The Universal Language of Freemasonry - ArchiMeD - Johannes ...

Chapter 8 - Categorization of Rituals 677
And since then I've made my progress, Though I'm weary sore and battered,
Remembering these daring feats, There's one comfort 'midst my ills
In a carriage which a servant For I'm a "Brotherhood" member
Pushes slowly thro' the streets. And the "Brotherhood" pays the bills.
It will be an interesting future task for some student of economy or sociology
to find out whether fraternal insurance companies or ordinary ones were more
popular among the American population in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.
Certainly, this is also a question of the region, for in big cities the clients of
insurance companies certainly differed from the ones in rural areas, having
different ambitions and predilections (secrecy, brotherhood, etc.). For many
brethren, membership in such a fraternal organization surely meant nothing but
having a jolly good time, with some goat-riding, and we can imagine that this
was rather the case in rural districts. It is also clear that "profane" insurance
companies were competing with Masonry, causing the latter a loss of
membership. The Masons were in a dilemma, since on the one hand, they had to
defend their confessed purpose to belong to an ethical institution designed for
self-improvement, and on the other hand they had to fight for attractiveness by
offering security. The following statement, although formulated with regard to
Prince Hall Masonry for the colored people, certainly is valid for Freemasonry in
general:
In their attempt to maintain standards, the Masons were reluctant to add
the type of insurance feature that other fraternities used to attract a
membership. They did not want to appear to be competing for
adherents, nor to be forced to lower their requirements in order to
maintain the system. Ultimately, many Masonic jurisdictions did give in
to the pressure but worked hard to prevent the subordination of their
social functions to their insurance role. 1648
Another side of insurance fraternities, which cannot be neglected here
although this problem leaves plenty of room for prejudice and speculation, is the
case of abuse. Thus, Blanchard enumerates a case that allegedly happened
among the Modern Woodmen of America, where dead bodies were invented in
order to receive benefit. We are not able to verify this special case, but most
certainly there were some "black sheep" among many righteous brethren.
1648 Muraskin, p. 40.
Another fact which has to do with the question, is that insurance lodges
have a relation to the crimes of murder and suicide. It is true that all life
insurance is liable to the same objection, but that does not avoid the
difficulty. It is a misfortune that any one should ever have a money
interest in the death of another. When it is the case that one has such an
interest the temptation to murder on the one hand and suicide on the
other springs into being. Along with these comes another, viz., the
temptation to buy a corpse and attempt to defraud the order. Those