Masonic Sightseeing in Lafayette, Indiana with Dwight L. Smith Lodge of Research

by Christopher Hodapp

On Saturday, the Dwight L. Smith Lodge of Research spent the day exploring Masonic sites around Lafayette, Indiana: the Tippecanoe Battlefield where the Grand Lodge placed a historical marker in 1966; the beautiful Battle Ground Lodge (which has just been restored following a wintertime flood from the roof); and the one of a kind J. H. Rathbone Museum of fraternal order ephemera from the Golden Age of fraternalism.

Masonic marker memorializing the death of Kentucky Grand Master Joseph Hamilton Daveiss
and other Masons at the Tippecanoe Battlefield Park.

While at the park, we had the opportunity to tour the on-site museum. We had 27 Masons and guests in attendance, and the weather was absolutely perfect.

Next was a visit to the Masonic hall of Battle Ground Lodge 313.

WB Dave Hosler was our host for the day and gave a presentation at Battle Ground Lodge about a brother elected as Master of the lodge at age 24 who survived World War I, but tragically died in the flu pandemic of 1918 before he could be installed.

The lodge's entry features artwork by Indiana Masonic 
artist Steven McKim, originally a member of Octagon Lodge, 
which subsequently merged with Battle Ground lodge.

Our third stop for the day was at the J.H. Rathbone Museum. Located in a former Knights of Pythias meeting hall in Lafayette, the museum is one of the largest collections of costumes, regalia, artwork, medals, ephemera and rituals from literally hundreds of fraternal groups that flourished throughout the U.S. between the Civil War and the 1930s. Curator Ken Moder, members of the museum's board, and other local volunteers have been sorting and organizing in recent years, and there were several in our group who had been unaware of just how extensive the collection really is.

Joining us for the day was Heather Calloway, her husband Todd, and their son, Simon. Heather worked for many years at the Scottish Rite SJ House of the Temple in Washington DC, and she’s now teaching at IU in Bloomington in the Museum Studies department. A fascinating project is getting underway in Bloomington which will be of great interest to Masons and others interested in the subject of fraternal organizations, and Heather is spearheading it. News will be forthcoming.

My deepest thanks to WB Dave Hosler for handling the day’s arrangements and Ken Moder for opening the Museum for us. But I especially want to thank everyone who attended. The COVID pandemic and shutdowns hurled a large monkey wrench into our lodge plans over the last 14 months, and I was happy we were able to make this work out just before our Masonic year ends in mid-May. The consensus among everyone Saturday afternoon was that we should have other similar events like this in the coming years.

The Dwight L. Smith Lodge of Research operates as a lodge under dispensation at the will and pleasure of the Grand Master, so we will have new appointed officers later this month. It has been my honor and pleasure to serve as Master of our research lodge over the last two years, and I thank all of our officers and members for their support.

For more information about the lodge, including membership or affiliation, visit our website at http://dlslodgeofresearch.net

Photos: Dave Hosler, Heather Calloway, Chris Hodapp

Fraternalism and Civics

Several weeks back, Alice and I made our monthly stop at the local bookstore (remember those things?), and I was taken in by the headline on the cover of the October edition of Atlantic Monthly: 'Is Democracy Dying?'

The magazine is freighted too heavily with politically partisan sniping for my tastes. and too many of the writers want to use their own visceral biases to twist their theses. But if you can you get past that, the issue explores a basic societal problem we currently face in America. Mainly, Americans don't know — or care to know — how their own communities, states and nation are supposed to work anymore. We've lost the keys to the Republic, and there it sits in the driveway, up on blocks, rusting away, while the neighborhood kids bust out the windows and steal the tires.

If you think I exaggerate, go to the website of what passes for your local newspaper these days and try to find a daily or even weekly summary of actions at your statehouse or city council meeting. Such news used to be a staple of basic local reporting, but no more.

In particular, take note of the article, Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore by Yoni Applebaum. The author makes the strong connection between the Golden Age of Fraternalism and the greatest level of civic engagement in American history. Whether we all knew it or not, the Freemasons, the Knights of Pythias, the Odd fellows - we were all teaching Americans how to govern the Republic. And we're now living out what happens when democratic people all decide "I'm not much of a joiner."

Or as Ben Franklin told the lady who asked him what the Continental Congress had given America in 1787, a republic or a monarchy, "A republic, if you can keep it."

