Post

Narland wrote:

Some of it is from seeing God as the Architect of the Universe as they attempted to apply it in 20th Century America (some better than others). And some of it is quirky people being free to be quirky at a time quirky was acceptable. It is also the end of an era, when just 50 - 60 years before, everyone and their dog belonged to a benevolence society to government taking over the functions of societal welfare from them. I do not think they saw the Cultural Revolution for what it was -- the death knell of Americanism as the hope of the future.

The fraternity in the US had seen its highest membership just a decade prior to printing. Since then it has been a steady decline, coupled with a rapid increase in the US population. Today, according to something I read, our numbers are around 800,000 unevenly distributed between the 51 mainline grand lodges, along with probably 100,000 (My own high estimate. Wikipedia claims 300,000, which is almost certainly false.) constituting the membership of the 41 legitimate and predominantly African grand lodges (These 41 do not publish statistics related to their numbers, for fear of pressure to merge into the mainline grand lodges). The GL of Iran in Exile also operates within the US, with an undoubtably tiny and shrinking membership. Some have claimed that the decline in membership is simply a return to natural levels from the previous boom, but this ignores the fact that the American population has only increased exponentially. My fraternity was not and is not, and has never been one of the Friendly Societies, but rather, something else. We do not engage in the insurance business (some grand lodges explicitly forbid it), and membership within the fraternity, and the payment of dues, does not translate into any amount of welfare, insurance, pension, or other such allotment, rather, support between members of the fraternity is governed by the individual obligations of the members. That said, we suffer the same, the only difference is that we probably do better (We've certainly survived better than the Woodmen, Oddfellows, Knights of Columbus, to name a few). I have no doubt that we will continue to exist and have an impact for at least another two centuries, but between now and then, many changes will take place, hopefully for the better.