The insurance orders: Woodmen, Maccabees, and the benefit machine

c. 1890 — 1920s

Life insurance with a ritual attached: Beneath the famous orders ran a second fraternal city, and the 1915 directory's societies pages are mostly its census. The Modern Woodmen of America kept two Fort Wayne camps — Camp No. 4761, meeting Monday nights in the Aldine Block, and a second camp, No. 3127, in the Odd Fellows' Hall — while the Woodmen of the World, a rival trunk off the same tree, met as Camp No. 129 in Dehm's Hall. The Knights of the Maccabees held Wayne Tent No. 54 in the K of P hall, and their women's counterpart, the Ladies of the Maccabees, kept Fort Wayne Hive No. 6 and Mad Anthony Hive No. 27. Around them the directory crowds the Royal Arcanum's Howard Council No. 246, the Royal League's Old Fort Council No. 192, the National Union's Kekionga Council No. 93 and Fort Wayne Council No. 837, the Order of Ben Hur's Court No. 15, the Independent Order of Foresters' Court Kekionga No. 1539, the United Commercial Travelers' Council No. 212, the Knights of the Golden Eagle's Burbage Castle No. 23, the Brotherhood of American Yeomen, the Degree of Honor, two Protective Home Circles, and the American Insurance Union. One order on the page was Fort Wayne's own export: the Ancient Order of Sphinx, whose supreme officers listed in 1915 — Supreme Worthy Master, Supreme Junior Master, Supreme Secretary, Supreme Treasurer — were Fort Wayne men meeting in the Lincoln Life Building, the mark of a fraternal order headquartered here.

These orders sold, with minimal disguise, the same product: an assessment-plan life insurance certificate, a sick benefit, and a funeral, delivered through a lodge because no commercial insurer would yet write workingmen's lives at prices they could pay. The ritual was the retention program; the lodge night was the collection round. When the history of Fort Wayne's secret societies is told as a story of grips and passwords it misses the point the directories make on their face — the "secret and benevolent societies" were the welfare state of a city that did not yet have one, and their decline, told below, followed the arrival of the real thing: commercial group insurance, employer benefits, and Social Security. The Maccabees, Woodmen and their kin have left no lodge in the city's present-day listings that this history could find; the Ancient Order of Sphinx left not even a successor address. What survives of them in Fort Wayne is the gravestone benefit made visible — the tree-stump monuments the Woodmen furnished their dead, which still stand in Lindenwood and the Catholic Cemetery, carved with the order's axe and wedge.

Sources:

1. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne city directory, 1915, "Secret and Benevolent Societies" — the camps, tents, hives, councils and courts named, with meeting places; the Ancient Order of Sphinx's supreme officers.
2. Fort Wayne News, "Eighty-Six Years of Lodge History" (1909) — the K.O.T.M. (Maccabees) treated among the modern orders.