I don't want to paste the whole article here, but let me put a major excerpt up just in case Atlantic's website vanishes in the night:

Like most habits, democratic behavior develops slowly over time, through constant repetition. For two centuries, the United States was distinguished by its mania for democracy: From early childhood, Americans learned to be citizens by creating, joining, and participating in democratic organizations. But in recent decades, Americans have fallen out of practice, or even failed to acquire the habit of democracy in the first place. The results have been catastrophic. As the procedures that once conferred legitimacy on organizations have grown alien to many Americans, contempt for democratic institutions has risen...

in the early years of the United States, Europeans made pilgrimages to the young republic to study its success. How could such a diverse and sprawling nation flourish under a system of government that originated in small, homogeneous city-states?

One after another, they seized upon the most unfamiliar aspect of American culture: its obsession with associations. To almost every challenge in their lives, Americans applied a common solution. They voluntarily bound themselves together, adopting written rules, electing officers, and making decisions by majority vote. This way of life started early. “Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. “The same spirit pervades every act of social life.”

By the latter half of the 19th century, more and more of these associations mirrored the federal government in form: Local chapters elected representatives to state-level gatherings, which sent delegates to national assemblies. “Associations are created, extended, and worked in the United States more quickly and effectively than in any other country,” marveled the British statesman James Bryce in 1888. These groups had their own systems of checks and balances. Executive officers were accountable to legislative assemblies; independent judiciaries ensured that both complied with the rules. One typical 19th-century legal guide, published by the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal order, compiled 2,827 binding precedents for use in its tribunals.

The model proved remarkably adaptable. In business, shareholders elected boards of directors in accordance with corporate charters, while trade associations bound together independent firms. Labor unions chartered locals that elected officers and dispatched delegates to national gatherings. From churches to mutual insurers to fraternities to volunteer fire companies, America’s civic institutions were run not by aristocratic elites who inherited their offices, nor by centrally appointed administrators, but by democratically elected representatives.

Civic participation was thus the norm, not the exception. In 1892, the University of Georgia’s president, Walter B. Hill, reported (with perhaps only slight exaggeration) that he’d made a test case of a small town “and found that every man, woman, and child (above ten years of age) in the place held an office—with the exception of a few scores of flabby, jellyfish characters.” America, he concluded, is “a nation of presidents.”

This nation of presidents—and judges, representatives, and recording secretaries—obsessed over rules and procedures. Offices turned over at the end of fixed terms; new organizations were constantly formed. Ordinary Americans could expect to find themselves suddenly asked to join a committee or chair a meeting...

Democracy had become the shared civic religion of a people who otherwise had little in common. Its rituals conferred legitimacy regardless of ideology; they could as readily be used to monopolize markets or advance the cause of nativism as to aid laborers or defend the rights of minorities. The Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP relied on similar organizational forms.

Time and again, groups excluded from democratic government turned to democratic governance to practice and press for equal citizenship. In the 1790s, a group of New Yorkers locked in debtors’ jail adopted their own version of the new Constitution, governing themselves with dignity despite their imprisonment.

[snip]

But the United States is no longer a nation of joiners. As the political scientist Robert Putnam famously demonstrated in Bowling Alone, participation in civic groups and organizations of all kinds declined precipitously in the last decades of the 20th century. The trend has, if anything, accelerated since then; one study found that from 1994 to 2004, membership in such groups fell by 21 percent. And even that likely understates the real decline, as a slight uptick in passive memberships has masked a steeper fall in attendance and participation. The United States is no longer a nation of presidents, either. In a 2010 census survey, just 11 percent of respondents said that they had served as an officer or been on a committee of any group or organization in the previous year...

Volunteerism, church attendance, and social-media participation are not schools for self-government; they do not inculcate the habits and rituals of democracy. And as young people participate less in democratically run organizations, they show less faith in democracy itself. In 2011, about a quarter of American Millennials said that democracy was a “bad” or “very bad” way to run a country, and that it was “unimportant” to choose leaders in free and fair elections. By the time Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, Gallup polling showed that Americans’ faith in most of the nation’s major institutions—the criminal-justice system, the press, public schools, all three branches of government—was below the historical average...

Read the entire article HERE. 

When Competition Made Us Better

 "Among democratic nations, . . . all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another."

--Alexis de Tocqueville

It's a VERY hot July weekend here at Hodapphaüs, and I stare at my backlog of unwritten articles, missed deadlines, ungraded essays, and half-finished emails with dread. I'm doing it. I'm doing it.

