Masculity Consumption and the Transformation of Scottish Rite Masonry

8/8/2019 Masculity Consumption and the Transformation of Scottish Rite Masonry

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Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233Mary Ann Clawson, Masculinity, Consumption and the Transformation of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the Turn-of-the-Century United StatesGender & History, Vol.19 No.1 April 2007, pp. 101121.

Masculinity, Consumption and theTransformation of Scottish Rite Freemasonry

in the Turn-of-the-Century United States

Mary Ann Clawson

Beat the drum; blow the horn; flash the sign; the degrees going cheap; 32 nd for a song; moneysworth or money back.1

During the 1890s, Scottish Rite Masons in the United States began to transform theirelaborate initiation rituals into a fully staged theatrical spectacle. The changes ashift from lodge room to auditorium, the constitution of initiates as an audience ofspectators and the introduction of elaborate sets and lighting transformed the ritualinto an avowedly theatrical experience, located the Rite within the eras growing array

of opportunities for commercial entertainment and consumer choice and producedan explosive growth in the hitherto floundering organisation. At the same time, as adrama performed by men and for men, the staged ritual seemed to challenge the erascultivation of female audiences, emerging as a distinctive masculine entertainmentgenre within a culture that associated frivolous consumption with women.

These changes also produced a round of trenchant criticism from traditionalistswithin the order, who decried what they saw as the commercialisation, feminisationand general dumbing-down of their treasured ritual. Greatest show on earth! lamentedWilliam Knox. Were not the degrees sold to me, and, in the spirit of commercialism,

shall I not sell the same? Critics like Knox and Francis ODonnell asserted the moralsuperiority of traditional practice which does the great work without stages and scene-settings, robes and regalias, electric lights or pipe organs, relying rather on assiduousdevotion and attention, cultivation of analytic thought and the almighty power ofReason to produce a great Mason, otherwise a truly good man.2

The conflation of Masonry and manhood was central to this conflict. To the grow-ing number of enthusiasts who flocked to the energised order, the staged ritual wasan alluring blend of edification and entertainment, enacted in surroundings they ex-perienced as luxurious, tasteful and manly. To the critics, the new mode of conferralrepresented a loss of both Masonic and masculine integrity, an unprecedented assim-

ilation into a regime of empty commercialism. Identifying spectacle with femininityand childhood, with the lower orders and the lower races and with all those groups

C The Author 2007. Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.


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102 Gender & History

outside the charmed circle of Caucasian male adulthood, the traditionalists champi-oned a ritual experience that would defend an earnest, active and self-denying manhoodagainst the onslaught of a passive, self-indulgent and feminised consumerism.3

During the past twenty-five years, Freemasonry has emerged as an important sitefor the study of masculine identity construction in a range of settings and historical eras.

While they vary in their attention to issues of class, race and nationality, these studiesshare an understanding of the lodge as a homo-social space in which historically specificmasculinities could be articulated and shaped.4 But the story has been largely toldwithout reference to the implications of Masons engagement with material practices,in particular market-based consumption the acquisition, through purchase, of thephysical spaces, regalia and ritual objects that sustained the Masonic experience bothpractically and symbolically.5 Through this absence, scholars have acceded, howeverunwittingly, to a dichotomisation that associates masculinity with production whiledefining consumer culture, pejoratively, as womens sphere.

The purpose of this study, therefore, is twofold. First, it seeks to extend and

complicate our understanding of Freemasonry through an examination of how oneAmerican organisation, the Scottish Rite, used consumption and spectacle to increaseits visibility and widen its appeal to prospective members. Yet the vehement opposi-tion to this largely successful innovation suggests that conflicts over fraternal esotericaoffer privileged insight into more fundamental controversies about the shifting mean-ings of white bourgeois manhood in its relation to the burgeoning culture of massconsumption and commercial entertainment in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Thus the case of the Scottish Rite also advances understanding ofmasculine consumption practices by contributing to a growing scholarly recognition ofEuropean and American mens complex engagements with consumer culture and the

varying conceptions of masculine identity and privilege such engagements proposed.

Gender and consumption

Consumer society has long linked women to consumption and men to production. AsKenon Breazeale notes, Much of what the modern world deems appropriate sex rolesis embedded in a nutshell dichotomy men produce and women shop.6 Within thisdichotomy, men are portrayed as untouched by consumer culture and untainted by itssupposed superficialities. Early feminist scholarship accepted not only the accuracy ofthe dichotomy but the moral hierarchy it implied. Often this took the form of seeingwomens consignment to consumption as a form of bondage, a source of oppression thatwomen were to overcome through paid employment and economic self-sufficiency.7

Over time, however, an increasingly dominant approach sought to undermine the di-vision by unearthing womens productive activities looking at both the unwrittenhistory of women as paid workers and, simultaneously, at the content and value ofwomens unpaid work in the home. Part of this effort was to recast consumption itselfas a form of useful labour that was essential to material survival as well as to socialand cultural reproduction in an increasingly monetarised and commodified society.8

But just as womens labour had been rendered invisible, so had mens consumption.

The masculine side of the dichotomy, which posited men as the disciplined, abstemiousand productive counter to feminine frivolity, went largely unexamined. Only recentlyhave feminist scholars sought to challenge this hierarchy by identifying masculine

C The Author 2007. Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007


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Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the United States 103

consumption as an equally important site for the construction of gender.9 As Victoriade Grazia argues, capitalist modernity developed through and as consumer society.This meant the transformation of goods from being relatively static symbols aroundwhich hierarchies were ordered to being more directly constitutive of class, socialstatus, and personal identity. Within this framework, commodity consumption is seen

as productive of gender for men as well as women: a process that transforms[s] afemale into a woman (and a male into a man) within the transformative powers of acapitalist economy that constantly refashions notions of authentic, essential woman-and manhood.10

Commodity consumption thus becomes both a major medium of social reproduc-tion and a strategic resource in the articulation and deployment of class, racial andgender distinctions. Given this, consumption could also emerge as a site of strugglewhere conceptions of gender and relations between gender and other forms of hierarchyand power were defined and negotiated, both between men and women and, impor-tantly for this study, among men. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

United States, the Scottish Rite was one such site where alternative definitions of mas-culinity were formulated and contested through white middle-class mens practical andsymbolic relationships to consumer society.

The turn-of-the-century period in which Scottish Rite Masons refashioned thecultural practices of their organisation has been repeatedly characterised as a formativemoment in the development of American culture more generally. At this time, theUnited States became actively involved in empire, in Cuba and the Philippines; thesegregationist policies of the Jim Crow era took firm hold in the South; FrederickWinslow Taylor and scientific management transformed the control of labour and,crucially for my argument here, the ideal of self-realisation and the articulation of

social status became more widely linked to consumer choice. Within this context,an emphasis on visual display was central to the emerging symbiosis of commerceand entertainment: the theatrical focus on elaborate stage sets, lighting and costumesprivileged appearance and served as an incitement to consumption, while department-store shopping, with its display windows and exuberant public spaces, emerged as thecontinuation, by other means, of the public delight in curiosities, spectacle, and featsof wonder that were offered up in the world of entertainment.11

Many scholars have argued that the intensified linking of commerce and entertain-ment was part of a much larger social and cultural reorientation that reorganised un-

derstandings of both class and gender. In class terms, mass production and distributionenabled middle-class people to adopt new standards of domestic culture previously re-stricted to the upper class and to partake of even more opulent displays of class-markedconsumption in the expansive public spaces being created by turn-of-the-centuryentrepreneurs.12 But both contemporary and retrospective analysts have understoodthis change as a highly gendered one, organised around the image of the avid womanconsumer, within a dichotomous framework that continued to link men to productionand women to consumption.

