You will not find much contempt for the republic’s frailties in these pages, but the fact remains that I am free to condemn an evil President, scorn the national anthem, and take to the streets in demonstrations against a wicked American war. I have done all of these things, and the certainty that I can continue to do them is, for me, a source of great national pride.
Q. If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A. Where else is there so much freedom?
The Tribal American
Mencken once found a Maryland undertaker who had been initiated eighteen times. “When he robes himself to plant a fellow joiner he weighs three hundred pounds and sparkles and flashes like the mouth of hell itself,” Mencken reported. “He is entitled to wear seven swords, all jeweled, and to hang his watch chain with the golden busts of nine wild animals, all with precious stones for eyes. Put beside this lowly washer of the dead, Pershing newly polished would seem almost like a Trappist.”
Grotesque? No: merely a sublime example of a national quirk. Alexis de Tocqueville called Americans the greatest joiners in the world, but in his day the urge to join was simply a yen. Since then it has become a lust. There are about a hundred million members of leagues, councils, societies and clubs in the United States. Fraternal orders alone have some twenty million initiates, whose We feeling is suggested by the names of their chapters—Temples, Shrines, Bethels, Dens, Nests, Hives, Parlors, Tabernacles, Wigwams (Improved Order of Red Men), Groves (United Ancient Order of Druids), Forests (Tall Cedars of Lebanon), Pup Tents (Military Order of the Cootie) and Aeries (Fraternal Order of Eagles).
Nor are swords and gilt busts extraordinary. You have only to see a Knight of Columbus in his sash, baldric and plumed hat, or the Supreme Queen of the Daughters of the Nile giving the year’s password to sister queens in majestic gold coronets, to realize that America is the shrine and aerie of mummery. In pomp and spangles, in cryptic raps and knuckle-twisting grips, in arcana and palladia and abracadabra our mystic brotherhoods are unmatched. “It’s just like a Maori war dance,” John Marquand’s sociologist says of a club outing in Point of No Return, but he’s wrong; the Maori doesn’t live who could hold a Masonic candle to the sunbursts of tribal America.
Even the Mau Mau couldn’t touch them. A shiver of anticipation ran through America’s 125,000 lodges in the early 1950s, when it was rumored that members of this Kenyan patriotic fraternity had devised a blood-curdling new ritual. It turned out the bush was only bush league. The initiation was warmed-over voodoo. The blood oath was on the Tom Sawyer level; the post-ceremonial beer drinking was a crude parody of some of our magnificent initiation banquets. When it came to mumbo jumbo, Mau Mau wasn’t even in the same class with Hoo Hoo, the American lumberman’s fraternity, whose devotion to the black cat and its sacred nine lives is so great that the lodge convenes only in the ninth month, has nine officers, and charges new members exactly $9.99.
***
Joining wasn’t invented in the United States. The Masons and the Odd Fellows, our two largest orders, began as guilds in medieval Europe. Daniel Defoe mentions the Odd Fellows; Freemasonry goes back to the tenth century, and the Ancient Order of Hibernians is said to have been traced to the eviction of a sixteenth-century Irish widow named Molly Maguire. Africa’s Egbo society has long had a complex ladder of rites up which an ambitious warrior may advance, becoming, in time, a sort of thirty-second-degree Egbo, and since Plato first observed Athenian lodges the institution has turned up in Borneo, among the Plains Indians, and in northern Alaska, where Eskimo males still withdraw to a separate hut they call the kozge.
It is in the United States, however, that the joiner has found his palatinate. Scarcely anyone is immune. Mencken mocked the undertaker, but he himself was a faithful member of Baltimore’s Saturday Night Club. Marquand thought his fictitious sociologist ridiculous, but when real sociologists invaded his hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts (pop. 14,000), they found 357 formal associations and several thousand cliques. Henry David Thoreau hated organized society so much he preferred jail. Yet he is venerated today by the Thoreau Society, with a membership of about six hundred and fifty.