This really isn't going to be another one of Hodapp's wheezy posts about lost temples, and yet it will seem like it, because they are a symbol (like so much else in Freemasonry). Nonetheless, I'm in a despondent mood, possibly from reading too much about Masonry's past a lot lately. I just reacquainted myself with Arthur Schlesinger's "Biography of a Nation of Joiners" (1944) and Charles Merz' "Sweet Land of Secrecy" (1927), both describing the height of the Golden Age of Fraternalism in America (you can find both in the excellent collection Secret Societies in America: Foundational Studies of Fraternalism, edited by Will Moore and Mark Tabbert). That period coincided with our greatest building boom. 

And it finally occurs to me that the biggest ill ailing Freemasonry in modern times has absolutely zero to do with "modern man," not enough discretionary time and income, raising kids and conflicting soccer practices, falling morals, dramatic loss of religious faith and traditions, anti-Masonic forces, public perception, the Internet, streaming television, smartphones, not enough publicity, or expensive dues (don't make me laugh uncontrollably and pass my Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper through my nose). Nope, it's much simpler than any of that.

There's no competition anymore.

At every explosion of Masonic membership in America, we shared our spoils with (and also spawned) an ever-increaing number of imitators. In the time after our American Revolution, scores of scientific, philosophical, literary, and other self-improvement societies took off like wildfire to bring European and Enlightenment-era concepts to the new country and educate a rugged and growing population that was headed westward. After the Civil War, Masonic grand masters all over the country railed against the chartering of too many lodges too quickly, but to no effect — the membership went up and up. And we suddenly had stacks of competing orders all chasing the returning veterans to fulfill the sense of fraternalism they shared in the military that was now lost. Same way after WWI ended, through the '29 Depression, when there were close to 1,000 other fraternal associative groups in the country. Millions upon millions of Americans belonged to one or more of these orders, and they all needed a hall to meet in, dues to be paid (and kept competitively low), scores of officers to fill stations, ritualists to enact parts in their theatrical initiations, volunteers to cook dinners and undertake community projects, and members to line the sidelines. Churches competed for almost the exact same people for many of the same jobs and similar levels of participation. That's when Freemasonry built our most magnificent, landmark temple buildings, because so was everyone else.

Forgive the local nature of these observations, but in my home town of downtown Indianapolis, of the classic "secret society" fraternal groups, only the Freemasons retain our big and impressive post-WWI clubhouses: Indianapolis Freemasons Hall (1909), the Scottish Rite Cathedral (1929), and at least part of the Murat Shrine Temple (the 1958 expanded clubhouse side, though the theatre side built in 1909 was leased to others long term). Several Prince Hall lodges (including Central Lodge 1 PHA) and appendant bodies banded together as the Prince Hall Masonic Temple Association in the 1980s and bought the former Oriental Lodge 500 Temple (1916) on Central Avenue, and so even it, too, remains as a Masonic building today. 

Former Knights of Pythias building in Indianapolis

Former Odd Fellows (IOOF) building,
Indianapolis

The only other large and impressive fraternal structures that remain within downtown Indianapolis are the former Odd Fellows tower (1908) at Washington and Pennsylvania Streets, and the beautiful, white glazed porcelain brick, former Knights of Pythias building (1925) on Meridian Street (even it was not a meeting hall, but originally housed the offices of their once burgeoning insurance program). When Indiana's Freemasons celebrated our 150th anniversary in 1968, neither of those two other groups owned their buildings, and were already mere ghosts of their former selves nationally - the Odd Fellows are down to a mere four lodges left in all of Indiana, according to their Grand Lodge website.

There's still the good sized Knights of Columbus McGowen Hall (1922) on Delaware Street, but the recently abandoned American Legion Headquarters (1927) anchoring the now incongruously named 'American Legion Mall' sits vacant. The Athenaeum (once Das Deutsche Haus, built in 1893-98) is still the home to a variety of German-related clubs and groups, but these never been what anyone would consider "secret society" sorts of places. There are other local, former fraternal buildings dotted around our downtown area, but none of them retain their original ownership and purpose of being a meeting hall for initiating and gathering their members.

Former Knights of Pythias high-rise,
Indianapolis (now demolished)

When these other halls were built in the 1920s, the Freemasons were the pinnacle of fraternalism in a very crowded field. We were the top of the heap, the gold standard. That was our reputation to the outside world, and inside of our own lodges, too. We built great temples and did great things because we thought the best of ourselves, and in many ways, attracted only the best of men because of that.

And today, for all intents and purposes, we are all that's left. 

