OUR COUNTRY was founded in conspiratorial ferment.
Many of the Founding Fathers belonged to a secret society, one that used strange ritualistic implements, costumes, and oaths. Without the support of money and forces from a foreign land’s secret society, it’s unlikely that what became the United States of America would have successfully broken from England, whose own leaders belonged to a similar secret society, albeit one with a more restrictive class structure.
The first American president was a Freemason, and his nine-pound Freemasonic bible, used to swear him into the highest office in the land, was likewise used by a number of American presidents, including Freemason George H.W. Bush and nearly his son George W. (the Masonic bible was stashed away that day due to fear of an expected rainstorm).
In the same way that Alcoholics Anonymous was the paragon for various twelve-step programs, Freemasonry became the ritualistic model for thousands of fraternal brotherhoods of contrasting beliefs. The brotherhoods that were fond of drinking, and the brotherhoods that were temperance minded; the Ku Klux Klan and the anti-slavery Orders; the Deist societies as well as Catholic organizations; the upper-class professionals as well as those holding clerical or janitorial jobs; the conventional and the erotic; the Christian and the occult.
At the origins of the American empire, all-white, all-male Masonic Orders ruled the day. After a few decades of Masonic power, resistance from outsiders (or “cowans,” as the Masons call them), prompted in part by the notorious disappearance and probable murder of William Morgan, who wrote an exposé revealing Masonic secrets, fomented the first third-political party in America, the Anti-Masonic Party. Booming opposition to Freemasonry led to a dilution of Freemasonic membership for a couple of decades, but Americans still wanted to join emerging brotherhoods, such as the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows and many others. By the beginning of the twentieth century, researchers say that as many as one-third of all Americans belonged to a secret society, and there were hundreds of them.
Secret passwords, grips, costumes, and strange initiation ceremonies became everyday life for an enormous cross section of Americans. The overwhelming success of fraternal brotherhoods and female auxiliaries was due in great part to their ability to serve as a job network, a stag club for entertainment and drink, and the only source at the time for medical and life insurance policies. Many of the service-oriented brotherhoods finally became insurance companies as memberships receded.
With hundreds of fascinating images, many never before printed, Ritual America reveals the peculiar realities of a country molded by the oddball Orders that came to shape an America divided by race, class, gender, trade, country of origin, and religious belief.
Among the many volumes that claim to explain fraternal brotherhoods, many of them are driven by ulterior motive—either in arcane, dry-as-dust histories penned by members; pop novels accused of plagiarizing speculative investigations into hidden agendas; or most entertainingly, conspiratorial sagas that link secret societies to extraterrestrial villains.
As you’ll see within, sometimes the richest and most exotic aspects of the fraternal brotherhoods can be seen in personal snapshots, newspapers, magazines, and period scrapbooks—the extraordinary once passed over as ordinary and, to those who opposed the unconventional, perhaps the profane was made mundane.
But with the evidence we provide within, the big secret graphic history of ritual Orders is as wide-ranging, strange, and fascinating as a history of the country itself.
Adam Parfrey
From Cyclopaedia of Fraternities by Albert C. Stevens [1899]