Some Americans join everything in sight. When the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations was published, during the Truman Administration, a Baltimore reporter discovered that he belonged to eleven of them. He wasn’t a Red. He just wanted to Belong. Inquiries have been addressed to at least one lodge that doesn’t even exist—the Knights of the Burning Pestle, after the title character in a comedy written by Beaumont and Fletcher in 1613. Many years ago a wag founded the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping-Car Porters George, specifying that only men named George need apply. The S.P.C.S.P.G. was supposed to be a joke, but look who agreed to serve as officers: Senator George of Georgia, George M. Cohan, George Cardinal Mundelein, and, as Sergeant at Arms, George Herman Ruth. Franklin D. Roosevelt was always pledging something; he became a Mason, an Elk, an Odd Fellow, and a member of the AHEPA, a Greek-American society. John F. Kennedy was a Knight of Columbus and an Eagle—Aerie No. 1445. Chief Justice Earl Warren was an Odd Fellow, an Eagle and a Rotarian. Gerald Ford is a member of Phi Delta Phi, a Deke, and a Mason.
At first glance Rotary may seem out of place here. Like Kiwanis, the Lions, Civitan, Gyro and Cosmopolitan, it is a lunch club for businessmen eager to meet on the level and part on the square, and the only drums it beats are the tom-toms of service. Its boosters don’t wear fancy pajamas or carry jeweled scepters, or prance around under glamorous banners. Their leaders aren’t called Sapient Screechers or Great Incohonees, and the closest thing they have to a ritual is an occasional rule that a man late to lunch must wear his hat or sing a solo during the meal.
The tribes of backslap, in short, don’t appear to be tribes at all. Yet each has its slogans, badges, high signs, oaths—tokens of what a philosopher described as “the umbilical cord that unites man with his fellow man in a primitive tribal society.” One band of hustlers actually calls itself the Tribe of Yessir. Candidates answer a series of questions known collectively as the Tribal Pledge. (Q.: “Do you further pledge yourself not only to admit, but positively insist that—is a real good town, full of good fellows, and that all the world is bright and sunny and getting brighter and sunnier constantly?” A.: “Yes, sir!”) The service clubs, like other orders, exert a powerful influence over the dress, manners and beliefs of their votaries, and if they lack mystery, so, increasingly, do the classic brotherhoods; the Eagles have abolished their secret password, and Masonic liturgy is no longer the dark mystery it once was.
***
Here some understanding of tribal evolution is useful. Freemasonry, the first great American order, reached its zenith during the Revolution. The Boston Tea Party was a lark of Boston’s St. Andrew’s Lodge. The Redcoat alarm was spread by Paul Revere, Right Worshipful Grand Master of Massachusetts. Washington, Franklin, Patrick Henry, Tom Paine and John Paul Jones were ardent Masons, and so were most of the Signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Masonic dominance continued until 1826, when it suffered a staggering blow; a Royal Arch Mason named William Morgan published everything he knew about the order. Morgan vanished—according to a shaft still standing in Old Batavia Cemetery, midway between Rochester and Buffalo, New York, he was murdered—and for awhile all societies, including Phi Beta Kappa, had a thin time. In 1832 feeling against the Masons was so strong that an Anti-Masonic party was formed. It carried only one state, Vermont, but the order was badly shaken.
There was a growing demand for new lodges, however, and since Masons knew the ropes they founded or wrote rituals for a glittering array of brotherhoods, including the Knights of Pythias, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, the Modern Woodmen of America, the Grange, and the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, America’s first real union. Freemasonry itself began to undergo a kind of cellular division—today th
ere are fifty orders allied to the original rites.
Still other Masons were establishing college fraternities, whose ceremonies borrowed heavily from Masonic rubrics, or joining such Victorian curiosities as the Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun, the Prudent Patricians of Pompeii, the Improved Order of Heptasophs, and the Red, White and Blue Lodge (three degrees; the top men were bluebloods). Meanwhile actors and writers had created the Loyal Order of Moose and the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. The stampede was on. By the 1890s there were so many societies in the land that William McKinley, campaigning from his front porch, could address an endless procession of marching clans.
Later the more absurd lodges died of embarrassment. Yet wherever one fell, a dozen sprang up. As de Tocqueville had predicted, Americans were forming associations of every sort, “religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.” They are still forming them. Today Freemasonry is stronger than ever—one out of every twelve American men belongs—and the National Fraternal Congress reports that the rest of the brotherhoods are booming too.