The Odd Fellows formed in 1730 and were once larger than Freemasonry in national membership. Today, they are down to under 600,000 worldwide (or a million, depending on how you count and whom you ask, since they also have recognition and regularity issues, and nobody likes to admit falling membership to outsiders anyway). The Knights of Pythias were down to 50,000 in 2003, and don't want to talk about numbers anymore. The Woodmen of the World claim 900 chapters nationwide, but they are largely an insurance company, and have been for decades. They just "rebranded" themselves as WoodmenLife. The Foresters and the Macabees went the insurance route, and are essentially gone. The Redmen are mostly vanished, and if there's an aging member of the Tribe of Ben Hur out there anywhere, send me a note. The Moose, Elks, Eagles and others cling on as social clubs (and remain popular in pockets of the country), but the Owls and the Oaks are gone. So are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other major and minor groups (take a stroll through the Rathbone Museum in Lafayette, Indiana sometime—that's their photo at the top of this post).

The world became an ever-increasingly impersonal place, we all stopped dealing face to face, and a handshake stopped meaning anything besides a involuntary reflex greeting like saying "Hi!" or "Have a good one!" Person to person, middle-class jobs and relationships vanished, communities died, people retreated to suburbia and one year lease apartments, and the fraternal groups closed one by one.

Now, Freemasonry is the last order standing, in the world of the formerly large, non-sectarian "secretive societies." We have no reason to be better or more impressive or more selective or more interesting than the other "dues-card-and-a-pin-I'm-in" orders, because there's no one else. And in all honesty, the world is not a better place for it, because the fraternal groups reinforced the sense of community that we don't share anymore. When the big fraternal groups competed to build the bigger or better buildings on our skylines, they signaled that our towns had lots and lots of citizens who cared very much for their communities. Now we pitch them overboard, build pole barns in cornfields, and offer little at our meetings to entice anyone to come back next month. Or join in the first place. Much less, to make large donations in their wills for us to do bigger and better things when they join the Great Majority. 

I coincidentally ran into two poignant blog entries found on other websites recently. The first is Robert Johnson's post a couple of weeks ago, Shadows Burned Onto the Walls - Addressing Freemasonry's Biggest Problem. 

In it, Robert expresses the despair nearly all contemporary members of the fraternity have at one point or another. I sense that the entry was based on a speech he gave at some point, and buried in it is perhaps the sagest of sage wisdom ever said to a fellow Freemason in times of troubles: “You have to be okay with Masonry the way it is. Work on your own path.”

Read it over on the always excellent Midnight Freemason blog site HERE.

The other entry I'll point you to is the haunting exploration of the former Los Angeles Scottish Rite Center by Brother Greg Stewart on the Freemason Information blog site: Something Lost: The Los Angeles Scottish Rite Cathedral.

Built at enormous cost and with great care in 1961, yet essentially dead in (appropriately) just 33 years, the Cathedral was recently converted to a modern art gallery. Greg recently took a tour of the newly reopened building, and he echoes my own sentiments whenever one of our more magnificent temples gets consigned to the dumpster voluntarily by our own members.

Thankfully, the new owners reserved a small room set aside to display the artifacts “…left behind by the Masons before they abandoned the building.” But entering that room did not bring much joy to Greg:

"I can’t say for certain if it was the space, the items in the space or the words taken in the context of the aforementioned relics of what Freemasonry once was. Leaving the relic room, I was moved to tears — not for the casual housing of materials sacred to me, but tears for what those relics once represented to the people in the space. To the owners of the history that poured the foundation and raised the marble edifice. Perhaps more so, the thought that this was the future of Freemasonry. That an empty building full of abandoned “relics” was really what lay at the end of it all. Yes, the building is just a building, but it affects the priest no less to see the church he dearly loved, laid low by a fire or an earthquake.

"Masons are builders and buildings can be replaced. But walking through the bones of a structure built to show the “intensity of feeling throughout history toward the Meaning of Masonry” felt like a priest walking through the ashes of his fallen church.

"I wanted to feel optimistic about the space. I wanted to appreciate it for what it once was.

Instead, I left haunted feeling depressed and overwhelmed. Not at the space or the modern art within its walls. I was haunted by the ghosts of what it once was."

A Fraternal Gem: J. H. Rathbone Museum and Resource Center

Every state in the union has its share of odd museums dedicated to a wild variety of preservation causes (or obsessions, depending on how it's organized). That's what makes small, specialized museums so interesting in the first place, because what may be eminently missable to much of the population can alternately be endlessly fascinating to others.

Lafayette, Indiana (hometown of Purdue University, for you out of staters) is home to one of those unique museums that few have ever heard of, but if you have an interest in frateralism in America, you need to know about it. 

