Masculity Consumption and The Transformation of Scottish Rite Masonry

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233
Mary Ann Clawson, ’Masculinity, Consumption and the Transformation of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the Turn-of-the-Century United States’
Gender & History, Vol.19 No.1 April 2007, pp. 101–121.
Masculinity, Consumption and the

Transformation of Scottish Rite Freemasonry
in the Turn-of-the-Century United States
Mary Ann Clawson
Beat the drum; blow the horn; flash the sign; the degrees going cheap; 32nd for a song; money’s
worth or money back.1
During the 1890s, Scottish Rite Masons in the United States began to transform their
elaborate initiation rituals into a fully staged theatrical spectacle. The changes – a
shift from lodge room to auditorium, the constitution of initiates as an audience of
spectators and the introduction of elaborate sets and lighting – transformed the ritual
into an avowedly theatrical experience, located the Rite within the era’s growing array
of opportunities for commercial entertainment and consumer choice and produced
an explosive growth in the hitherto floundering organisation. At the same time, as a
drama performed by men and for men, the staged ritual seemed to challenge the era’s
cultivation of female audiences, emerging as a distinctive masculine entertainment
genre within a culture that associated frivolous consumption with women.
These changes also produced a round of trenchant criticism from traditionalists
within the order, who decried what they saw as the commercialisation, feminisation
and general dumbing-down of their treasured ritual. ‘Greatest show on earth!’ lamented
William Knox. ‘Were not the degrees sold to me, and, in the spirit of commercialism,
shall I not sell the same?’ Critics like Knox and Francis O’Donnell asserted the moral
superiority of traditional practice which ‘does the great work without stages and scene-
settings, robes and regalias, electric lights or pipe organs’, relying rather on ‘assiduous
devotion and attention’, ‘cultivation of analytic thought’ and the ‘almighty power of
Reason’ to produce ‘a great Mason, otherwise a truly good man’.2
The conflation of Masonry and manhood was central to this conflict. To the grow-
ing number of enthusiasts who flocked to the energised order, the staged ritual was
an alluring blend of edification and entertainment, enacted in surroundings they ex-
perienced as luxurious, tasteful and manly. To the critics, the new mode of conferral
represented a loss of both Masonic and masculine integrity, an unprecedented assim-
ilation into a regime of empty commercialism. Identifying spectacle with femininity
and childhood, with the ‘lower orders’ and the ‘lower races’ and with ‘all those groups

C The Author 2007. Journal compilation
C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

102 Gender & History
outside the charmed circle of Caucasian male adulthood’, the traditionalists champi-
oned a ritual experience that would defend an earnest, active and self-denying manhood
against the onslaught of a passive, self-indulgent and feminised consumerism.3
During the past twenty-five years, Freemasonry has emerged as an important site
for the study of masculine identity construction in a range of settings and historical eras.
While they vary in their attention to issues of class, race and nationality, these studies
share an understanding of the lodge as a homo-social space in which historically specific
masculinities could be articulated and shaped.4 But the story has been largely told
without reference to the implications of Masons’ engagement with material practices,
in particular market-based consumption – the acquisition, through purchase, of the
physical spaces, regalia and ritual objects that sustained the Masonic experience both
practically and symbolically.5 Through this absence, scholars have acceded, however
unwittingly, to a dichotomisation that associates masculinity with production while
defining consumer culture, pejoratively, as women’s sphere.
The purpose of this study, therefore, is twofold. First, it seeks to extend and
complicate our understanding of Freemasonry through an examination of how one
American organisation, the Scottish Rite, used consumption and spectacle to increase
its visibility and widen its appeal to prospective members. Yet the vehement opposi-
tion to this largely successful innovation suggests that conflicts over fraternal esoterica
offer privileged insight into more fundamental controversies about the shifting mean-
ings of white bourgeois manhood in its relation to the burgeoning culture of mass
consumption and commercial entertainment in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century America. Thus the case of the Scottish Rite also advances understanding of
masculine consumption practices by contributing to a growing scholarly recognition of
European and American men’s complex engagements with consumer culture and the
varying conceptions of masculine identity and privilege such engagements proposed.
Gender and consumption