There have been some changes. Among the newer organizations, for example, the American weakness for what John Quincy Adams called “childish pageantry” seems to be diminishing somewhat. As America grows more urbane its tribes are becoming smoother, quieter, broader in the tie and longer in the coif. There is less emphasis on hieroglyphics, more on social skills.
But this is only a difference in packaging. Here and there lapel pins have replaced robes, that’s all. The motives of tribesmen haven’t changed a jot. “Man is a gregarious animal,” I was told by the secretary-treasurer of the Fraternal Congress, “and he still seeks the company of other men and women.” Behind the pink geniality of the luncheoneer’s meeting, behind the cigars inserted in the elliptical faces, lies the same feeling of security that members of the Mafia, a nonservice club, acquire from those they call gli amici, the brethren. The first Rotarian, Paul P. Harris, put it peppily: “Here’s the foundation of success, the practicalized, sterilized, scientized, vitalized, idealized foundation of your success, my success, the world’s success—acquaintance, the dynamics and harmonics of Rotary.”
Joiners do join for various reasons, of course. This woman acquires prestige from the Junior League, that one from the National Secretaries Association. A realtor discovers that all the big men in town are Shriners, a grocery clerk gets a thrill out of being High Priest on lodge night, a henpecked husband yearns for the distinction of the thirty-second-degree Freemasonry, or of the Knights of Columbus fourth degree or the seventh degree of the Grange. At bottom, however, every member is drawn by the dynamics and harmonics of acquaintance, and this craving for herd warmth binds all American voluntary associations, from the pals of the Exchange Club to the sheeted creeps of the Ku Klux Klan; from Vogue, the high-school sorority, to the Minute Women manning the watchtowers of the republic.
The need for group stimuli is no respecter of class lines. Once the lodge was regarded as a sort of non-U country club, but a recent study revealed that the typical joiner is a middle-aged college graduate with either a profession or an executive position. The report should have surprised no one. Our tribes have always attracted eminent people, and not all of them have been Americans. George Washington brought Lafayette into Freemasonry at Valley Forge, and Benjamin Franklin taught Voltaire the Masonic grip. Florence Nightingale followed the gleam of the Eastern Star (Masonic women); a Speaker of the House wrote a degree for the Rebekahs (Odd Fellows’ women). All Catholic archbishops wear the breastplates of the Knights of Columbus, and virtually every United States Senator belongs to something. It’s good politics, of course, but as a rule public men make solemn brothers. During the Revolution, when a British military lodge lost its Masonic paraphernalia in battle, Washington returned it with a guard of honor. A mayor of New York said that he felt the fraternal spirit whenever he came into a room full of chairs, and FDR had the White House closed to visitors while he took three Pythian degrees.
Among less eminent members lodge loyalty may transcend every other tie. Let the klaxon wind and the faithful drop everything. A Lions convention attracts thirty-five thousand roaring beasts. Fifty thousand stamp collectors assembled in New York not long ago, and there have been cases of boosters who, told that the Local attendance record was in jeopardy, insisted on being carried to meetings on litters. James J. Davis wouldn’t serve as Harding’s Secretary of Labor until he had been assured that his duties wouldn’t interfere with his Moose work. When Admiral Peary reached the North Pole he planted the American flag and then, right under it, the standard of Delta Kappa Epsilon. “Next to God,” said an Episcopalian bishop, “I love dear old Psi U.”
Sophisticates may jeer, but the joiner jeers right back. Dedicated tribesmen are likely to look upon nontribesmen as outcasts. College Greeks call nonfraternity men Barbs or Culls. To Red Men all beyond the glow of the Council Fire are Palefaces; to Klansmen non-Klansmen are Aliens. A German sociologist concluded that the American who isn’t a member of any club at all is “a sort of pariah,” and an American Legion commander looked forward to the day “when any man eligible to become a member of the Legion, who does not belong, will be looked upon with suspicion, and justly so, by the community where he lives.” Everybody should join, the compulsive joiner argues, because everybody can.
