Moral dividends: Freemasonry and finance capitalism in early-nineteenth-century America

Abstract

Using documents from the Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons of the State of Indiana (USA), I show how the material practices and symbolic orientations of finance capitalism became transposed into Freemasonry in the early-nineteenth century. I briefly discuss why this happened and point to how these developments shaped the institutional trajectory of Freemasonry. Next, I observe that the symbolic moral standing of Freemasonry became transposed onto finance capitalism as undertaken by its members and other white men like them. After a brief explanation, I outline how these developments affected the institutionalisation of finance capitalism.

Keywords:

• Institutional change
• finance capitalism
• joint stock form
• Freemasonry
• moral legitimacy

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Nilda Flores González, Lars Geschwind, Sydney Halpern, Abbey Hambright, Jerome Hendricks, Nick Rochin, Anna Soulsby, Judy Tseng, John Walsh and Anne Zacharias-Walsh. For helpful comments on this paper, she is also grateful to members of the European Group on Organization Studies’ Standing Working Group 08 on History and Organization Studies (July 2015, Athens, Greece and July 2016, Naples, Italy), the Social Science History Association panel on Corporations, Community and Culture (November 2015, Baltimore, USA), and the anonymous Business History reviewers.

Notes

1. Archer and Blau, “Class Formation,” 28.

2. Micklethwait and Woolridge, The Company.

3. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure”; Haydu, “Business Citizenship at Work.”

4. Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In.”

5. Kieser, “Why Organization Theory”; Zald, “More Fragmentation?” Clark and Rowlinson, “The Treatment of History”; Bucheli and Wadhwani, Organizations in Time.

6. Roy, Socializing Capital; Perrow, Organizing America; Cooke, “The Denial of Slavery”; Yates, Control Through Communication.

7. Skocpol, “How Americans Became Civic”; Kaufman, For the Common Good?

8. Buley, The Old Northwest; Cayton, Frontier Indiana; Carmony, Indiana, 1816–1850.

9. As in many other states, the US federal government emptied Indiana of its Native American population by force. A series of treaties confined Native Americans to progressively smaller portions of the state, and eventually expelled them toward the west, although not without resistance. See Campion, “Indian Removal.”

10. Hall, “A Historical Overview.”

11. Skocpol, “How Americans Became Civic.”

12. Knoop and Jones, A Short History.

13. Weisberger, McLeod and Morris, Freemasonry on Both Sides.

14. Skocpol, “How Americans Became Civic.”

15. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood; Skocpol, Diminished Democracy.

16. Archer and Blau, “Class Formation.”

17. Although gender and racial exclusion were not contested during the early-nineteenth century, both of these social boundaries were challenged and successfully defended later in the century. In response to their exclusion from American Freemasonry, African American men organised the parallel order of Prince Hall Freemasonry. See Muraskin, Middle-class Blacks; Walker, A Noble Fight.

18. McDonald, A History of Freemasonry.

19. In the late 1820s and 1830s, the Anti-Masonic Party was the first instance of a third political party in US history. It capitalised on a distrust of Freemasonry spurred by salacious reports of the 1826 disappearance and death of William Morgan in upstate New York, reportedly at the hands of his Masonic lodge. Political Anti-Masonry found most of its support in New England, New York and adjacent states, but as a cultural phenomenon it was somewhat more widespread. Although it temporarily decimated the number of Freemasons in many states, including Indiana, Anti-Masonry subsided by the late 1830s. See Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood.

20. Note that although American Freemasonry survives today, it differs somewhat from its nineteenth-century version. Similarly, its meanings and effects vary across geographic regions, as attested by studies of Freemasonry in Europe and in former European colonies other than the US. For example, see Kieser, “From Freemasons to Industrious”; Harland-Jacobs Builders of Empire; Arroyo, Writing Secrecy. As one prominent historian remarked, ‘In America, freemasonry has on the whole been far less controversial than in Europe.’ Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry, 8.

21. Most of the sources I use are available in digital form on the Internet. One reason is that the aging Baby Boom generation has a massive interest in amateur genealogy, for which Masonic records can be a useful resource. See Rodriguez, “How Genealogy.” The compendium of Proceedings from 1817–1845 was digitised by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The 1848 and 1868 Proceedings were digitised by HathiTrust. McDonald’s 1898 history of the Grand Lodge was digitised by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center. Smith’s 1968 history of the Grand Lodge and Crain’s 1928 centennial history of Tipton Lodge #33 are available in public libraries. I bought used copies of these books online.

22. See Rowlinson et al., “Research Strategies” for a discussion of the difference between social documents and narrative texts.

23. Üsdiken and Kieser, “Introduction” describe an integrationist strategy for organisational history, while Rowlinson et al., “Research Strategies” delineate a strategy they call analytically structured.