Consumer society has long linked women to consumption and men to production. As
Kenon Breazeale notes, ‘Much of what the modern world deems appropriate sex roles
is embedded in a nutshell dichotomy – men produce and women shop’.6 Within this
dichotomy, men are portrayed as untouched by consumer culture and untainted by its
supposed superficialities. Early feminist scholarship accepted not only the accuracy of
the dichotomy but the moral hierarchy it implied. Often this took the form of seeing
women’s consignment to consumption as a form of bondage, a source of oppression that
women were to overcome through paid employment and economic self-sufficiency.7
Over time, however, an increasingly dominant approach sought to undermine the di-
vision by unearthing women’s productive activities – looking at both the unwritten
history of women as paid workers and, simultaneously, at the content and value of
women’s unpaid work in the home. Part of this effort was to recast consumption itself
as a form of useful labour that was essential to material survival as well as to social
and cultural reproduction in an increasingly monetarised and commodified society.8
But just as women’s labour had been rendered invisible, so had men’s consumption.
The masculine side of the dichotomy, which posited men as the disciplined, abstemious
and productive counter to feminine frivolity, went largely unexamined. Only recently
have feminist scholars sought to challenge this hierarchy by identifying masculine

C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007
Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the United States 103
consumption as an equally important site for the construction of gender.9 As Victoria

de Grazia argues, capitalist modernity developed through and as consumer society.
This meant the ‘transformation of goods from being relatively static symbols around
which hierarchies were ordered to being more directly constitutive of class, social
status, and personal identity’. Within this framework, commodity consumption is seen
as productive of gender for men as well as women: a process that ‘transforms[s] a
female into a woman’ (and a male into a man) within the ‘transformative powers’ of a
capitalist economy that ‘constantly refashions notions of authentic, essential woman-
and manhood’.10
Commodity consumption thus becomes both a major medium of social reproduc-
tion and a strategic resource in the articulation and deployment of class, racial and
gender distinctions. Given this, consumption could also emerge as a site of struggle
where conceptions of gender and relations between gender and other forms of hierarchy
and power were defined and negotiated, both between men and women and, impor-
tantly for this study, among men. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
United States, the Scottish Rite was one such site where alternative definitions of mas-
culinity were formulated and contested through white middle-class men’s practical and
symbolic relationships to consumer society.
The turn-of-the-century period in which Scottish Rite Masons refashioned the
cultural practices of their organisation has been repeatedly characterised as a formative
moment in the development of American culture more generally. At this time, the
United States became actively involved in empire, in Cuba and the Philippines; the
segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era took firm hold in the South; Frederick
Winslow Taylor and scientific management transformed the control of labour and,
crucially for my argument here, the ideal of self-realisation and the articulation of
social status became more widely linked to consumer choice. Within this context,
an emphasis on visual display was central to the emerging symbiosis of commerce
and entertainment: the theatrical focus on elaborate stage sets, lighting and costumes
privileged appearance and served as an incitement to consumption, while department-
store shopping, with its display windows and exuberant public spaces, emerged as ‘the
continuation, by other means, of the public delight in curiosities, spectacle, and feats
of wonder that were offered up in the world of entertainment’.11
Many scholars have argued that the intensified linking of commerce and entertain-
ment was part of a much larger social and cultural reorientation that reorganised un-
derstandings of both class and gender. In class terms, mass production and distribution
enabled middle-class people to adopt ‘new standards of domestic culture previously re-
stricted to the upper class’ and to partake of even more opulent displays of class-marked
consumption in the expansive public spaces being created by turn-of-the-century
entrepreneurs.12 But both contemporary and retrospective analysts have understood
this change as a highly gendered one, organised around the image of the avid woman
consumer, within a dichotomous framework that continued to link men to production
and women to consumption.
For American men, then, the shift to a consumer society was complex because
it so directly challenged an earlier definition of manliness as residing in self-mastery,
hard work and control over impulse. Men’s contradictory relationship to consumption
and pleasure in this era is undoubtedly part of what has led some scholars to identify

the 1890s and early 1900s as a moment of innovation, contestation and even crisis
when the terms and meanings of male identity were particularly at issue. Thus the
Scottish Rite’s turn-of-the-century transformation occurred at a particularly significant
moment. By offering dramatic spectacle in lavish surroundings to male-only audiences,
the Scottish Rite helped promote an emergent model of masculinity, grounded in leisure
and consumption rather than the discipline of hard work.13
The Scottish Rite in the fraternal world