For American men, then, the shift to a consumer society was complex becauseit so directly challenged an earlier definition of manliness as residing in self-mastery,

hard work and control over impulse. Mens contradictory relationship to consumptionand pleasure in this era is undoubtedly part of what has led some scholars to identify



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the 1890s and early 1900s as a moment of innovation, contestation and even crisiswhen the terms and meanings of male identity were particularly at issue. Thus theScottish Rites turn-of-the-century transformation occurred at a particularly significantmoment. By offering dramatic spectacle in lavish surroundings to male-only audiences,the Scottish Rite helped promote an emergent model of masculinity, grounded in leisure

and consumption rather than the discipline of hard work.

13

The Scottish Rite in the fraternal world

The term fraternalism commonly designates those organisations that approximate theMasonic model of a male-identified secret society organised around elaborate initia-tion rituals and ascension through multiple levels, or degrees, of membership. As thenations largest complex of dues-paying membership organisations, fraternal orderswere a major social and cultural presence throughout Protestant America, both whiteand black, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1900, for example,

the two largest, the Masons and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, had one mil-lion members each, while at least four others, all modelled on Freemasonry, had over500,000, thus totalling approximately 20 per cent of the total adult white male popula-tion of 21.9 million.14 At the same time, African Americans, barred from the raciallyexclusionary organisations of the dominant white majority, established parallel orderssuch as the Prince Hall Masons and the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, which oc-cupied an equally important role in black communities. The racially exclusive practicesof white Masons in the US conflicted quite obviously with Freemasonrys explicitlyarticulated universalism. In most parts of the British Empire, this contradiction was ad-dressed, although not without controversy, through the admission of elite members of

the colonised groups into Masonic lodges. In the United States, however, the dominantgroup took a different approach, which not only denied African Americans admissionto white Masonic lodges, but refused to acknowledge the Masonic legitimacy of PrinceHall Masonry, despite its longtime recognition by the Grand Lodge of England.15

Fraternal organisations are distinctive in their use of elaborate initiation ritualsto create fictive brotherhoods. As both Lynn Dumenil and Mark Carnes emphasise,the ritual, a quasi-religious secret performance intended to inculcate morality and pro-vide ethical instruction, was key to the orders assertion of unity and moral purpose.Nineteenth-century fraternal ritual also operated, however, as a form of participatorytheatre, a systematically marketed entertainment genre that was a major selling-pointto prospective members.16 The repeated efforts of nineteenth-century orders to developappealing rituals suggest that for many men the high point of fraternal participationwas the opportunity to play these dramatic roles and thus to engage in a form of leisureactivity.17

Early Masonry was shaped around a craft identity, tracing its heritage to the me-dieval lodges of working stonemasons. Emerging in the eighteenth century, it centredon the degree titles of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason, its arti-sanal associations signalled by the wearing of mechanics aprons and the use of thesquare and compass as ritual objects. Enthusiasm for Masonic ceremonial, however,

led to the multiplication of degrees and creation of esoteric rituals that cast initiatesas Judean princes and Crusader knights. Freemasonrys craft identity, expressed in thethree foundational degrees, now vied with more aristocratic myths of origin.



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Within this tradition, the Scottish Rite developed in the early nineteenth-centuryUnited States as a system of twenty-nine higher degrees set in exotic Middle Easternlocales: King Solomons temple, the palaces of King Cyrus and King Darius, theSinai desert, the court of Saladin and the lodge of the Crusader knights. Unlike itspopular rival, the ten-degree York Rite system, and despite the dramatic possibilities its

ritual seemed to offer, the Scottish Rite remained a relatively minor part of the largerMasonic world for most of the nineteenth century, with perhaps 1015,000 membersin 1890. By the early 1900s, however, the Rites growth had accelerated, increasingfrom 40,000 members in 1900 to 590,000 in 1927. Strikingly, this period of explosivegrowth coincides quite precisely with the appearance of the staged ritual as its mostdistinctive feature.18

From the lodge room to the stage

Scottish Rite texts delineated the costumes to be worn by ritual participants: the Grand

High Priest, for example, wore a purple and gold tiara, jewel-studded breastplate, whitelinen tunic and purple robe studded with bells and pomegranates. Like other fraternalassociations in the post-Civil-War US, the Scottish Rite had access to the elaboratecommercially produced costumes sold by mail-order catalogue and, in many cases,to the increasingly grand Masonic halls of the era. But the customary configurationof space in the traditional, rectangular Masonic lodge room posed problems for thecomplex Scottish Rite ceremonies, as a single degree could have up to four separatescenes, each with its own mandated decor and props.19

The Fifteenth Degree, for example, known as the Knight of the East, movedbetween the Grand Lodge of Perfection at Jerusalem and the brilliantly lighted palace

of King Cyrus of Persia. In this degree, the initiate played Zerubbabel, a Prince of theHouse of Judah, who travelled to Persia to demand that King Cyrus free the Israelitesfrom bondage. When he was taken prisoner, his defiant assertion of principle movedCyrus to free him and Zerubbabel returned triumphantly to Jerusalem following a finalbattle with a company of renegade guards.20

Despite these dramatic possibilities, many found themselves dissatisfied with thequality of the ritual experience, as well as the practical difficulties of performing mul-tiple scenes in the traditional lodge setting. In response, Scottish Rite Masons in thesouthwest began to present their rituals as staged, pageant-like dramatic events. By1910, many local organisations had moved their initiations from traditional rectangularlodge rooms to specially-constructed auditoriums, equipped with proscenium stagesand state-of-the-art theatrical lighting and scenery, where the twenty-nine degrees wereconferred at twice-yearly events titled Reunions.21

Degree initiation, which had formerly stretched over months and even years, wasnow compressed into a Reunion lasting three to four days, in which candidates receiveddegrees in groups of several hundred, increasing to as many as 1,000 by the 1920s. Withthe exception of one individual, chosen as the exemplar, initiates sat as an audienceof spectators rather than acting as the protagonists of the ritual drama. An improvedstandard of presentation accompanied this shift, as degree enactors memorised rather

than read their lines and Scottish Rite bodies extolled their magnificent costumes,sets and special effects. Finally, the Reunion alternated degree conferral with elabo-rate meals and socialising in the temples or cathedrals of the Rite, their banquet and



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billiard rooms, libraries and lounges providing many of the amenities of an urban mensclub.

These changes had significant implications for the experience of Scottish Riteinitiation. On the one hand, the increasingly elaborate, luxurious character of ScottishRite structures was consistent with larger trends in Masonic construction. On the other

hand, the move to the stage was a distinct, and controversial, innovation within the largerMasonic universe, one that suggested a departure from the more rigorous demands ofthe traditional initiation experience towards an increasing use of consumption andspectacle to cement fraternal bonds and orchestrate claims to individual and collectivestatus.

Examination of Scottish Rite members in two locations, Little Rock, Arkansas,and St Louis, Missouri, is consistent with earlier research on Masonic lodges in thelate nineteenth-century United States, which found a mixed-class composition witha preponderance of middle-class proprietors, accompanied by a significant minorityof skilled workers and a smaller number of more prosperous entrepreneurs and pro-

fessionals at the upper end of the spectrum.22

Little Rock, a small Southern city of4050,000, approximated this model, as a minority of blue-collar workers, predom-inantly train conductors and locomotive engineers, mixed with a majority of small-to medium-sized proprietors, professionals and local clergy, including an Episcopalrector and a rabbi. St Louis, a much larger Midwestern city of over 400,000, drew asomewhat more elite membership of entrepreneurs and professionals located in centralbusiness-district offices, with little or no representation of manual workers or smallretailers at one end of the spectrum, or of larger capitalists at the other. 23

