By the peak of the fraternal movement in 1920, it was estimated that nearly 50 percent of working class males belonged to a fraternal lodge, participating in its menu of mutual aid.  Of course, Americans joined fraternal societies for a variety of reasons, from sick and death benefits to expanded social ties.  But most of all, the fraternal lodge represented a set of values.  Writes Beito:

Societies dedicated themselves to the advancement of mutualism, self-reliance, business training, thrift, leadership skills, self-government, self-control, and good moral character.  These values reflected a fraternal consensus that cut across such seemingly intractable divisions as race, gender, and income. (Beito 2000 p27)

Nor was the boss necessarily the leader, and the employee the follower.  Because of the rotation of offices, the roles of leader and follower could often change, and the business owner might be an ordinary member when his employee served as Grand Master of the local lodge.

The associations were, however, rigidly segregated by race and by sex.  Almost all societies that catered to white males contained prohibitions against non-Caucasians.  Immigrants formed their own ethnically-based fraternal organizations and blacks developed parallel institutions of their own. 

Whig histories of the welfare state commonly track the involvement of government in the provision of relief and of social services where an expansion of government service is progress and a contraction of government service a retreat.  Public provision of service is equated with modernity and with compassion; lack of government provision is equated with primitive conditions and meanness.  In contrast, conservative and libertarian accounts celebrate the private and the voluntary. 

The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which reported to the British government in 1909 on the reform of the Poor Laws of 1834, issued two reports: the Majority Report, championed by followers of the British Idealists, like T.H. Green and F.H. Bradley, and the Minority Report, which reflected the views of the Fabian Society and its leading lights, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. (Green 1999 p64)  The supporters of the two reports believed that their solutions to poverty were radically different.  But the difference was mainly in how the top-down supervision of the poor would be organized.  Should the poor be assisted through a “friendly army of trained social workers” in a network of existing charitable institutions, backed up by the government as a last resort, as the Platonic majority proposed, or should the existing structure be broken up and new specialist government committees, to the Webbs “an elite of unassuming experts,” be charged to deal with social problems?  In the end, the British got both, but the army of trained social workers turned out not to be very friendly, and the Webbs’ experts turned out not to be very unassuming.  Given power to intervene in the lives of the poor, they have taken full advantage of it.

The vast reach of the welfare state in the century since the Poor Law report of 1909 has obscured the fundamental issue in the relief of the poor.  How helpless are they?  Could today’s poor find the ability to form organizations of mutual aid like the lower orders of the nineteenth century, when all traces of mutualism have been erased by the plans and programs of the trained social workers and the experts?  There is, in fact, ample evidence that the poor possess rough-and-ready skills to do exactly that, as we shall see in a later chapter.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill