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Fraternal Orders and Class Formation in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Mary Ann Clawson
Mary Ann Clawson
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University
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Type
Social Structure and the Construction of Culture
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , October 1985 , pp. 672 - 695
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1985

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References

1 Belleville City Directory (Urbana, Illinois: D. McKenzie, 1884);Google ScholarBuffalo Street Guide and Knights of Pythias Lodge Directory (Buffalo: Albert J. Kuebler and Fred kroebel, 1894).Google Scholar In 1900, the two largest fraternal organizations, the Masons and the Odd Fellows, had one million members each out of a total national population of thirty-nine million. At least four other orders had more than a half million members. Stevens, Albert C., The Cyclopedia of Fraternities (1907; rpt. Detroit: the Gale Research Company, 1966), 43, 254, 113–14.Google Scholar

2 A limited selection of these includes Cumbler, John, Working-Class Community in Industrial America: Work, Leisure, and Struggle in Two Industrial Cities—1880–1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979);Google ScholarDawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976);Google ScholarGreenberg, Brian, “Worker and Community: Fraternal Orders in Albany, New York, 1845–1885,” Maryland Historian, 8:2 (Fall 1977), 38–53;Google ScholarStephenson, Charles, “A Gathering of Strangers? Mobility, Social Structure, and Political Participation in the Formation of Nineteenth-Century American Working-Class Culture,” in American Working-Class Culture: Explorations in American Labor and Social History, Cantor, Milton, ed. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979);Google ScholarWalkowitz, Daniel, Workers' City, Company Town (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).Google Scholar

3 See Rosenzweig, Roy, “Boston Masons, 1900–1935: The Lower Middle Class in a Divided Sociiety,” Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 6:3–4 (07–10 1977), 123–24, for the declaration of egalitarian sentiment wihin Freemasonry.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Rosenzweig, , “Boston Masons”;Google ScholarDumenil, Lynn, “Brotherhood and Respectability: Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1981).Google Scholar

5 Cumbler, , Working-Class Community, 44–45;Google ScholarMontgomery, David, “Labor in the Industrial Era,” in The United States Department of Labor History of the American Worker, Morris, Richard B., ed. (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1976), 121.Google Scholar

6 This account makes primary use of Tilly's, CharlesFrom Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978),Google Scholar but see as Oberschall, well Anthony, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973).Google Scholar

7 While this perspective focuses equally on the ways in which externally imposed costs structure collective action, that part of the argument is not pertinent to the analysis of fraternalism, which has not existed in the United States as a movement oriented toward conflict.

8 Przeworski, Adam, “Proletariat into Class: The Process of Class Formation from Karl Kautsky's The Class Struggle to Recent Controversies,” Politics and Society, 7:4 (Fall 1977), 348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 The recent historical literature begins, of course, with Thompson's, E. P.The Making of the English Working Class.Google Scholar A small selection from subsequent work includes Gutman, Herbert, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976);Google ScholarDawley, , Class and Community; John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974).Google Scholar

Class formation as a theoretical issue in Marxism is discussed in Przeworski, , “Proletariat into Class”;Google ScholarStark, David, “Class Struggle and the Transformation of the Labor Process,” Theory and Society, 9 (01 1980), 89–130;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKatznelson, Ira, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).Google ScholarCalhoun, Craig, “The Radicalism of Tradition: Community Strength or Venerable Disguise and Borrowed Language,” American J ournal of Sociology, 88:5 (03 1983), 886–914, is an interesting recent critique of Marxist approaches.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Stark, , “Class Struggle,” 97.Google Scholar

11 Tilly, , From Mobilization to Revolution, 62–63.Google Scholar

12 Aminzade, Ronald, “Breaking the Chains of Dependency: From Patronage to Class Politics, Toulouse, France, 1830–1872,” Journal o f Urban History, 3:4 (08 1977), 485–505;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “The Transformation of Social Solidarities in Nineteenth-Century Toulouse,” in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Merriam, John, ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979).Google Scholar

13 See Foster, , Class Struggle,Google Scholar and Beckhoffer, Frank and Elliott, Brian, “An Approach to the Study of Small Shopkeepers and the Class Structure,” European Journal of Sociology, 9 (1968), 180–202,CrossRefGoogle Scholar for accounts of working-class withdrawal from cross-class institutions in England, and Bell, Donald H., “Worker Culture and Worker Politics: The Experience of an Italian Town, 1880–1915,” Social History, 3:1 (01 1978), 1–21, for an Italian case.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Aminzade, , “Breaking the Chains,” 502.Google Scholar

15 Indeed, one indication of its availability and appeal is the fact that so many early unions, such as the Sons of Vulcan, the Knights of St. Crispin, the Bricklayers and Masons International Union, and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, were originally organized fraternally as, of course, was the Knights of Labor.

16 An important exception to this charge is Greenberg's treatment of the fraternal order as a social control mechanism in “Worker and Community.”

17 For information on Lynn, see Dawley, , Class and Community, as well as Cumbler.Google Scholar

18 The Belleville data are from an aggregation of charter members of the town's three Pythian lodges, established from 1874 to 1881, while the Buffalo data come from the Buffalo Street Guide and Knights of Pythias Lodge Directory, which listed members' names, addresses, and occupations. In both cases, I have classified members according to the categories presented in Themstrom, Stephen, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 289–92, appendix B, and used by Rosenzweig and Dumenil in their Masonic studies as well.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Wieck, Edward A., The American Miners' Association (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1940), 9;Google ScholarRoy, Andrew A., A History of the Coal Miners of the United States (1903; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), 62–67.Google Scholar

20 Indeed, the 79 percent blue-collar membership shown for Cavalier in Table 4 is probably an understatement, since the Cavalier charter, unlike the other two, did not list occupations, and the occupations of only twenty-three of the thirty-five could be identified. Individuals with blue-collar occupations tend to be under-represented in city directories and other published sources, so it is likely that the twelve unidentified members included an even higher proportion of such occupations.

21 Montgomery, David, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Vintage, 1967), 218;Google ScholarBelleville Daily Advocate, 2 February, 30 July 1877; 15 January 1878.Google Scholar

22 In fact, Thomas, through the railroad he controlled, had been responsible for refusing service to a cooperative mine formed by union miners. When the miners appealed to the governor, the railroad company tore up the switch leading to the mine to forestall legal action. Belleville Daily Advocate, 6 July 1911;Google ScholarRoy, , History of Coal Miners, 73–74.Google Scholar

23 In those cases in which an artisanal title could imply either a proprietor or a wage worker, I classified as proprietors those who could be located in the business-and-commercial section of the 1894 Buffalo City Directory. See Smith, Thomas, “Reconstructing Occupational Structures: The Case of the Ambiguous Artisan,” Historical Methods Newsletter,8:3 (06 1975), 134–46,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Thernstrom, , The Other Bostonians, 292, for discussions of this classificatory problem.Google Scholar

24 Laslett, John and Lipset, Seymour Martin, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday Anchor, 1974), contains a variety of positions on “American particularism.”Google Scholar

25 Twentieth-century biographical connections between workers and small proprietors are revealed in Mills, C. Wright, “The Middle Class in Middle-Sized Cities,” in Cities and Society, 2d ed. Hall, Paul K. and Reiss, Albert, Jr., eds. (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1957), 411–23,Google ScholarPubMed and in Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bendix, Reinhard, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 177–79. Herbert Gutman explores solidary relations between workers and local small businesses in nineteenth-century communities in Work, Culture, and Society, ch. 5.Google Scholar

26 Tilly, , From Mobilization to Revolution, 62, 61.Google Scholar

27 See Clawson, Mary Ann, “Class, Brotherhood, and Patriarchy: Fraternalism in Europe and America” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1980), ch. 7, for a description of the ways in which orders literally sold memberships through the systematic use of agents working on commission.Google Scholar

28 Simmel, Georg, “The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies,” American Journal of Sociology, 11:4 (1906), 441–95;CrossRefGoogle ScholarGist, Noel P., “Secret Societies: A Cultural Study of Fraternalism in the United States,” The U niversity of Missouri Studies, 20:4 (October 1940), 15–176.Google Scholar

29 Dewar, James, The Unlocked Secret: Freemasonry Examined (London: William Kimber and Company, Limited, 1966), 93;Google ScholarAnderson, James, “Constitution of the Free Masons,” in The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans, Jacob, Margaret, ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 279–87.Google Scholar

30 Valkenberg, Jno. Van, The Knights of Pythias Complete Manual and Textbook (Canton, Ohio: Memento Publishing Company, 1887);Google ScholarRoss, Theodore A., Odd Fellowship: Its History and Manual (New York: The M. W. Hazen Co., 1888).Google Scholar

31 Dewar, , Unlocked Secret, 98–100.Google Scholar

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35 Clawson, Mary Ann, “Early Modern Fraternalism and the Patriarchal Family,” Feminist Studies, 6:2 (Summer 1980), 368–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Extrafamilial social organization as a source of masculine power is discussed by Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, “Woman, Culture, and society: A Theoretical Overview,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist and Lamphere, Louise, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974),Google Scholar and Sandsy, Peggy Reeves, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

36 Muraskin, William A., Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975);Google Scholar for racial exclusion in other orders, see Clawson, , “Class, Brotherhood, and Patriarchy,” 342–46.Google Scholar

37 Dalton, Melville, Men Who Manage (New York: John Wiley, 1959), 150–55, 178–81;Google ScholarFriedlander, Peter, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939: A Study in Class and Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979), 47, 60, 129–30.Google Scholar

38 Lukes, Steven, “Political Ritual and Social Integration,” Sociology, 9:2 (05 1975), 301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Sydel Silverman sees very similar processes at work in neighborhood- and gender-based organizations of central Italian cities; see “Rituals of Inequality: Stratification and Symbol in Central Italy,” in Social Inequality: Comparative and Developmental Approaches, Berreman, Gerald D., ed. (New York: Academic Press, 1981).Google Scholar

40 Calhoun, Craig, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 16.Google Scholar

41 Kannelson, , City Trenches, 19.Google Scholar