The term ‘fraternalism’ commonly designates those organisations that approximate the
Masonic model of a male-identified secret society organised around elaborate initia-
tion rituals and ascension through multiple levels, or degrees, of membership. As the
nation’s largest complex of dues-paying membership organisations, fraternal orders
were a major social and cultural presence throughout Protestant America, both white
and black, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1900, for example,
the two largest, the Masons and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, had one mil-
lion members each, while at least four others, all modelled on Freemasonry, had over
500,000, thus totalling approximately 20 per cent of the total adult white male popula-
tion of 21.9 million.14 At the same time, African Americans, barred from the racially
exclusionary organisations of the dominant white majority, established parallel orders
such as the Prince Hall Masons and the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, which oc-
cupied an equally important role in black communities. The racially exclusive practices
of white Masons in the US conflicted quite obviously with Freemasonry’s explicitly
articulated universalism. In most parts of the British Empire, this contradiction was ad-
dressed, although not without controversy, through the admission of elite members of
the colonised groups into Masonic lodges. In the United States, however, the dominant
group took a different approach, which not only denied African Americans admission
to white Masonic lodges, but refused to acknowledge the Masonic legitimacy of Prince
Hall Masonry, despite its longtime recognition by the Grand Lodge of England.15
Fraternal organisations are distinctive in their use of elaborate initiation rituals
to create fictive brotherhoods. As both Lynn Dumenil and Mark Carnes emphasise,
the ritual, a quasi-religious secret performance intended to inculcate morality and pro-
vide ethical instruction, was key to the orders’ assertion of unity and moral purpose.
Nineteenth-century fraternal ritual also operated, however, as a form of participatory
theatre, a systematically marketed entertainment genre that was a major selling-point
to prospective members.16 The repeated efforts of nineteenth-century orders to develop
appealing rituals suggest that for many men the high point of fraternal participation
was the opportunity to play these dramatic roles and thus to engage in a form of leisure
activity.17
Early Masonry was shaped around a craft identity, tracing its heritage to the me-
dieval lodges of working stonemasons. Emerging in the eighteenth century, it centred
on the degree titles of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason, its arti-
sanal associations signalled by the wearing of mechanics’ aprons and the use of the
square and compass as ritual objects. Enthusiasm for Masonic ceremonial, however,
led to the multiplication of degrees and creation of esoteric rituals that cast initiates
as Judean princes and Crusader knights. Freemasonry’s craft identity, expressed in the
three foundational degrees, now vied with more aristocratic myths of origin.

Within this tradition, the Scottish Rite developed in the early nineteenth-century
United States as a system of twenty-nine higher degrees set in ‘exotic’ Middle Eastern
locales: King Solomon’s temple, the palaces of King Cyrus and King Darius, the
Sinai desert, the court of Saladin and the lodge of the Crusader knights. Unlike its
popular rival, the ten-degree York Rite system, and despite the dramatic possibilities its
ritual seemed to offer, the Scottish Rite remained a relatively minor part of the larger
Masonic world for most of the nineteenth century, with perhaps 10–15,000 members
in 1890. By the early 1900s, however, the Rite’s growth had accelerated, increasing
from 40,000 members in 1900 to 590,000 in 1927. Strikingly, this period of explosive
growth coincides quite precisely with the appearance of the staged ritual as its most
distinctive feature.18
From the lodge room to the stage