Despite this relatively modest profile, affiliation with the Scottish Rite suggestedloftier class aspirations on the part of its adherents. Scottish Rite initiation was costly,

ranging between $100 and $200 for ascension through the full complement of degrees.This was a hefty sum at a time when in 1900 the earnings of all non-farm employeesaveraged $486 per worker, with railroad wage earners receiving an average of $560per year, postal employees $878 and ministers $794.24 The size, cost and ambition ofScottish Rite buildings, again reflecting the aspirations of their members, continuedto escalate during the early twentieth century. Construction of the 1917 Temple inBloomington, Illinois, a town of only 27,000, cost $510,000 with scenery, equipmentand furnishings accounting for an additional $76,000.25 With the elite urban mensclub evidently serving as a model, Scottish Rite buildings often contained not onlyritual spaces and meeting rooms, but dining halls, lounges, libraries, billiard and cardrooms and ladies parlours. These features bespoke not only an interest in tastefulconsumption, but also an altered conception of the lodge hall from a ritual site to, asDayton Allen Willey wrote of the Los Angeles temple, a favorite gathering place formembers of the Scottish Rite who would know each other socially.26

This new tone was reinforced through the organisation of the Reunion as a three-to four-day period in which degree conferral was punctuated by luncheons, dinnersand late-evening refreshments. Banquet menus were replete with upper-class referencepoints fragile foods not locally available, multiple courses and wines chosen to matcheach course. Here too, Scottish Rite practices echoed a growing urban middle-class taste

for luxurious dining out, an experience which, as Erenberg notes, offered fantasies. . .

of a more sumptuous and indulgent life.27 The rituals placement within a frameworkof banqueting and socialising in the well-appointed lounges, libraries, billiard rooms



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and dining rooms of the newly constructed Scottish Rite temples provided an aura ofurban glamour, forging a link between spectacular entertainment and status-consciousconsumption.

The growing size and luxury of Scottish Rite buildings was consistent with theincreasing ambition of Masonic construction more generally. Perhaps the most notable

example was Chicagos Masonic Temple. The worlds tallest commercial building atthe time of its completion in 1892, it combined extensive Masonic accommodationswith offices, restaurants and retail space.28 The introduction of the staged ritual, on theother hand, was a distinctive Scottish Rite innovation, a more fundamental reconcep-tualisation of the classic initiation experience in which the shift from lodge room toauditorium boldly defined the ritual as a work of theatre.

Indeed, leaders quickly characterised the new practices as theatrical in characterand thereby shaped the expectations of initiates accordingly. Even in the 1890s, whenthe earliest stagings occurred in Arkansas and Kansas, Reunion programmes resem-bling theatre playbills identified degree enactors as dramatis personae. References to

directors and to Masonic actors were commonplace by the early 1900s, with com-mercial theatre explicitly referenced as a standard of comparison. Not a theatre in theCity has so complete and thorough an electrical equipment, boasted the Scottish RitesThe New Age magazine of the recently completed San Francisco temple, while themassive auditorium [of Wichita, Kansas] is considered as fine, according to its size,as any modern metropolitan theatre in the country. Scottish Rite ritualists based theirinnovations in staging on explicit collaboration with commercial theatre entrepreneursfrom whom they purchased the scenery, lighting and special effects that produced lightsabre battles, molten lava cascades and ghostly apparitions.29

Such changes connoted a significant reorientation of the initiate to the ritual ex-

perience. The earlier lodge was also a dramatic event, but its enactment emphasisedcandidates direct participation in the ritual trials. Traditional Scottish Rite ceremonyhad placed the fully costumed individual initiate at the dramas centre, where he mightbe bound in chains, fight a battle and be invested with the signs, handshakes and jewelsof the degree. In contrast, the fully staged ritual constructed initiates as observers ratherthan protagonists of the initiatory drama. The redefinition of initiates as an audience,along with the use of elaborate stage effects in a theatrical setting, placed initiatesin what was, arguably, a more passive relationship to the initiatory tests while trans-forming Scottish Rite enactments into something resembling a commercial popularentertainment allied with the eras enthusiasm for spectacle.

Scottish Rite theatre accommodation and contradiction

The turn of the century was an era when popular culture became more visually oriented more dominated by spectacular display and less focused on the spoken and written word.This was the case in print media, where by the late 1890s, eye appeal had begun torival copy for prominence in advertisements as well as in the proliferating public spaces department stores, restaurants, vaudeville palaces, railroad terminals, internationalexpositions that William Leach characterises as adult fantasy environments and

palaces of consumption.30

As the model and precursor for many of these innovations,theatrical productions of the 1890s played down dialogue and narrative and playedup living stage pictures, with famed producer David Belasco boasting that the



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characters present on the stage are really secondary to the light effects. Our actors,noted one critic, are now less rhetorical and more pictorial as they must be on thestage of our modern theater, a theatre of sumptuous spectacle that functioned as acelebration of materiality, and an advertisement for consumption.31

The Scottish Rite ritual was easily assimilated to such a concept of theatre as

grand spectacles of light and motion. Its Middle Eastern locales played on the erastaste for orientalist exotica and lent themselves to elaborate and colourful staging,as did its array of esoteric degrees Master of the Ninth Arch, Patriarch Noachite,Knight of the Brazen Serpent.32 With depictions of landscapes so realistic that thespectator can readily imagine he hears the noise of the water falling over the cataract,the elaborate professionally designed sets and lighting produced a visual experienceto rival what was available on the best of American stages.33 But if the world ofcommercial entertainment guided the evolution and reception of the staged ritual, fra-ternal traditions of masculine sociability and feminine exclusion guaranteed its dis-tinctive trajectory. As the product of a male-only organisation, Scottish Rite drama

was rife with contradictions in an era distinguished by an increasing cultivation ofwomen as audience members and consumers, occupants of public space and culturalconsciousness.

By 1900, women theatre-goers were a major audience presence and lucrativemarket for both vaudeville and legitimate theatre, the latter increasingly defined astheir special province. This commercial and cultural reconfiguration meant that publicspaces and entertainment venues once dominated by men were now not only accessibleto respectable women but catered to them. In consequence, many men sought alternativeentertainments such as variety theatre, burlesque and sporting events, where masculinehegemony remained secure.

On the stage as well, women assumed a larger role, as both the personificationof virtue and the objects of male gaze. In contrast, the Scottish Rite depicted a worldin which women appeared as neither sex objects nor the protagonists of sentimentaldrama. Their absence, both physically and symbolically, guaranteed the exclusion ofmany of the eras most sacred and dependable dramatic themes, such as womanlyvirtue, motherly love and the defence of home and family indeed the entire privatesphere as it was popularly understood from the discursive universe of the Rite. As aresult, the Masonic scenic repertoire omitted the kitchens, gardens and conservatoriesthat signified romance and domesticity, harking back instead to an earlier theatrical eraof didactic moralism, when playbills were selected to appeal to male audiences, andmanly virtues were preferred over romance, robust heroes and villains over matineeidols.34 The Scottish Rite stage was a masculine space inhabited by men, who appearonly as public figures, as rulers, soldiers and religious leaders.

Scottish Rite dramatisation can, therefore, be seen as a masculine response towhat Richard Butsch has called the re-gendering of legitimate theatre, a vehicleby which men attempted to reclaim narrative drama as a masculine activity. Moreover,unlike many other male entertainment genres, which carried a faintly disreputable aura,the Scottish Rite provided its participants with considerable moral capital. As a formof entertainment for men, the Scottish Rite synthesised turn-of-the-century spectacle

with earlier traditions of masculine rectitude. By addressing only men and recognisingmen alone as moral actors, the Scottish Rite ritual defined masculine identity through adiscourse that effaced women and home, two of the eras most potent symbols, rendered



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them irrelevant to lifes highest truths and noblest contests and thus claimed a moralhigh ground often ceded to women.

Yet such an assertion of masculine autonomy, as Martina Kessel notes, carrieswith it a vulnerability to charges of feminisation, a susceptibility less present in morerelational or polarised conceptions of gender in which women represent a visible

albeit subordinated presence.

