South Bend Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders: The Lodge City on the St. Joseph

Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders · The Lodge City on the St. Joseph

For a hundred years South Bend, like every American industrial city, ran a second civic government after dark. Its first secret society was chartered in 1842, when the town was eleven years old, and its lodges multiplied with the factories until the city directory needed a standing department — "Secret and Benevolent Societies" — to hold them. By 1907 Timothy Howard, writing the county's history, could only say that the fraternal orders of South Bend were "exceedingly numerous," and then list them for three pages: three Masonic lodges and a German-speaking fourth tradition, two grand traditions of Odd Fellowship, Pythians in two separate orders divided by race, tents and hives of Maccabees, camps and groves of two rival Woodmen orders, a tribe of Red Men, courts of Foresters Catholic and independent, and an order of Owls that had been invented in a South Bend law office three years before and already claimed nests from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is worth stating plainly what held this world together, because the record states it plainly: beneath the passwords and the degrees, most of these orders were insurance companies and burial societies. They paid the sick benefit, carried the widow's pension, and buried the dead with ceremony — that was the machine inside the mystery, and the workingmen of Studebaker's and Oliver's who filled the lodge rooms knew it. One of this city's orders was not an import: the Order of Owls was founded here, in 1904, and for two decades its Supreme Nest governed a national order from North Main Street. One of them was an enemy the city fought in the street: the Ku Klux Klan, which organized here in 1923, kept a headquarters with a lighted cross on North Michigan Street, and was broken as an organization by 1926. This section holds the documented record of that whole world: who chartered what, when, where they met, and what is left of it.