24. Proc 1817–1845, 334.

25. Ibid., 345.

26. Ibid., 362.

27. Ibid., 409, 440.

28. Proc 1848, 36.

29. The veracity of these ancient origins is usually questioned in scholarly accounts of Freemasonry, such as Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood; Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood; Kieser, “From Freemasons to Industrious.” This makes such claims a good example of an invented tradition. See Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.

30. Smith, Goodly Heritage, 59.

31. Moore, Masonic Temples, 18.

32. Proc 1817–1845, 392.

33. Proc 1817–1845, 66.

34. Ibid., 220, 265, 314.

35. Crain, Historical Abridgement, 24.

36. Ibid., 35, 45–46.

37. Ibid., 48, 60.

38. Ibid., 50.

39. Ibid., 104–105.

40. Ibid., 43.

41. Ibid., 105.

42. Proc 1817–1845, 366.

43. Ibid., 367.

44. Ibid., 407.

45. Proc 1817–1845, 410, 415; Proc 1848, 29–31.

46. Proc 1817–1845, 382–383.

47. Ibid., 441.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 456.

50. Ibid.

51. Proc 1848, 75.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Proc 1848, 77.

55. Proc 1848, 76.

56. Smith, Goodly Heritage, 98.

57. American Freemason, 313.

58. Smith, Goodly Heritage, 99.

59. Moore, Masonic Temples, 124–129.

60. Smith, Goodly Heritage, 68.

61. Smith, Goodly Heritage, 172.

62. Proc 1817–1845, 359.

63. Ibid., 374.

64. Proc 1848, 76.

65. Ibid., 77.

66. Mullins, “In the Sweat.”

67. Proc 1817–1845, 426.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., 427–428.

70. Ibid., 428.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid., 367.

73. Proc 1868, 29.

74. McDonald, A History of Freemasonry, 382.

75. Smith, Goodly Heritage, 464–465.

76. Weber, The Protestant Ethic; Mutch, Scottish Presbyterians.

77. Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood.

78. Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In,” 243.

79. Meyer and Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations,” 345.

80. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure”; Clemens and Cook, “Politics and Institutionalism.”

81. Boxenbaum and Jonsson, Chapter 2.

82. Sahlin and Wedlin, Chapter 8, 219.

83. Erlingsdóttir and Lindberg, “Isomorphism, Isopraxism and Isonymism.”

84. Proc 1817–1845, 393, 410.

85. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital.”

86. Mutch, “Communities of Practice”; Emirbayer and Johnson, “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis.”

87. Kieser, “From Freemasons to Industrious”; cf. Newton, “From Freemasons.”

88. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital.”

89. Kaufman’s For the Common Good? discusses how fraternal orders create factionalism; Clemens’ “From City Club” discusses opportunity hoarding.

90. Haydu, “Business Citizenship at Work,” 1426.

91. Dacin et al., “Formal Dining,” 1412.

92. Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut; Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood.

93. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood.

94. Charles, Service Clubs; Mayo, The American Country Club; Kendall, Members Only; Clemens “From City Club.”

95. Hall, “A Historical Overview.”

96. Arthur, Advice to Young Men, 158.

97. Ibid., 161–163.

98. Proc 1817–1845, 31.

99. Hilkey, Character is Capital.

100. Ross, “Our New York Letter,” 227, quoted in Moore, Masonic Temples, 124.

101. Smith, Goodly Heritage, 97.

102. Singh et al., “Organizational Legitimacy.”

103. Suchman, “Managing Legitimacy,” 579.

104. Suchman “Managing Legitimacy”; Higgins and Gulati, “Stacking the Deck.”

105. Weber, “The Protestant Sects.”

106. DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited,” 157.

107. Zald and Lounsbury, “The Wizards of Oz”; Willmott, “Why Institutional Theory.”

108. Rowlinson et al., “Critical Management.”

109. Cooper et al., Chapter 28.

110. Rowlinson et al., “Competing Perspectives”; Decker, “Postcolonial Transitions in Africa”; Harvey et al., “Andrew Carnegie.”

111. cf. Perrow, Organizing America.

112. McDonald, A History of Freemasonry, 296.

113. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture; Skocpol, Diminished Democracy.

114. Weber, “The Protestant Sects.”

115. Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood.

116. Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut; Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood; Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood.

117. Kieser, “From Freemasons to Industrious”; Newton, “From Freemasons”; Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry.

118. Clark and Rowlinson “The Treatment of History”; Zald, “Spinning Disciplines.”

119. Clemens, The People’s Lobby; Suddaby et al., “Historical Institutionalism.”

120. Zucker, “Organizations as Institutions”; Kieser, “Organizational, Institutional”; “Why Organization Theory.”

121. Clemens, The People’s Lobby; Perrow, Organizing America; Schneiberg et al., “Social Movements.”

122. Decker et al., “New Business Histories!”

123. Lamoreaux, “Rethinking the Transition.”

124. Clemens, “Toward a Historicized Sociology”; Haydu “Business Citizenship at Work.”

125. Zunz, Making America Corporate; Roy, Socializing Capital; Micklethwait and Woolridge, The Company.