Scottish Rite texts delineated the costumes to be worn by ritual participants: the Grand
High Priest, for example, wore a purple and gold tiara, jewel-studded breastplate, white
linen tunic and purple robe studded with bells and pomegranates. Like other fraternal
associations in the post-Civil-War US, the Scottish Rite had access to the elaborate
commercially produced costumes sold by mail-order catalogue and, in many cases,
to the increasingly grand Masonic halls of the era. But the customary configuration
of space in the traditional, rectangular Masonic lodge room posed problems for the
complex Scottish Rite ceremonies, as a single degree could have up to four separate
scenes, each with its own mandated decor and props.19
The Fifteenth Degree, for example, known as the Knight of the East, moved
between the Grand Lodge of Perfection at Jerusalem and the ‘brilliantly lighted’ palace
of King Cyrus of Persia. In this degree, the initiate played Zerubbabel, ‘a Prince of the
House of Judah’, who travelled to Persia to demand that King Cyrus free the Israelites
from bondage. When he was taken prisoner, his defiant assertion of principle moved
Cyrus to free him and Zerubbabel returned triumphantly to Jerusalem following a final
battle with a company of renegade guards.20
Despite these dramatic possibilities, many found themselves dissatisfied with the
quality of the ritual experience, as well as the practical difficulties of performing mul-
tiple scenes in the traditional lodge setting. In response, Scottish Rite Masons in the
southwest began to present their rituals as staged, pageant-like dramatic events. By
1910, many local organisations had moved their initiations from traditional rectangular
lodge rooms to specially-constructed auditoriums, equipped with proscenium stages
and state-of-the-art theatrical lighting and scenery, where the twenty-nine degrees were
conferred at twice-yearly events titled Reunions.21
Degree initiation, which had formerly stretched over months and even years, was
now compressed into a Reunion lasting three to four days, in which candidates received
degrees in groups of several hundred, increasing to as many as 1,000 by the 1920s. With
the exception of one individual, chosen as the ‘exemplar’, initiates sat as an audience
of spectators rather than acting as the protagonists of the ritual drama. An improved
standard of presentation accompanied this shift, as degree enactors memorised rather
than read their lines and Scottish Rite bodies extolled their magnificent costumes,
sets and special effects. Finally, the Reunion alternated degree conferral with elabo-
rate meals and socialising in the temples or cathedrals of the Rite, their banquet and

billiard rooms, libraries and lounges providing many of the amenities of an urban men’s
club.
These changes had significant implications for the experience of Scottish Rite
initiation. On the one hand, the increasingly elaborate, luxurious character of Scottish
Rite structures was consistent with larger trends in Masonic construction. On the other
hand, the move to the stage was a distinct, and controversial, innovation within the larger
Masonic universe, one that suggested a departure from the more rigorous demands of
the traditional initiation experience towards an increasing use of consumption and
spectacle to cement fraternal bonds and orchestrate claims to individual and collective
status.
Examination of Scottish Rite members in two locations, Little Rock, Arkansas,
and St Louis, Missouri, is consistent with earlier research on Masonic lodges in the
late nineteenth-century United States, which found a mixed-class composition with
a preponderance of middle-class proprietors, accompanied by a significant minority
of skilled workers and a smaller number of more prosperous entrepreneurs and pro-
fessionals at the upper end of the spectrum.22 Little Rock, a small Southern city of
40–50,000, approximated this model, as a minority of blue-collar workers, predom-
inantly train conductors and locomotive engineers, mixed with a majority of small-
to medium-sized proprietors, professionals and local clergy, including an Episcopal
rector and a rabbi. St Louis, a much larger Midwestern city of over 400,000, drew a
somewhat more elite membership of entrepreneurs and professionals located in central
business-district offices, with little or no representation of manual workers or small
retailers at one end of the spectrum, or of larger capitalists at the other.23
Despite this relatively modest profile, affiliation with the Scottish Rite suggested
loftier class aspirations on the part of its adherents. Scottish Rite initiation was costly,
ranging between $100 and $200 for ascension through the full complement of degrees.
This was a hefty sum at a time when in 1900 the earnings of all non-farm employees
averaged $486 per worker, with railroad wage earners receiving an average of $560
per year, postal employees $878 and ministers $794.24 The size, cost and ambition of
Scottish Rite buildings, again reflecting the aspirations of their members, continued
to escalate during the early twentieth century. Construction of the 1917 Temple in
Bloomington, Illinois, a town of only 27,000, cost $510,000 with scenery, equipment
and furnishings accounting for an additional $76,000.25 With the elite urban men’s
club evidently serving as a model, Scottish Rite buildings often contained not only
ritual spaces and meeting rooms, but dining halls, lounges, libraries, billiard and card
rooms and ladies’ parlours. These features bespoke not only an interest in tasteful
consumption, but also an altered conception of the lodge hall – from a ritual site to, as
Dayton Allen Willey wrote of the Los Angeles temple, ‘a favorite gathering place for
members of the Scottish Rite who would know each other socially’.26
This new tone was reinforced through the organisation of the Reunion as a three-
to four-day period in which degree conferral was punctuated by luncheons, dinners
and late-evening refreshments. Banquet menus were replete with upper-class reference
points – fragile foods not locally available, multiple courses and wines chosen to match
each course. Here too, Scottish Rite practices echoed a growing urban middle-class taste
for luxurious dining out, an experience which, as Erenberg notes, offered ‘fantasies . . .
of a more sumptuous and indulgent life’.27 The ritual’s placement within a framework
of banqueting and socialising in the well-appointed lounges, libraries, billiard rooms

and dining rooms of the newly constructed Scottish Rite temples provided an aura of
urban glamour, forging a link between spectacular entertainment and status-conscious
consumption.
The growing size and luxury of Scottish Rite buildings was consistent with the
increasing ambition of Masonic construction more generally. Perhaps the most notable
example was Chicago’s Masonic Temple. The world’s tallest commercial building at
the time of its completion in 1892, it combined extensive Masonic accommodations
with offices, restaurants and retail space.28 The introduction of the staged ritual, on the
other hand, was a distinctive Scottish Rite innovation, a more fundamental reconcep-
tualisation of the classic initiation experience in which the shift from lodge room to
auditorium boldly defined the ritual as a work of theatre.
Indeed, leaders quickly characterised the new practices as theatrical in character
and thereby shaped the expectations of initiates accordingly. Even in the 1890s, when
the earliest stagings occurred in Arkansas and Kansas, Reunion programmes resem-
bling theatre playbills identified degree enactors as ‘dramatis personae’. References to
directors and to ‘Masonic actors’ were commonplace by the early 1900s, with com-
mercial theatre explicitly referenced as a standard of comparison. ‘Not a theatre in the
City has so complete and thorough an electrical equipment’, boasted the Scottish Rite’s
The New Age magazine of the recently completed San Francisco temple, while ‘the
massive auditorium [of Wichita, Kansas] is considered as fine, according to its size,
as any modern metropolitan theatre in the country’. Scottish Rite ritualists based their
innovations in staging on explicit collaboration with commercial theatre entrepreneurs
from whom they purchased the scenery, lighting and special effects that produced light
sabre battles, molten lava cascades and ghostly apparitions.29
Such changes connoted a significant reorientation of the initiate to the ritual ex-
perience. The earlier lodge was also a dramatic event, but its enactment emphasised
candidates’ direct participation in the ritual trials. Traditional Scottish Rite ceremony
had placed the fully costumed individual initiate at the drama’s centre, where he might
be bound in chains, fight a battle and be invested with the signs, handshakes and jewels
of the degree. In contrast, the fully staged ritual constructed initiates as observers rather
than protagonists of the initiatory drama. The redefinition of initiates as an audience,
along with the use of elaborate stage effects in a theatrical setting, placed initiates
in what was, arguably, a more passive relationship to the initiatory tests while trans-
forming Scottish Rite enactments into something resembling a commercial popular
entertainment allied with the era’s enthusiasm for spectacle.
Scottish Rite theatre – accommodation and contradiction

The turn of the century was an era when popular culture became more visually oriented –
more dominated by spectacular display and less focused on the spoken and written word.
This was the case in print media, where by the late 1890s, ‘eye appeal’ had begun to
rival copy for prominence in advertisements as well as in the proliferating public spaces
– department stores, restaurants, vaudeville palaces, railroad terminals, international
expositions – that William Leach characterises as ‘adult fantasy environments’ and
‘palaces of consumption’.30 As the model and precursor for many of these innovations,
theatrical productions of the 1890s ‘played down dialogue and narrative and played
up “living stage pictures”’, with famed producer David Belasco boasting that ‘“the