That’s not strictly true. Most groups are selective—that’s the point of the thing. Freemasonry picks its men; so do Boy Scout troops. The discriminatory character of high-school societies has inspired half the states to pass restrictive laws, which are widely flouted by junior joiners. One of the initiation props of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows is Moses’ rod, “to smite the high, thick walls of prejudice which shut away man from his fellows”; nevertheless the order itself shuts away black fellows. That is the significance of the name—it became independent of the Grand Lodge of England after the two had disagreed about racial barriers in America. La Société des Quarante Hommes et Huit Chevaux, the fun-loving affiliate of the American Legion, similarly excludes black veterans. Virtually all fraternal orders are segregated. An exception is the Knights of Columbus, but a Supreme Knight once admitted to me that local lodges are free to use the racial blackball.
Still, if one hall won’t give you the password, you can always shop around. Individual tribes may be exclusive, but the system itself is inclusive. Somewhere there’s a crowd that wants you. If you dislike “going through the chairs” of Odd Fellowship, or find the thirty-two steps of the Masons’ Scottish Rite tedious, there are the quick, painless single-degree orders: the Moose, the Elks, the Eagles. And the mystic brotherhoods are only the beginning. We have national organizations for euthanasia enthusiasts, simpler spellers, astrologists, soap sculptors, truant officers, twins, trailer owners, shut-ins, homing-pigeon racers, baby-sitters, autograph collectors, parachutists, left-handed golfers, and short men, whose motto is, “We Shall Undercome.”
There are Golden Age clubs for senior citizens and, for people who want to Take Off Pounds Sensibly, TOPS. Sundry societies study African violets, tropical fish or internal secretions. Men (women) born in California may belong to the Sons (Daughters) of the Golden West, and people who think that historians have libeled Aaron Burr are welcome at the Aaron Burr Association, whose President General happens to be a man named Burr.
Drunks can join Alcoholics Anonymous. Drug addicts are eligible for Narcotics Anonymous. Associations Awalt ex-Rhodes Scholars, ex-FBI men, ex-airline hostesses and ex-rural letter carriers; others entice the Friends of Children’s Museums and the Defenders of Furbearers. Godmothers have a League, grandmothers a Federation, women who have christened ships a Society.
Our tribal press alone is staggering. Men who have become heads of companies before the age of forty are Young Presidents and read Enterprise. Cheerleaders get The Megaphones; amputees The Amp; members of the National Puzzlers’ League The Enigma. The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet
Singing in America puts out The Harmonizer, and its female auxiliary, the Sweet Adelines, issues Pitch Pipe.
Any common enthusiasm is sufficient reason to form a clan. Once the vows are taken the enthusiasm may wane, but the fellowship has a life of its own. After all, Freemasons haven’t built a cathedral in centuries. Mah Jongg belongs to the 1920s, but the Mah Jongg League has an enrollment of 150,000. Nearly a century has passed since the Knights of Pythias had any connection with civil servants, though it was started by them, and most Elks and Moose have forgotten their artistic origins. Sometimes an association doesn’t appear until long after the event it commemorates—the Blizzard Club, honoring the blow of ’88, wasn’t founded until 1940—though here we get into something else: the tribal reverence for the past which one historian of American organizations calls ancestor worship.
The seed for American ancestor worship was sown in 1783, when George Washington’s officers established the Society of the Cincinnati and decided that membership should descend to their children according to the English law of primogeniture. Washington was appalled by the hereditary provision, but the Cincinnati has flourished ever since. Moreover, the society’s refusal to broaden its qualifications led to the Sons of the Revolution, which led to the D.A.R., which led to all sorts of extraordinary things.
The National Society of the Colonial Dames wasn’t satisfied with tracing its members’ pedigrees back to independence. To be a bona fide Dame, you had to have a forefather in the colonies by 1750. Having made the D.A.R. look tacky, the Dames in turn were upstaged by the Descendants of Colonial Governors Prior to 1750, the Colonial Lords of Manors in America, the Jamestowne Society (for people whose forebears lived in Jamestowne before 1700), and the Mayflower Descendants.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 28
