Sunday April 27, 2025It’s an unhappy epitaph, but epitaphs always are. I will simply add that this was a point none of us ever wanted to reach. As one of the three blabbermouths who sat at the Hilton Alexandria bar one night in February of 2008 and said, “We should start our own organization and publish our own magazine!” everyone involved has my heartfelt gratitude. Or maybe it’s apologies I owe.
Greetings all members, Fellows and friends of the Masonic Society,
It is with great difficulty and sadness that we, as the members of the TMS Board of Directors, inform you that we have officially closed all operations of The Masonic Society, Inc and have ceased publication for the foreseeable future. This decision was not an easy one. Over recent years, the leadership of TMS has been working steadfastly behind the scenes to maintain the viability of the organization while addressing a multitude of issues and concerns including having to mitigate prior management actions and breaches that inflicted irrevocable damage.
Central to these efforts has been our commitment to honoring the vision that resulted in the very creation of TMS. This dedication to Masonic Education first and foremost fueled the resolve to do our very best to meet the interests of our subscribers and members while ensuring compliance with all applicable laws, regulations and ethical standards. Throughout this experience, we operated from a perspective of simply doing the right thing and living up to our Masonic values and duties as the Board of Directors.
We are eternally grateful for all those who volunteered to serve in their various capacities during our period of restructuring. A special thank you goes to our Secretary Bro. Driver and Treasurer Bro. Doxsee who stepped in to help pick us up the pieces for what often felt like thankless work. However, the increasing costs of producing a print journal, the shift of available and sustainable resources to support the journal and an unrelenting series of administrative burdens have overcome our earnest intent and capabilities.
The Board is forever indebted and appreciative of Bro. Matt Dupee for helping to facilitate charitable donations in 2022 from the Edward and Lois Fowler Charitable Trust and in 2023 from the Robert and Margaret Cathers Charitable Trust which assisted TMS in meeting several of its critical operations and producing the last TMS journal sent to our subscribers. In full transparency, the Board made every good faith effort to prevent this outcome including the confidential exploration of a transfer of assets to another interested party to keep the Masonic Society name and journal alive, however those negotiations closed unsuccessfully.
During the time of its activity, TMS benefited from the expertise of many authors, reviewers, editors, production staff, leaders, readers and others who contributed to creating and sharing content about this important Masonic area. Thank you cannot be expressed enough. Prospective authors are encouraged to seek alternative publication venues.
As we complete the remaining logistical steps for the shuttering of our doors, we encourage you to always cherish with pride the TMS patents, content, literature and ephemera that represents an important slice of Masonic history. What started as a dream, manifested into a reality and progressed through the very stages of mortality that we reflect upon within the very symbolism of our Craft.
Sincerely and Fraternally,
Oscar Alleyne, Board member & Past President
Mason Russell, Board member
Kevin Wardally, Board member
Aaron Shoemaker, Board member
Mark Robbins, Board member
Reed Fanning, Board member
Michael Doxsee, Board Treasurer
Shamus Driver, Board Secretary
John Bridegroom, Board member
Chris Hodapp, Founding Board member & Editor Emeritus
Almost two years of public silence has gone on while all of our board members pursued every possible avenue to find responsible parties to support the Society and its biggest expense, the publication of the Journal. My deepest personal thanks to all of the officers and directors for their efforts in these last couple of years for trying to keep TMS alive, and especially to Oscar Alleyne for his herculean efforts behind the scenes to raise money and bail us out of the hole in which we found ourselves.
The reality is that, when we started TMS, we suffered from the very same birth defect so many other publications have shared for more than three centuries: the complete lack of a professional, long-range business plan that would have at least attempted to deal properly with rising production and postage costs. Like countless groups before us, we started with an almost Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney-esque "We can put on a show!" naivety. But that doesn't pay bills.
We wanted from the start to raise the quality level of Masonic publications by producing a physically beautiful journal with high-quality, full color photography and original artwork. As the founding editor, the TMS Journal was always an exhausting, labor-intensive job — especially the way I designed it at first — and illness eventually forced me to hand off my monstrous creation to art director John Bridegroom and a new editor, Michael Halleran, out of exhaustion. Michael Poll later took on the editor's role, and he and John did a masterful job with the magazine in subsequent years.
Our mission was to create a place in which every Brother could have a chance at publishing their original writings, be they research, essays, poems, or other items that didn't always fit into the other existing Masonic publications at the time. We felt that too much good material was being created by individuals who maybe read their work out in lodge, or at a single Masonic gathering, then vanished into obscurity. I think we successfully accomplished those things, and more. We lasted longer than so many others who have attempted it in the past, and we left behind a beautiful corpse. So for that, I’m grateful.
The other effect we had was to raise the level of expectations for other Masonic publications. Before TMS, so many state and national Masonic magazines looked homemade, two steps above being run off on a mimeograph machine in the church basement. In the wake of the TMS Journal's premiere, countless magazines vastly improved their formats, taking full advantage of the latest publishing tools available, as we did.
To those who will doubtless ask why we didn't simply dump the printed, dead-tree format and just publish an e-magazine, we did discuss that possibility. The sad reality is that e-magazines simply do not get read, and certainly don't get kept around for future perusal. Magazines that have switched to an all-online format are historically just postponing their inevitable death. Worse, the proliferation of online blogs, Patreon sites, Facebook pages, Reddit discussions, podcasts, and more have only fractured the audience for Masonic publications further, making it almost impossible to reach more than a tiny niche of the Masonic world with any sort of publication. Like newspapers and network television, the world has atomized, which makes finding a large-scale audience for a work like ours difficult, at best.
But we were also a membership organization, over and above the content of the Journal. Our hand-stamped patents were unlike any that anyone had ever seen before. From the start, we held our annual meetings at Masonic Week in Alexandria with great speakers, and we spent many years having a second gathering throughout the country - even venturing into the U.K. early on. Our membership drives at Masonic Week, along with our hospitality suites, were extremely popular and well-received. Our Quarry Projects generated an extremely useful and logical Masonic writing style manual that needs to be more widely adopted, to avoid unintelligible conventions, acronyms, and abbreviations that litter so many grand lodge, research lodge and local lodge publications. In short, TMS had everything going for it from the beginning, except perhaps business acumen.
So, as the band strikes up for one last melancholy chorus of "Nearer My God To Thee" and our stern silently slips below the waves, to the officers, directors, Fellows, members, and friends of the Masonic Society, it’s been an honor to go down on this ship together.
Requiescat In Pace.