The J. H. Rathbone Museum and Resource Center was originally founded to store, preserve, and display Knights of Pythias memorabilia. In fact, their building is also the meeting location of Lafayette Lodge No. 51, Knights of Pythias. This was the home lodge for James Carnahan who was the founder of the Uniform Rank Knights of Pythias, a military branch best known for their drill teams, similar to the Masonic fraternity's Knights Templar. But since the Museum's creation, it has grown into fulfilling a much larger purpose. It now comprises a collection of thousands of items concerning all things fraternal.

The role of fraternal societies in America, especially during the period of their explosive growth between the end of the Civil War and the 1929 Great Depression, cannot and must not be ignored or forgotten. In 1927, author Charles Mertz estimated that 30 million of the 106 million people in the United States at that time held membership in at least one fraternal group. Just ten years later, author Charles W. Ferguson upped his estimate to 50 million fraternal members out of 122 million Americans. These societies helped people young and old to learn and appreciate the American way of democratic life and values during a period of massive upheaval and immigration from countries with little or no experience of it. In a different nation, such a huge clash of disparate foreigners arriving into a country might have become enormously fractious and divided along ethnic, religious, economic, or political lines. But America was different then, and fraternal groups had a lot to do with that. (And no, I'm not forgetting the elephant in the room of racial segregation that was enforced through the early 1960s.)

They taught their members basic civility, organizational skills, administrative roles, public speaking, religious and social tolerance and equality, and lessons of civic responsibility. And they provided economic stability and a social safety net when millions might very well have become what was referred to then as "wards of the state," or at least suffered tremendous poverty long before the days of government welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, and social security. 

The segregated African-American fraternal societies also exploded in popularity at the exact same time, many directly paralleling their white counterparts, and teaching the exact same lessons and skill sets to their members. Black fraternal groups arguably had as great an influence on their part of American society as the black churches in strengthening their community, family life, faith, business and civic skills at a time when white America was largely ignoring them.

Without fraternal societies at that critical period in time, America would have been a very, very different place. In fact, it's arguable that society is in severe need of a rebirth of the fraternal society right this very minute, for many of the exact same reasons, and more. America seems to have lost its most essential civic and civil skills these days, what with all of our internal tribalistic divisions and total lack of social manners and abilities, and a lodge room is perhaps the most ideal place of all to relearn them. 

But that's another post for anther day.

The Rathbone Museum is packed floor to ceiling with artifacts, clothing, regalia, hats, swords, books, newsletters, and all of the other ephemera that the fraternal societies of the 19th and 20th century poured out to their members. Freemasonry and the Odd Fellows were merely the largest of the groups, but the Knights of Pythias, Woodmen of the World, the Red Men, the Grange, the Foresters, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Knights of Columbus, the "animal lodges" of Elks, Moose, Eagles, and hundreds of others (an estimated 800 in 1927) were every bit as active and proud of their orders. Like Freemasonry, they had rituals and ceremonies, officers with bilious titles, costumes and regalia, jewelry, lapel pins and medals (Oy! the medals!), and more. Countless examples of all of this are on display in the Rathbone Museum's limited space.

Surprisingly, there are very few other museums like the Rathbone. (In fact, I hope that one day a friend and Brother of mine will open his unique Washington D.C. house as a museum, as it is packed with thousands of these types of items, as well, and deserves to be seen and protected.) While the Rathbone is a labor of love curated by Dr. Ken Moder, it is noteworthy that his board of directors is made up of others who may be known to some of you: Pennsylvania's fez-obsessed resident Seth C. Anthony; the House of the Temple's Heather Calloway; Kelby Dolan (who has done much work with us at the Masonic Museum and Library of Indiana); Odd Fellows member Michael Greenzieger; John Hardesty; and Teresa Snarr. 

So if you find yourself in west-central Indiana, maybe passing through on your way to Chicago or elsewhere on I-65, and Lafayette is not out of your way, be sure to stop in at the J. H. Rathbone Museum and Resource Center at 134 South Earl Avenue, Lafayette, Indiana. And if you encounter a treasure trove of items related in any way to any of the countless fraternal societies in America, please contact Dr. Moder and his team before you just shrug and consign grandpa's top drawer of rings, old ribbons or silly hats to the dumpster. They might have little or no monetary value, but they are not just junk. They might help to tell the story of an important period in time when organizations like Freemasonry and numberless others helped to weave the very fabric of American society into something unique and strong.