35

Through its positioning of men as both audienceand protagonists of a dazzlingly lit, colourfully costumed drama, Scottish Rite stagingasserted masculine self-sufficiency. But in doing so, it violated many of the eras con-ventions of masculine self-presentation. It was this emphasis on visual spectacle, withits glorification of consumption and implicit feminine associations, which so outragedthe traditionalist critics of the new staged ritual.

Degrees for sale

While the spread of the staged Scottish Rite led to rapid organisational growth, it also

provoked controversy. The debate that erupted in the pages of the Scottish Rite maga-zine The New Age turned on the question of whether the dramatised ritual necessarilyobscured and detracted from the moral lessons of the spoken text or whether, whenproperly presented, performance could be used to enhance reception of Masonic truths.Any change that diluted the authority of the ritual and detracted from the realisationof this great purpose would be unacceptable to the orders most committed adher-ents, who equated the making of a great Mason with the formation of a truly goodman.36

In this dispute, Epes W. Sargent, a prominent theatre critic, as well as an enthusias-tic Scottish Rite Mason, embraced the dramatic approach. While Sargent acknowledged

that the staged ritual was often unsuccessful, imperilling the meaning of the real textas opposed to the pomp and ceremony of the drama, he nonetheless championed itspossibilities, maintaining that the advantage of the drama is that it more closely holdsthe mind by making appeal to the eye, thus centering the attention.37 This goal couldbe attained through improved staging.

Attention to historically authentic sets and costumes would create a unified expe-rience, eliminating the incongruous juxtapositions that occurred when the Hebrews inthe wilderness, wearing short hair, patent leather shoes and high collars emerging fromtheir robes, robbed these splendid dramas of half their effectiveness.38 This more ef-fective visual presentation had to be accompanied by more knowledgeable and deeplyfelt acting. A parrot-wise repetition of the dialogue is not all-sufficient, no matter howstrongly the ceremonies may appeal to the visual sense. Quality of performance couldbe improved through longer and more disciplined rehearsals (most Masonic actorsare not what their professional brothers call quick studies) and elucidation of the rit-uals symbolism, so that the cast was not only equipped with something more than aguesswork knowledge of their own lines, but imbued with a spirit of enthusiasm forthe work. Above all, this meant submission to the directors authority in matters ofstaging, discipline and conception. Urging the actors to improve their performance, heemphasised their duty to yield unquestioning obedience to the director and strive with

all earnestness to supplement his work.39

Sargent thus sought a more spectatorial experience, with higher performance stan-dards and more distance, physically, socially and symbolically, between enactors and



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initiates. It was by becoming a betterwork of theatre more expertly acted, more accu-rately and beautifully staged, a professional product to be consumed by an appreciativeaudience of spectators that the Scottish Rite could drive home lessons that are neverforgotten.40

For three other Scottish Rite commentators William Knox, Frances H. E.

ODonnell and one who called himself Codex the problem was not bad drama, butdramatisation itself. All three targeted the visual spectacle of the staged ritual, coupledwith its commodification, as the principal threat to Masonrys moral and philosoph-ical integrity. Fearing that Spectacular Display would overwhelm the spoken text,they questioned the staged rituals positioning of initiates as onlookers rather than pro-tagonists, and worried that its colourful but undemanding character would attract theunserious and undeserving. Above all, they saw the visual as a lower order of commu-nication, incapable of conveying the intellectual feasts of the Scottish Rite degreeswhile dulling the rational faculties and moral sensibilities of its recipients.41

Knox, ODonnell and Codex were Scottish Rite traditionalists who conceived the

Rite as an elite organisation existing to impart moral teaching to a worthy few. Buttheir attacks were empowered through their use of contemporary cultural criticism andscientific thought. Organising their critique around a series of unequal antimonies ephemeral versus eternal, passive versus active, feeling versus rationality, primitiveversus civilised, purchased sensation versus priceless learning, the eye versus the ear they spoke in a gender-, class- and race-coded language that fused a critique ofconsumer society with a concern for the feminisation and popularisation of the Riteitself.

The critics were undoubtedly contemptuous of what Knox described as the strut-tings and mouthings of indifferent amateur actors amid lurid scenic display. But more

than cultural snobbery was at work here. Unlike Epes Sargent, they located the failuresof the staged ritual primarily in its commodification and commercialisation, rather thanits remediable aesthetic limitations. The tendency of the time, Codex lamented, is torelegate the onlookers (the Brethren) to mere spectators of a theatrical performance.Not only had the ritual lost the demanding quality of a ritual trial, it had become afinancial transaction: They are perched in a gallery and have no more to do with theceremonies of the evening than a man who buys a seat in a dress circle of a theatreat a grand spectacular show. If theatre was a major reference point, then commerceas well as diversion was implied in the parallel. The result, Codex concluded, was acoldness about this that strikes me as most un-Masonic. It was the coldness of socialdistance and pecuniary exchange. Knox agreed: in an era when success is summed upin the amount of material profit, selling degrees had emerged as one of the greatestmoney-making businesses of the day.42

Commercial success, in this view, rested upon gaudy sensationalism, whatODonnell termed the passing show of a costly reproduction in tinsel. Knox was evenmore cutting in his description of the moving wires . . . stalking ghosts, diaphanousforms, unearthly yells, groans, shrieks, flashing lights, storms, earthquakes that nowenlivened Scottish Rite drama.43 The result, he argued, was the recruitment of newmembers oblivious to the orders intellectual feasts, motivated primarily by the lure

of exciting ritual and social standing.In castigating the Scottish Rites turn towards spectacle and away from the writtenand spoken word, Knox, ODonnell and Codex echoed the many cultural critics of



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their era who recognised that the merchandising of thrills and chills, the vending[of] vicarious intense experience had become central to an emerging mass culture.It was the sense that culture could be purchased secondhand, through spectatorship. . . as well as through mass consumption, Jackson Lears argues, that posed a directthreat to Protestant and republican doctrines of coherent selfhood, doctrines which,

with their emphasis on labour, discipline and self-denial, were precisely exemplifiedby the tenets of Freemasonry as understood by the traditionalists.44 Spectacle, on theother hand, as displayed in the newly dramatised Scottish Rite, entailed a surrender tosensation that swept away the discrete boundaries of this autonomous, and implicitlymasculine, self. Despite the male-only composition of its membership, Scottish Ritedramatisation appeared to the critics as a project of feminisation that put the coherenceand integrity of masculine identity at risk.

This view was most obviously expressed in comments about the visual richnessof the staged ritual. Modes of presentation that fuelled the orders growing popularitysimultaneously violated conventions of masculine self-presentation. At a time when

upstanding men dressed in sombre black suits, Scottish Rite drama arrayed them indazzling colours and voluminous robes positioning them as both the audience andthe protagonists of a strikingly lit, lavishly staged and opulently costumed drama. Theexclusion of women, who ordinarily served as the focal point of pictorial representationin nineteenth-century theatre, left male ritual enactors as both the representatives ofvirtue, a formulaic feminine role, and the objects of male spectatorial gaze, an equallyfeminised position.45

Codex addressed this quite directly, identifying extravagance of costume withwhat he saw as the related dangers of Catholicism and effeminacy. Charging thatScottish Rite costumes were patterned after vestments of the Romish Church, he

complained that we have the clothing of the Lady of Babylon, if we do not have herdogmas. The personification of the Church of Rome as a lady, or more likely as awhore, was linked to Catholicisms ritual vestments, which seemed, to his Protestanteyes, suspiciously feminine, in clear contrast to the modest garb of the Protestant clergy.Slowly and insidiously this Jesuitism is cropping up again. This time in the shape ofman millinery that is, through the appeal of fancy and thus effeminising dress.46

