What was good for the middle classes in freemasonry was also good for the working classes.  In England, the friendly society developed to afford the protections of death benefits and rudimentary life insurance to the respectable working class.  In the United States, a complex culture of fraternal organizations provided death benefits, widows’ assistance, life insurance, job referral networks, and a social gathering place.  Immigrant groups were quick to develop mutual aid organizations.  The Jews in the Lower East Side of New York had such a large network that social workers were unable to disentangle the extent of its web.

Today, the friendly society has dropped off the radar of British society, except for an occasional reference in some Labour politician’s speech praising the contribution of “friendly societies and trades unions” to the socialist movement.  In the United States, the great ugly buildings of the fraternal organizations echo with the activities of sub-tenants, the old meeting rooms converted for dance classes.  The Oddfellows and Foresters in England, the Elks, the Masons, the Eagles, and the Moose in the United States: what was the point of them?  Fifty years to one hundred years ago, such a question would have been unnecessary.  Everyone belonged, and everyone understood.

Friendly societies entered into British politics in 1793 with the Act for the Encouragement and Relief of Friendly Societies, but had flourished long before they had registered on the radar of Parliament.  An early society was the Incorporation of Carters in Leith, Scotland, founded in 1555, but rapid growth did not occur until the eighteenth century.  “By 1801, an authoritative study by Sir Frederic Eden estimated that there were about 7,200 societies with around 648,000 adult male members out of a total population of about nine million.” (Green 1993, p31)  Most societies are thought to have started as informal groups of working men who met in public houses and made regular contributions which gave them an agreed right to benefit.  But many of these “dividing societies” were limited in their utility.  Distributing their surplus every year, they refused to re-enroll very sick members, and could not provide more sophisticated benefits beyond the basics of sickness and small death benefits.  Eventually federations of friendly societies emerged in which surpluses could be accumulated and members retained their rights to benefits so long as their contributions were kept up.

The origins of modern American fraternalism are also difficult to establish.  Most likely, they began in the late seventeenth century.  The first official Masonic lodge in the American colonies opened in Boston in 1733.  Beginning as a club for the upper crust, the Masons gradually extended to a less exclusive membership after the revolution.  The societies seem to have arisen as a response to urbanization.  In Massachusetts, according to David T. Beito, “voluntary associations generally arose after communities reached population thresholds of between 1,000 and 2,000.”  The societies provided the ability to extend brotherly relations beyond actual blood relationship, for “biologically unrelated individuals thus used kinship to construct the solidarity necessary to accomplish a variety of tasks.” (Beito 2000 p8)  These tasks included funeral benefits, life insurance, health benefits, “employment information, temporary lodging, and character references.” (Beito 2000 p6)

The Masons appealed more to merchants and professionals, but still included, if discreetly, a commitment to mutual aid.  But other, more downscale, societies modeled themselves directly upon the friendly societies of Britain and focused on the provision of sickness and death benefits. 

Since members were expected to help each other, to favor their brothers over others, it was clearly beneficial to all that members maintained a good character. This made economic sense in an age when actuarial science and risk evaluation were still embryonic, so the societies developed rules and sanctions to help weed out (or straighten out) the poor risks.  Many societies maintained specific sanctions against misconduct—such as expulsion for being a common drunkard—while benefits were more informal. 

The first American lodge affiliated with the Manchester Union of Oddfellows was founded in Baltimore in 1819.  Eleven years later, the Oddfellows had lodges in four states and 6,000 members; eleven years after that, they seceded from the British and formed the Independent Order of Oddfellows, the IOOF.  They began as a working class association that only later began to appeal to commercial and professional men.

The Oddfellows were the first to move from the informal delivery of benefits to a more formal schedule of guaranteed benefits.  They also talked not of “charity” and “relief” but of “benefit” and “right.”  Still, the rights were not unconditional.  Oddfellows vowed to “withhold aid for habitual drunkenness, profanity, adultery, or disruptive behavior.” (Beito 2000 p10)  Between 1830 and 1877 the Oddfellows increased from 6,000 to 475,000 members, and disbursed over $69 million in aid and benefits.  There was a parallel black Oddfellow movement.  Founded by Peter Ogden in New York City, it was refused a charter by the IOOF, and affiliated instead with the British Grand United Order of Oddfellows, the renamed Manchester Unity.

The United States pioneered in 1868 a new form of fraternalism, the mutual life insurance society.  The Ancient Order of United Workmen, founded by master mechanic John Jordan Upchurch, offered a life insurance policy to its members, a $1,000 death benefit funded by a $1.00 per capita assessment.  This reversed the normal emphasis of lodge benefits, which before the Civil War had featured sick benefits and a small death benefit.   The life insurance benefit proved highly popular, and the Workmen grew to 450,000 members by 1902.  The popularity of life insurance encouraged other orders to offer the same benefit, and by “1908 the 200 leading societies had paid out well over $1 billion in death benefits.” (Beito 2000 p12)  According to Beito, quoting Everybody’s Magazine:

The ranks of fraternalism had become an “enormous army”… of “the middle-class workman, the salaried clerk, the farmer, the artisan, the country merchant, and the laborer,” all attempting “to insure their helpless broods against abject poverty.  Rich men insure in the big companies to create an estate; poor men insure in fraternal orders to create bread and meat.  It is an insurance against want, the poorhouse, charity, and degradation.” (Beito 2000 p12)

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill