After spending some time at the Odd Fellows retirement home in Eureka Lake, Polistra decided to seek out a lodge. She found a typical one in La Cygne** near the southeast corner of the state. Like most lodges it was in a downtown storefront. The building looks like it originally housed a bank. A grocery store was downstairs and the lodge clubroom was upstairs.
Approaching downtown..
The beautiful terracotta crest on top of the building announces the presence of the IOOF.
She drives up to the side door in her Bantam.
Let’s go upstairs.
At the top of the stairway….
And into the clubroom. Looks like a comfortable place for Friendship, Love and Trust, the three links in the organization’s logo.
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HISTORY
The history of the Odd Fellows parallels the economic history of USA. The lodge began in England around 1780, where it was mainly a drinking club. Like other lodges it developed a set of ceremonies and ranks. Unlike other lodges the members belonged to a variety of trades, so ‘odd’ seems to mean assorted or varied.
Thomas Wildey, a blacksmith, was a leader there. When he came to Baltimore in 1817 he founded a branch, which soon grew and spread to other cities. At first it was mainly a fraternal club. He formed a national organization in 1825. The IOOF is getting ready for its 200th birthday next year.
After Lincoln’s War accomplished its designed purpose of turning the country into a sweatshop to benefit Wall Street, social conditions for working men were intolerable. Lodges began providing real services for members, not just friendship. This passage from an 1889 history of the IOOF describes the situation dramatically.
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Most of the membership of the Odd Fellows were mechanics and day laborers, in a country where labor was comparatively poorly paid. It was all that the laboring man could do by industry to procure a sufficiency to meet his own pressing wants and the wants of those who were dependent upon him. With the great mass of the poor laborers there was no chance for increase of worldly goods.
When disease laid its paralyzing hand upon them and the income from labor was cut off, there was nothing laid up in store to draw and subsist upon. The poor man had in prospect a pauper’s grave and a forlorn and destitute family.
These are some of the things which gave rise to a society whose motto from its very origin has been “To relieve the distressed, bury the dead and educate the orphan.”
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By 1920 the Odd Fellows were the largest and least exclusive Mutual Benefit Society with two million members worldwide. In 1920 several trends came together. Social Economics and unions improved conditions for workers, and then the commercial insurers started to take over the MBS. In 1929 Wall Street bombed the country again, creating favorable conditions for MBS, but the New Deal acted quickly to relieve workers, so lodges continued to decline.
Now we’ve been bombed by Wall Street again, with no New Deal in sight, so conditions could be favorable for Mutual Benefit Societies again.
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** Random facts: La Cygne, the Swan, is on the Swan Swamp (Marais des Cygnes) river, the lowest part of Kansas. Marais rhymes with Sarah. In 1920, at the peak of the Odd Fellows, La Cygne had a population of 1000, and still does today. It was the center of the Kansas coal mining region, and had a bank and a weekly newspaper. Small towns were more completely equipped back then.
Harding, my second favorite president, was elected in 1920. He was an Odd Fellow, and FDR, the best president, was also an Odd Fellow.
Polistra's Mill 