More subtly, however, the charge of feminisation was conveyed through a largercritique of spectacle and its marketing, a claim that the Scottish Rite had chosen visualpleasure over the more rigorous, edifying demands of the written and spoken word. Inthis view, dramatisation compromised Freemasonrys character as a system of ethicalknowledge that could only be acquired through disciplined, concerted effort, a processthe critics framed in implicitly gendered terms. Here they echoed formulations currentsince the eighteenth century, when, as Jennifer Jones argues, French Enlightenmentthinkers theorised the difference between objects that worked on the eyes, and objectsthat worked on the soul . . . objects that captured the passive viewer through sensualdelight and [those] that demanded domination by the mind and intellect.47

ODonnell in particular excoriated the frivolous innovation and foolish vanitiesthat detract[ed] from the majestic grandeur of philosophical teaching. Arguing thatthe aim of Masonry was to give knowledge rather than to please, ODonnell implied a

gendered dichotomy between learning and pleasure, in which, as Jones notes, womenspsychological and sensory apparatus made them ideally suited to consume, and theirpassivity rendered them particularly vulnerable to capture by their sensual delight in



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agreeable and frivolous objects. In calling for a rejection of the ritual, ODonnellsought to call the Scottish Rite back to its masculine mission, for to please and to bepleased were surely the province of the gentler sex. Thus, he concluded, Let Wisdomand Strength be the masters, and Beauty the chaste handmaiden of the ceremonies.Masonry was and needed to remain a project of masculine moral formation, the Moral

Manhood among Men.

48

But ODonnell took a further step, deploying a species of evolutionary thoughtin which racial pseudo-science lent authority to the moralistic critique of spectacle.The eye and the ear, he argued, occupied a position that was developmental as wellas moral. Because the crude impressions of infancy are received mostly via the Eye,it might be acceptable to use pictures to entice a beginning reader. But after the firststages of education are passed . . . the Ear becomes more attentive, and . . . Reasonbegins more to take the place of mere Impression in the development of the HigherThought Processes. With this scenario in mind, the full implications of ODonnellscritique become clear. In employing spectacle, the staged ritual operated as a kind

of kindergarten, striking at the integrity of an institution, which is not a Primary,Grammar, or High School of Ethics, but the ne plus ultra College. Most disturbingly,its vividly pictorial quality catered to the mind of the child, the savage, and the ignorant[which] everywhere is best reached through the sense of Sight.49

ODonnells attack was grounded in the then-current notion of recapitulation. Thisbelief, that every individual repeats in its own life history the life history of its race,passing through the lower forms of its ancestors on its way to maturity, was whatallowed him to equate the mind of the child with that of the savage. Recapitulationtheory posited that children and savages shared characteristics: lack of will power,reflection, and persistence; feeble attention span; weak capacity for abstraction; imita-

tiveness and lack of originality; impulsiveness and general emotionalism, all qualitiesthat pictorial display was believed to cater to and intensify.50 If the child was an evolu-tionary throwback to earlier stages of human development, an analogue to present-dayprimitive societies, then the transformation of the Scottish Rite from a text-basedverbal presentation to a pictorial one was, in developmental terms, a form of regressionand even, given the racial connotations of the parallel, of racial degeneracy. Notingthat the Evolution of Species proves the force of majority rule in Nature equally asin Nations, ODonnell articulated a version of the popular Darwinism which, as GailBederman notes, increasingly conflated race, class and gender through the oppositionof civilisation to savagery.51

What then, did it portend when men so avidly participated in the world of colourand light, texture and taste, the dramatised Scottish Rite and the lavishly furnishedtemples offered them? Operating at such a low level, the feminised, compromisedritual attracted a wider and less worthy range of members than the deserving men ofsuperior mind and mould of life who had once been its chief adherents. Those whowere drawn to the new Scottish Rite spectacle were, for ODonnell, Mob-Men or, inCodexs words, groundlings; that is, persons of low status and crude or indiscriminatetaste. For Knox, they were status-seekers and giddy fashion-followers, chasing fromtown to town in search of Nobles and Princes and Kings and Scribes, the biggest

Reunion ever held in these parts and the Greatest show on earth.52

Here one maydiscern the subtext of the feminine as well as of class and racial denigration, for the newmembers were in effect consumers, and fickle consumers at that. The identification of



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woman, child and savage is extended to encompass the lower echelons of Americansociety, their class and ethnic position connoted by their herd-like behaviour, unrefinedtaste and childlike credulity in the face of the market for spectacle and sensation. At thisimperial moment, one might further speculate, those who could be captivated, enthralledor overpowered by spectacle might be equated with the captured, the colonised, all of

them opposed to those whose superior intellect and discipline entitled them to mastersubject peoples just as they did verbal texts.53

Vocabularies of Masonic consumption

The question of whether the dramatised Scottish Rite was an unprecedented step intoa feminised, colonised and thereby degraded world of consumption, as critics charged,or the vigorous assertion of masculine empowerment that its enthusiasts celebrated,must be placed within the larger history of Masonic consumption practices. In thiscontext, the Scottish Rites elevation of grand spectacle to the centre of its initiatory

rituals did indeed represent a significant innovation. Yet, the innovation resided notso much in the introduction of consumer choice to the Masonic repertoire as in thediffering symbolic uses to which it was put. For throughout its history, Freemasonryhad depended on commodity purchase to help produce varying and historically specificversions of honourable manhood.

With their explicit referencing of stonemasons tools and artisans leather aprons tosignify moral worth, eighteenth-century British Freemasons had expressed the values ofan emerging capitalist order. By ascending the degrees of membership, from apprenticeto journeyman to master of the craft, the aristocrats, gentlemen, wealthy bourgeois and

middling tradesmen who were drawn to the order proclaimed the value of economicallyproductiveactivity.54 They accomplished this, however, not by actually engaging in craftlabour, but through rituals and conviviality that depended on the medium of purchasefor their enactment. Both the convivial practices and the ritual objects that Masons usedto express their symbolic identity as producers were located in the centurys burgeoningarray of consumer possibilities.

Masonic membership was itself a purchased good. As Margaret Jacob notes:

money in the form of dues, initiation fees, fines for misconduct, charitable funds and loans, was theinstrument of the new sociability [which] flourished where men had the money to support it. Theypaid to be equal; they then paid to rise in the wisdom of the philosophical degrees; with money

they adjudicated extreme social differences within an ideological framework that recognized onlyequality and merit.55

Thus, fraternal conviviality itself was anchored in commerce. Pubs and hostel-ries were the quasi-public spaces where Masons most often met to consume the foodand drink that sustained their communal rituals. Significantly, these were commercialspaces, with access based on purchase. The services they offered were essential to theMasonic project of bringing together men of diverse backgrounds in relations of equal-ity.56 In early Masonic practice, for example, drink was an important group activity[in which] all participated equally . . . served from the communal punch bowl which so

many societies purchased, while the drinking vessels were almost always exactly thesame size and shape, often decorated with a common symbol or inscription. As a result,Masonic lodges emerged as an important niche market for Britains fledgling pottery



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industry.57 Given that pottery and china are typically seen as domestic, and therebyfeminised objects, the identification of mens associations as an important early marketfor them complicates received understandings about the gendered character of mass-marketed consumer goods, while making clear that Freemasons ability to representthemselves as producers was crucially dependent upon their activities as consumers.

The transformation of the Scottish Rite did not, then, mark the first entrance ofMasons into the realm of consumer culture from one of prelapsarian disregard, asthe traditionalists had argued. Rather it marked a significant change, not only in thescale of involvement, but also in its symbolic valence. When an eighteenth-centuryBritish Mason donned a ceremonial version of the artisans leather apron, or drankfrom a communal punch bowl, he acquired and made use of leisure-time effects todepict himself as a hard-working producer. In doing so, such men used consumptionto signify their distance from it, and their superiority to those more overtly in itsthrall.58 In distinct contrast, when an early twentieth-century American Mason wasinitiated into the higher degrees of the Scottish Rite, he departed from, rather than

reinforced, previously dominant norms of masculine under-consumption, instead usingconsumption both to engage in and signify an enthusiastic embrace of sensation andpleasure.

