the fraternity’s liberal religious themes were gaining ascendance within most Protestant churches. The conflict over Freemasonry further revealed developing class and religious divisions within “women’s sphere.”
In the late nineteenth century, a chastened Freemasonry continued its growth, though now within a profusion of new fraternal orders. Though never again to hold a prominent place in American public life, the brotherhood continued to cultivate and elaborate a private world of ritual meaning separate from the tumult of early industrial capitalism and the pious, female world of the home. Over time, the fifth chapter suggests, these two gendered worlds moved more closely together. By the end of the century, though the fraternity’s antimodernist beliefs and practices diverged from the liberal Protestantism of the time, few Christians remained noticeably opposed to Freemasonry. The early twentieth-century remasculinization of some Protestant churches underscored this acceptance of, even attraction to, Freemasonry.
Beyond the European American middle class, African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, and Catholics appropriated Freemasonry for their particular purposes. The sixth chapter begins the second part of the book by turning to the nexus of African American Freemasonry and black churches in the late nineteenth century. Prince Hall Masonic lodges originated in the northern cities of Boston and Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century. After the Civil War, they were planted throughout the South alongside newly established African American churches. In North Carolina, the male membership and leadership of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church closely overlapped with that of the state’s Prince Hall lodges. In fact, the Northern missionary James Walker Hood was both the bishop of the North Carolina Conference of the AME Zion Church and the grand master of the North Carolina Grand Lodge of Prince Hall Masons. Though these two interwoven social institutions were at times at odds with each other over relations between church and lodge, women and men, and the impact of the Holiness movement, together they provided black Americans with ideological and ritual resources that countered white racial narratives of African American inferiority. Moreover, unlike European American Masons and their churches, Prince Hall Masons worked with black churches in a common African American struggle to oppose racism and determine their destiny in American society.
The seventh chapter’s tale of Native Americans and Freemasonry begins with the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant’s 1776 journey to London, where he joined a Masonic lodge. Brant and subsequent Native American Masons employed the resources of Freemasonry to advance the interests of their people. Following the mid-nineteenth-century forced removal of southeastern Indians to the “Indian Territory” of what became Oklahoma, most of the area’s Native American leaders joined the fraternity. The “civilization” program that the Washington administration initiated and which continued until the presidency of Andrew Jackson promised acceptance to Native Americans in return for their assimilation to the ways of European American society. Freemasonry was part of this process. At the same time, Native Americans appropriated Freemasonry in an effort to make use of new spiritual assets to retain their Indian identity and help steer their way through the challenges of living in the new American society. By the late nineteenth century, when Native American leaders were assimilating to white society and joining Masonic lodges, European American fraternalists were pursuing Native American wisdom, some going so far as donning Indian costumes and creating what they thought to be Native American ceremonies. For these members of the white middle class, Native American ways offered one means of responding to the dislocations of the modernizing American social order. For modernizing Native Americans, in contrast, Freemasonry provided an avenue for finding their place in early twentieth-century American society.
The eighth chapter turns to the involvement of Jews and Catholics in Freemasonry. Cosmopolitan English Jews became members soon after the 1723 formation of the modern fraternity, and their presence in the brotherhood grew in tandem with the expansion of participation of Jews in European and American society. In colonial America, Jewish Masons joined lodges founded within Jewish coastal settlements. After the Revolution, Jewish elites expanded beyond coastal cities and were chosen as leaders in the fraternity. Catholics, in contrast, trace their Masonic origins to medieval stoneworkers’ guilds. In the early 1800s, American lodges included men from the upper reaches of the small immigrant Irish, English, and French Catholic communities. After the large-scale Irish, German, and Italian immigration in midcentury and the enforcement of new papal condemnations, American Freemasonry’s attitude toward the Catholic Church began to change. The presence of Jews and Catholics in the Masonic fraternity was at times unsettling, and by the second half of the nineteenth century the needs of new immigrants for organizations that fostered a commitment to America while retaining Old World ethnic and religious identity led to the creation of exclusively Jewish (B’nai B’rith) and Catholic (Knights of Columbus) orders from the ideology and initiatory rituals of Freemasonry.
In the early twentieth century, as the epilogue briefly recounts, Freemasonry adopted the characteristics of a modern service club. New emphases on life insurance and recreation challenged an older embrace of honor and noble purpose. New interests in practical community involvement undercut the pursuit of deep and personal moral truths through ritual drama. Today the fraternity, like many American civic associations, is in decline.36 Along with voluntary organizations throughout society, it has seen membership plummet. For much of American history, however, the Masonic lodge helped to shape a diverse and expanding religious culture. How all of this came about is the story to which we now turn.
PART ONE
European American Freemasonry
CHAPTER 1
Colonial Freemasonry and Polite Society, 1733–1776
At sunrise on the morning of December 27, 1738, the “firing of guns from several ships in the harbor” to announce the festival of Saint John the Evangelist awakened the people of Charleston, South Carolina. At ten o’clock, the city’s Masons, clothed in jewels, aprons, white gloves, and stockings and preceded by a small band, paraded through the streets to the site of their Grand Lodge meeting, at the home of James Graeme, the soon-to-be chief justice of the province and their provincial grand master. At eleven o’clock, the brotherhood processed to the Anglican church, where they sat in their separate section of pews and listened to their brother the Reverend Mr. Durand praise the fraternity’s values of mutual love and benevolence. “In the same order” they then marched on to the house of Thomas Shepherd, a leading attorney, for “a very eloquent speech on the usefulness of societies” and an “elegant” dinner. This was followed by an invitation to a brother’s ship, where several toasts were given, “saluted by the discharge of 39 guns.” The evening concluded “with a ball and entertainment for the ladies.”1
In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, reports of grand parades of gentlemen Masons began to appear in the newspapers of colonial coastal cities. In New York, the order of procession was carefully described:
First walked the Sword Bearer, carrying a drawn sword; then four Stewards with White Maces, followed by the Treasurer and Secretary, who bore each a crimson damask cushion, on which lay a gilt Bible, and the Book of Constitution; after these came the Grand Warden and Wardens; then came the Grand Master himself, bearing a truncheon and other badges of his office, followed by the rest of the Brotherhood, according to their respective ranks—Masters, Fellows Crafts, and ’Prentices, to about the number of fifty. . . . We hear they afterward conferred a generous donation of fifteen pounds from the public stock of the Society to be expended in clothing the poor children belonging to our charity school; and made a handsome private contribution for the relief of indigent prisoners.2
In Philadelphia, the officers and members of the Grand Lodge procession included the governor, the mayor, a chief justice, a college provost, the secretary of the Provincial Assembly, other leading men of Pennsylvania, and Deputy Grand Master Benjamin Franklin.3 For colonial spectators, these “very grand show[s]” carried out with “grandeur and decorum” announced the elite social standing of Freemasons.4
The
