes that the Lung Tester, Judgement Stand, and Boxing Outfit had also been discontinued. These discontinuations appear to have been the direct result of a number of lawsuits that some injured candidates had brought against the Modern Woodmen of America in the first decade of the 20th century.

Gags, tricks, and other hazing-related elements of fraternal groups reveal much about the so-called golden age of fraternalism in the US - the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although usually not sanctioned by the fraternal groups, the equipment for performing these gags on new initiates were readily available from the same companies that supplied regalia, lodge furniture and other supplies to various fraternal organizations. Probably the most well known of these gags involves pushing a hoodwinked (blindfolded) candidate around a lodge room on a wobbly-wheeled fake mechanical goat. Indeed, "riding the goat" was central to the MWA's Fraternal Degree. William D. Moore, in an article called "Riding the Goat: Secrecy, Masculinity, and Fraternal High Jinks in the United States, 1845–1930," (abstract is available here) makes a compelling case that the goat's popularity - and, I would add, the popularity of other related "high jinks" - took hold at a time when ideas of American masculinity were reshaping themselves. Moore concludes that, in part, "riding the goat" (and, by extension, related gags and tricks) can be seen as "experiment[s] with evading the strictures of Victorian deportment."

Of course, many people were concerned about this kind of hazing even as it was happening. The existence of such gags and hazing - whether sanctioned or not - is in stark contrast to most fraternal degree rituals, which tend to focus on the betterment of the candidate, and often use allegory and metaphor in a dramatic presentation to illustrate these ideas and to emphasize moral and ethical behavior. Because fraternal rituals are generally fairly serious and self-reflective, the existence of gags and tricks was often a source of contention among those who thought the high jinks were a welcome levity and those who thought that they were undignified and counter-productive. In most cases, the leaders of fraternal groups did not sanction these so-called "side degrees," although they existed and persisted during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as unsanctioned activities that took place in many fraternal lodge rooms. The case of the Modern Woodmen of America is an interesting illustration of how one fraternity - at least briefly - officially sanctioned the use of such gags (and even noted that their membership grew because of it) before eventually deciding to put such goats and trick chairs out to pasture.

Both images above come from our collection of fraternal regalia catalogs (FR002):

Modern Woodman of America Supply Department Catalog. Modern Woodman Press, 1911.

Modern Woodmen of America Premium Book. Rock Island, IL: Modern Woodman Press, ca. 1900.