It was this frank characterisation of Freemasonry as a purveyor of pleasure, ratherthan a medium for masculine ethical regeneration, that so disturbed traditionalists.Their critiques of the dramatised, commodified ritual reveal a complex intertwining ofclass, racial and gender claims, joined in the concept of manliness, the Victorian erasdominant conception of explicitly white and implicitly Protestant bourgeois manhood,but one that had become increasingly unstable by centurys end. For if the turn of thecentury is notable for its deployment of and fascination with the visual, it is also known

as a historical moment when middle-class men seem to have been unusually interestedin, even obsessed with manhood.59

Manliness, as Gail Bederman notes, was a moral concept, an ideal to which menaspired, rather than the entitlement of all males. With self-restraint, rationality, powerfulwill and unceasing and goal-directed effort as its hallmarks, the ideal of self-made man-hood, as E. Anthony Rotundo terms it, was a disciplined mode of conduct especiallyappropriate in a small-scale market economy based on the labour of self-employedentrepreneurs.60 By the 1890s, however, the hegemony of manliness seemed underassault, confronted by labour unrest, class-based electoral challenges and an array

of middle-class womens movements, all of which worked to question middle-classmens claim on public power and authority. Simultaneously the era saw a contrac-tion of small entrepreneurship, the nineteenth-century economic base of middle-classmanliness. Finally, the turn of the century was characterised by new opportunitiesfor commercial leisure, opportunities that expanded womens place in public life butcomplicated mens: The consumer cultures ethos of pleasure and frivolity clashedwith ideals of manly self-restraint, further undermining the potency of middle-classmanliness.61

These challenges prompted a range of attempted reformulations. Bederman, forexample, emphasises the emergence of a discourse of civilisation which used evolu-

tionary thought to explain male supremacy in terms of white racial dominance, and,conversely, to explain white supremacy in terms of male power, a discourse typi-fied by ODonnells use of recapitulation theory. Rotundo identifies a transition from



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self-made to passionate manhood, whereby men affirmed the option of cultivatingtheir individuality through consumption and diversion. As the nineteenth century ended,play, leisured entertainment and consumer engagement once considered marks of ef-feminacy became approved modes of masculine self-expression. A man could definehis self-worth, not just in the workplace, but through enjoyment and self-fulfilment

outside of it.

62

These themes, so evident in the Scottish Rite literature, make it clearthat the debate over the transformed ritual was part of a larger contest to explain whatmen are, how they ought to behave, and what sorts of power and authority they mayclaim, as men.63

The critiques revealed the tensions produced by alternative conceptions of theMasonic experience: a traditional view of ritual as the exemplification of a system ofmoral instruction and testing versus its emergent status as a leisure activity. The shiftfrom lodge room to auditorium, the use of elaborate stage effects and the definition ofinitiates as an audience placed the Scottish Rite squarely within the expanding realmof popular entertainment and gave it a competitive advantage within the populous

fraternal world. At the same time, its character as a mens organisation provided it witha distinctive niche in the broader universe of popular entertainment because it offereddramatic spectacle for a male-only audience at a time when mainstream theatre wasincreasingly seen as a feminine pastime.

These changes also revealed a tension between competing visions of manhood.Critics of the dramatised ritual spoke for an earlier vision of manliness, which empha-sised the redeeming qualities of hard work and self-discipline, whether in pursuit ofeconomic gain or Masonic enlightenment. True Masonry was identified with true man-hood, both of which were defined through opposition to a series of others the child,the savage, the mob and the feminine, all of which were thought to be distinguished

by their affinity for the visual. Thus the shift from the ear to the eye, from oratoryto spectacle, served as the focal point for all that troubled Masonic traditionalists. Itwas theatrical display that promoted the commodification of the order; it was theatricaldisplay that catered to the tastes of the child-like savage and the credulous mob; it wastheatrical display that threatened to unman its members through their placement asbedazzled spectators or, as colourfully attired performers, the objects of spectatorialgaze.

Proponents of the new ritual offered an alternative view of manhood, characterisedby an affirmation of consumption and, more subtly, by an acceptance of the emergingcorporate order. The latter can be seen in Sargents defence of the staged ritual. In hisview, the ritual acquired its power, not from the self-reliant efforts of each individualinitiate, but from their collective access to a superior product. That product in turnderived its authority from the professionalisation of Masonic enactors, who must beknowledgeable about the text, well-rehearsed and, above all, willing to submit them-selves to the expert supervision of a single powerful director whose unified conceptionproduced a coherent and illuminating effect. The enactment of the Scottish Rite wouldthus mirror an emerging Taylorist model of production, as well as contribute to its pro-liferation of consumer options and their adoption as a form of masculine entitlement.

Within this new formulation, with its union of class and gender, the power and

appeal of Masonry resided in the splendour of its consumption practices. Consider, forexample, the yearly Maundy Thursday banquets, obligatory for all Knights Rose Croix(Eighteenth Degree Masons). In Butte, Montana, in 1902, the banquet included oysters



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on the half shell, lobster salad, roast spring lamb with mint sauce and turkey with calfsfoot jelly, accompanied by Sauternes, St Julien and burgundy wines. Whatever the con-dition of oysters and lobster by the time of their arrival in Butte, their function as classmarkers was clear, as was their assertion of the prerogatives and pleasures of mascu-line consumption.64 Elaborate banqueting in a male-only setting had replaced austere

moral lessons as a means of shaping class and gender into a single honorific identity.A similar interest in consumption is revealed in descriptions of temples that com-bined, in their members eyes, the best features of a fine mens club and a well-equippedmetropolitan theatre. Scottish Rite publications emphasised superb costuming, elegantparaphernalia and exquisite scenery and stage equipment . . . remarkable for the vivid-ness of [their] representation. Equally enthusiastic accounts detailed the banquet roomsand lounges, with their rich mahogany, weathered oak and cozy corners in the oldDutch style, not to mention the largest Axminster Wilton rug ever woven.65 Again,a delight in costly and tasteful consumption is palpable, coupled with an attention tovisual detail that Codex or ODonnell might have found unsettling.

Pleasure was now defined as a masculine right and privilege, a source of pride, ascertain uses of leisure time and certain consumer tastes became markers of manliness.With its combination of dramatic spectacle, bourgeois comfort and masculine fellow-ship, the transformed Scottish Rite exemplified the attractions of this perspective. Byredefining itself explicitly as a site of spectatorship and consumption, the Scottish Riteachieved both enormous growth and an enhanced prestige within the Masonic world.Bederman correctly notes that it took several generations for the new formulationsto overtake Victorian manliness as the primary middle-class ideology of powerfulmanhood. Yet the sense of triumph is clear: Lay aside your business for the occasion,proclaimed the Little Rock Reunion Program of 1898. Be with us and enjoy the fruits

of our labor. . .

judge for yourself whether or not you have a right to feel gratified andproud that you are a Scottish Rite Mason.66

Conclusion

Scottish Rite traditionalists were correct in their view that the elaborately staged ritualand luxuriously furnished interiors of turn-of-the-century temples violated previouslydominant norms of masculine under-consumption. Indeed, the admonition to abandonproductive activity, however temporarily, in favour of enjoyment was a frank challengeto Freemasonrys historic view of honourable manhood as residing in the moral dignityof labour. Yet, despite this new embrace of pleasure, the transformed Scottish Ritemaintained significant continuities with earlier Masonic practice as well, continuitiesthat allowed for its ongoing self-representation as a distinctively masculine institution.Taken together, these juxtapositions contribute to a growing scholarly challenge to thedichotomous representation of women as consumers and men as producers, in favourof a more complex narrative.

For, as the traditionalists had intuited, the turn towards a more explicit engagementwith consumer society produced an ongoing contradiction: how could men consumewithout being labelled feminised consumers? The staged Scottish Rite, with its syn-

thesis of vivid spectacle, fine dining, masculine exclusivity and lofty purpose, offeredone compelling response to this dilemma. Consumption, Leora Auslander has argued,has tended to be deemed appropriately masculine when it was productive of self and



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of a durable legacy beyond the self.67 Activities motivated by a higher purpose andaccomplished through collective solidarity could be erased as consumption or elevatedabove it. By defining it as a project of collective identity formation rather than indi-vidual gratification, the Scottish Rite could locate consumption within a discourse ofelevated purpose and manly honour.

As a variant of the mens club, the emergent Scottish Rite, with its dining halls,smoking lounges, libraries and stages, was a site of luxurious consumption. But, like themens club, Scottish Rite consumption was simultaneously privatised and collectivised,shielded from the public especially female gaze and experienced, most significantly,through the medium of membership.68 Dazzling ritual, august surroundings and organ-isationally mandated socialising were all mobilised to inspire a long-term identificationwith a greater, grander whole.

Thus, the transformed Scottish Rite, along with the mens clubs and spectatorsports emerging at much the same time, relied upon forms and practices of consump-tion predicated upon notions of membership that seemed to be absent from womens

commercial culture. Such practices suggest that Masonry, and by extension other mensorganisations and activities, have operated as one significant vehicle for a largely un-recognised form of masculine consumption. They further suggest that masculine con-sumption may have secured its invisibility through the construction of collectivity, acollectivity defined in part by its explicit or de facto exclusion of women, and in part bythe higher purpose it implied. The Scottish Rite experience, like the Masonic historythat preceded it, thus exemplified a wider framing of mens leisure and consumptionas acts of collective masculine affiliation, a framing that obscured their commodifiedcharacter and guarded them from an association with the feminine, while working topromote new conceptions of mens material entitlement. Whether best seen as an elab-

oration of Masonic tradition or a departure from it, it is clear that the staged ritual, andthe controversy it provoked, served not only to reveal ongoing contradictions withinFreemasonry, but to illuminate the complexities of its role in the larger history of mas-culine consumption in Europe and the United States, with the varying meanings ofmanhood such engagement could propose.

Notes

My thanks to Gail Radford, the anonymous reviewers for Gender & History and especially to Dan Clawson.

1. William Knox, What Excuse?, New Age 7 (1907), pp. 2524. Degrees here refers to Freemasonrys

hierarchical structure in which Masons ascend, through multiple initiations, a series of levels or degrees ofmembership.

2. Knox, What Excuse?, pp. 2523; Francis H. E. ODonnell, Philosophy and the Drama in Freemasonry,New Age 4 (1906), pp. 4748, here pp. 4767.

3. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1989), p. 51.

4. Mark Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)andMary AnnClawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism (Princeton,NJ: Prince-ton UniversityPress, 1989) are earlyexamples. Morerecently, see Jessica Harland-Jacobs,All in the Family:Freemasonry and the British Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Journal of British Studies 42 (2003),pp. 44882; Aviston D. Downes, Freemasonry in Barbados before 1914: The Limits of Brotherhood,Jour-nal of Caribbean History 36 (2002), pp. 285309; Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Civility, Male Friendship,

and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Gender & History 13 (2001), pp. 22448; MartinSummers, Diasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production of Black Middle-ClassMasculinity, Gender & History 15 (2003), pp. 55074.



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5. The following, however, are exceptional in their attention to Masonic material culture: William D. Moore,From Lodge Room to Theatre: Meeting Spaces of the Scottish Rite, in C. Lance Brockman (ed.), Theatreof the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 18961929 (Minneapolis:Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, 1996), pp. 3051; C. Lance Brockman, Creating Scenic Illusion forthe Theatre and the Fraternity, in Brockman, Theatre of the Fraternity, pp. 92109; Martin Summers,Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 19001930

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 558.

6. Kenon Breazeale, In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer,Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20 (1994), pp. 122.

7. Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963) is perhaps the earliest and best-knownstatement of this position in Second Wave feminism.

8. For womens work in the home, see Ruth Schwartz Cowan,More Workfor Mother: The Ironies of HouseholdTechnology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Susan Strasser, NeverDone: A History of American Housework(New York: Pantheon, 1982).

9. Victoria de Grazia (ed.), with Ellen Furlough, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in HistoricalPerspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), especially de Grazia, Introduction, pp. 110;de Grazia, Changing Consumption Regimes, pp. 1124; Jennifer Jones, Coquettes and Grisettes: WomenBuying and Selling in Ancien Regime Paris, pp. 2553; David Kuchta, The Making of the Self-MadeMan: Class, Clothing, and English Masculinity, 16881832, pp. 5478; Leora Auslander, The Gendering

of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 79112.10. de Grazia, Introduction, pp. 4, 78; Auslander, Gendering of Consumer Practices, p. 79.11. Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 17501990 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 15; Thomas Postlewait, The Hieroglyphic Stage: American The-atre and Society, Post-Civil War to 1945, in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds), The Cam-bridge History of American Theatre, vol. 2: 18701945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),pp. 10795, esp. p. 151.

12. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London:Verso, 1996), p. 90; William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New AmericanCulture (New York: Pantheon, 1993).

13. As Summers notes, this linking of production with manhood was equally central to both black and whiteversions of Freemasonry: Manliness and Its Discontents, pp. 267.

14. Albert C. Stevens, The Cyclopaedia of Fraternities (2nd edn 1907; repr. Detroit: Gale, 1966), p. 114.15. Harland-Jacobs, All in the Family; Downes, Freemasonry in Barbados; William A. Muraskin, Middle-

Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1975); Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, pp. 165; Bayliss J. Camp and Orit Kent, Whata Mighty Power We Can Be: Individual and Collective Identity in African American and White FraternalInitiation Rituals, Social Science History 28 (2004), pp. 43983.

16. Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 18801930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1984); Carnes, Secret Ritual; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood.

17. Rituals were often written and rewritten with the goal of attracting members, e.g. the Odd Fellows in 1835,1845 and 1880, and the Knights of Pythias in 1866, 1882 and 1892. See Carnes, Secret Ritual, pp. 98104,for the Improved Order of Red Mens struggle to develop a successful ritual.

18. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American

Social Order, 17301840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 23973; James D.Carter, History of the Supreme Council, 33, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry SouthernJurisdiction, U.S.A. 18911921(Washington, DC:The Supreme Council, 33 Degree, 1971); S. Brent Morris,Boom to Bust in the Twentieth Century: Freemasonry and American Fraternities, The 1988 Anson JonesLecture, presented to the Texas Lodge of Research, 19 March 1988.

19. Moore, The Masonic Lodge Room; Edward W. Wolner, Chicagos Fraternity Temples: The Origins ofSkyscraper Rhetoric and the First of the Worlds Tallest Office Buildings, in Roberta Moudry (ed.), The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 98119.William D. Moore, From Lodge Room to Theatre: Meeting Spaces of the Scottish Rite, in Brockman(ed.), Theatre of the Fraternity, pp. 3051, discusses the evolution of staging and seating arrangements.

20. Charles T. McClenachan, The Book of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1867; repr.New York: A. H. Kellogg, 1901), pp. 199200.

21. These changes are discussed in Brockman (ed.), Theatre of the Fraternity, especially the essays by Moore,From Lodge Room to Theatre; Clawson, Spectatorship and Masculinity in the Scottish Rite, pp. 5271;Carnes, Scottish Rite and the Visual Semiotics of Gender, pp. 7291 and Brockman, Creating Scenic



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Illusion for the Theatre and the Fraternity, pp. 92109. See also Carter, History of the Supreme Council,pp. 15967, 175, 2034; William L. Fox, Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle: Two Centuries of ScottishRite Freemasonry in Americas Southern Jurisdiction (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997),pp. 1467.

22. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, pp. 395, 398; Roy Rosenzweig, Boston Masons, 19001935: The Lower Middle Class in a Divided Society, Journal of Voluntary Action Research 6 (1977),pp. 11926, here p. 123.

23. Roster of Scottish Rite Bodies of the Valley of Little Rock, 189798, Library of the House of the Temple(hereafter LHT), Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, Washington,DC; R. L. Polk & Co.s Little Rock City Directory 189798 (Little Rock: R. L. Polk, 1897); Scottish RiteBodies of St Louis, 1891, LHT; Goulds St. Louis Directory for 1890 (St Louis: Gould Directory Company,1890).

24. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: US GovernmentPrinting Office, 1975), Average Annual Earnings in All and Selected Industries and in Occupations,Series D 779793, p. 168.

25. Alphonse Cerza, A History of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in Illinois 18461965(Chicago: Illinois Council of Deliberation, 1966), pp. 54, 187.

26. Dayton Allen Willey, Scottish Rite Temple at Los Angeles, The New Age 7 (1907), pp. 5513, herep. 552.

27. Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 18901930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 41.

28. Wolner, Chicagos Fraternity Temples, pp. 98, 101.29. The California Bodies of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and Their New Home,

New Age 3 (1905), pp. 714, here p. 72; Reunion Program (Wichita, KS: Wichita Scottish Rite Bodies,1898), Library of the House of the Temple; Brockman, Creating Scenic Illusion; Lawrence J. Hill, TheChanging Light of Dramatic Initiation, in Brockman (ed.), Theatre of the Fraternity, pp. 11025. Brockmanfinds that 20 to 25 per cent of orders to major scenic design companies in the early twentieth century camefrom Scottish Rite temples. C. Lance Brockman, The Age of Scenic Art: The Nineteenth Century, in TheTwin City Scenic Collection: Popular Entertainment 18951929 (Minneapolis: University Art Museum,1987), pp. 4353.

30. Leach, Land of Desire, pp. 43, 82.

31. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 49; Robin Veder, Tableaux Vivants: PerformingArt, PurchasingStatus,Theatre Annual 48 (1995), pp. 1429; Leach,Land of Desire, p. 80; Butsch,Making of American Audiences,pp. 1115.

32. Scottish Rite written texts were aggressively relativistic: Born in a Protestant land, we are of that faith. . . born in the Jewish quarter of Aleppo, we should have contemned [sic] Christ as an imposter; in Con-stantinople we should have cried Allah il Allah God is great and Mahomet is his Prophet. Birthplaceand education give us our faith . . . No man is entitled positively to assert that he is right, where other men,equally intelligent, hold directly the opposite opinions. (McClenachan, Scottish Rite, pp. 43032). Yet thestaged rituals colourful depictions of Middle Eastern locales could be linked to the scientific racism ofthe day, vividly depicted at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, where the White City representedthe artistic and material achievements of civilisation, with Asian and Middle Eastern societies located

in a middle area in the Midway side-show and savage races at the opposite end. Robert W. Rydell, Allthe Worlds a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 18761916 (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 65. Thousands of Masonic visitors to the fair were also received atthe massive Masonic Temple, where they had the opportunity to witness an early version of Scottish Ritestaging.

33. Brockman, Age of Scenic Art, p. 7.34. Richard Butsch, Bowery Bhoys and Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American

Theater Audiences, American Quarterly 46 (1994), pp. 374405, here pp. 37980.35. Martina Kessel, The Whole Man: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-Century Germany,

Gender & History 15 (2003), pp. 131, here pp. 24.36. ODonnell, Philosophy and the Drama, pp. 4756.37. Sargent, The Player, pp. 3578. Identified as a drama critic thirty-second degree Mason, Sargent was best

known as the most authoritative writer on vaudeville in the east, writing principally for the New YorkMorning Telegraph under the name Chicot. Clippings in Epes W. Sargent folder, Billy Rose Collection,New York Public Library, Lincoln Center. Thanks to Richard Butsch for this reference.



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38. Epes W. Sargent, Detail and the Drama of the Degree, New Age 7 (1907), pp. 1757, here p. 175.39. Sargent, The Player, pp. 3578; Sargent, Detail, pp. 175, 177.40. Sargent, The Player, pp. 3578; Sargent, Detail, pp. 175, 177.41. Knox, What Excuse?, p. 254.42. Knox, What Excuse?, p. 254; Codex, The Stage in Masonry, The New Age 4 (1906), p. 379; Knox,

What Excuse?, p. 252.43. ODonnell, Philosophy and the Drama, p. 476; Knox, What Excuse?, pp. 2523.

44. Jackson Lears, Beyond Veblen: Rethinking Consumer Culture in America, in Simon J. Bronner (ed.),Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 18801920 (New York: Norton,1989), pp. 7397, here p. 75.

45. Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 17901870 (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1994), pp. 7071.

46. Codex, Stage in Masonry, p. 379, italics in original. The term man-milliner was made famous byRepublican politician Roscoe Conklings 1877 attack on political reformers. By using man milliner, E.Anthony Rotundo notes, Conkling evoked the idea of a man-woman. E. Anthony Rotundo, AmericanManhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books,1993), p. 271.

47. Jones, Coquettes and Grisettes, p. 3648. ODonnell, Philosophy and the Drama, p. 477; Jones, Coquettes and Grisettes, p. 36; ODonnell, Phi-

losophy and the Drama, pp. 4756.49. ODonnell, Philosophy and the Drama, p. 475.50. Russett, Sexual Science, p. 50. Of course these were characteristics associated with women as well. Other

treatments of recapitulation theory include Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural Historyof Gender and Race in the United States, 18801917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) andDominick Cavallo,Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 18801920 (Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

51. ODonnell, Philosophy and the Drama, p. 474; Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 25, 30.52. Codex, Stage in Masonry, p. 379; ODonnell, Philosophy and the Drama, p. 476; Knox, What Excuse?,

pp. 2523.53. ODonnell, Philosophy and the Drama, p. 476; Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 125.54. Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood, pp. 53, 7883.

55. Margaret Jacob, Money, Equality, Fraternity: Freemasonry and the Social Order in Eighteenth-CenturyEurope, in Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III (eds), The Culture of the Mar-ket: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 10225, here pp. 107,116.

56. John Brewer, Commercialization and Politics, in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, TheBirth of a Consumer Society: The Commercializationof Eighteenth-CenturyEngland(Bloomington:IndianaUniversity Press, 1982), pp. 197262, here p. 222.

57. Brewer, Commercialization and Politics, pp. 2223, 2512.58. Kuchta and others argue that the Great Renunciation, eighteenth-century mens retreat from fancy dress,

allowed middle-class men to assert their political rights by positioning themselves between two forms ofcorruption; an effeminate aristocracy and a vicious working-class while enabling aristocratic men, now cladmore simply, to defendtheir own claimsto political leadership andcivic virtue. Masonic useof artisanstools

and garb to signify moral worth may be seen as a further elaboration of this mode of political symbolism.Kuchta, Making of the Self-Made Man; Katya Silverman, Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse, inTania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment:Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington:IndianaUniversity Press, 1986), pp. 13952.

59. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 1011.60. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 1011; Rotundo, American Manhood, p. 3.61. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 1214.62. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 4; Rotundo, American Manhood, p. 6.63. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 7.64. Program,Maundy Thursday Obligatory Feast, Butte, Montana, 27 March 1902, Libraryof the House of the

Temple. The Butte menu closely approximates the rules for dining and ordering of courses, including oystersas the de rigueur first course, specified by famed matre dh otel Oscar Tschirky of the Waldorf-Astoria in

an 1899 periodical What To Eat. Erenberg, Steppin Out, pp. 49, 58.65. St Louis Scottish Rite Bodies, Reunion Program, 1114 November 1902, Library of the House of theTemple; Willey, Scottish Rite Temple at Los Angeles, pp. 553, 551.



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Masculity Consumption and the Transformation of Scottish Rite Masonry