characters present on the stage are really secondary to the light effects”’. ‘“Our actors”’,
noted one critic, ‘are now less rhetorical and more pictorial – as they must be on the
stage of our modern theater’, a theatre of ‘sumptuous spectacle’ that functioned as a
‘celebration of materiality, and an advertisement for consumption’.31
The Scottish Rite ritual was easily assimilated to such a concept of theatre as
‘grand spectacles of light and motion’. Its Middle Eastern locales played on the era’s
taste for ‘orientalist’ exotica and lent themselves to elaborate and colourful staging,
as did its array of esoteric degrees – Master of the Ninth Arch, Patriarch Noachite,
Knight of the Brazen Serpent.32 With depictions of landscapes ‘so realistic that the
spectator can readily imagine he hears the noise of the water falling over the cataract’,
the elaborate professionally designed sets and lighting produced a ‘visual experience
to rival what was available on the best of American stages’.33 But if the world of
commercial entertainment guided the evolution and reception of the staged ritual, fra-
ternal traditions of masculine sociability and feminine exclusion guaranteed its dis-
tinctive trajectory. As the product of a male-only organisation, Scottish Rite drama
was rife with contradictions in an era distinguished by an increasing cultivation of
women as audience members and consumers, occupants of public space and cultural
consciousness.
By 1900, women theatre-goers were a major audience presence and lucrative
market for both vaudeville and legitimate theatre, the latter increasingly defined as
their special province. This commercial and cultural reconfiguration meant that public
spaces and entertainment venues once dominated by men were now not only accessible
to respectable women but catered to them. In consequence, many men sought alternative
entertainments such as variety theatre, burlesque and sporting events, where masculine
hegemony remained secure.
On the stage as well, women assumed a larger role, as both the personification
of virtue and the objects of male gaze. In contrast, the Scottish Rite depicted a world
in which women appeared as neither sex objects nor the protagonists of sentimental
drama. Their absence, both physically and symbolically, guaranteed the exclusion of
many of the era’s most sacred and dependable dramatic themes, such as womanly
virtue, motherly love and the defence of home and family – indeed the entire private
sphere as it was popularly understood – from the discursive universe of the Rite. As a
result, the Masonic scenic repertoire omitted the kitchens, gardens and conservatories
that signified romance and domesticity, harking back instead to an earlier theatrical era
of didactic moralism, when playbills were selected to appeal to male audiences, and
‘“manly” virtues were preferred over romance, robust heroes and villains over matinee
idols’.34 The Scottish Rite stage was a masculine space inhabited by men, who appear
only as public figures, as rulers, soldiers and religious leaders.
Scottish Rite dramatisation can, therefore, be seen as a masculine response to
what Richard Butsch has called the ‘re-gendering’ of legitimate theatre, a vehicle
by which men attempted to reclaim narrative drama as a masculine activity. Moreover,
unlike many other male entertainment genres, which carried a faintly disreputable aura,
the Scottish Rite provided its participants with considerable moral capital. As a form
of entertainment for men, the Scottish Rite synthesised turn-of-the-century spectacle
with earlier traditions of masculine rectitude. By addressing only men and recognising
men alone as moral actors, the Scottish Rite ritual defined masculine identity through a
discourse that effaced women and home, two of the era’s most potent symbols, rendered

them irrelevant to life’s highest truths and noblest contests and thus claimed a moral
high ground often ceded to women.
Yet such an assertion of masculine autonomy, as Martina Kessel notes, carries
with it a vulnerability to charges of feminisation, a susceptibility less present in more
relational or polarised conceptions of gender in which women represent a visible –
albeit subordinated – presence.35 Through its positioning of men as both audience
and protagonists of a dazzlingly lit, colourfully costumed drama, Scottish Rite staging
asserted masculine self-sufficiency. But in doing so, it violated many of the era’s con-
ventions of masculine self-presentation. It was this emphasis on visual spectacle, with
its glorification of consumption and implicit feminine associations, which so outraged
the traditionalist critics of the new staged ritual.
‘Degrees for sale’

While the spread of the staged Scottish Rite led to rapid organisational growth, it also
provoked controversy. The debate that erupted in the pages of the Scottish Rite maga-
zine The New Age turned on the question of whether the dramatised ritual necessarily
obscured and detracted from the moral lessons of the spoken text or whether, when
properly presented, performance could be used to enhance reception of Masonic truths.
Any change that diluted the authority of the ritual and detracted from the realisation
of this great purpose would be unacceptable to the order’s most committed adher-
ents, who equated the making of a ‘great Mason’ with the formation of ‘a truly good
man’.36
In this dispute, Epes W. Sargent, a prominent theatre critic, as well as an enthusias-
tic Scottish Rite Mason, embraced the dramatic approach. While Sargent acknowledged
that the staged ritual was often unsuccessful, imperilling the meaning of the ‘real text’
as opposed to ‘the pomp and ceremony of the drama’, he nonetheless championed its
possibilities, maintaining that the ‘advantage of the drama is that it more closely holds
the mind by making appeal to the eye, thus centering the attention’.37 This goal could
be attained through improved staging.
Attention to historically authentic sets and costumes would create a unified expe-
rience, eliminating the incongruous juxtapositions that occurred when the ‘Hebrews in
the wilderness’, wearing short hair, patent leather shoes and high collars emerging from
their robes, ‘robbed these splendid dramas of half their effectiveness’.38 This more ef-
fective visual presentation had to be accompanied by more knowledgeable and deeply
felt acting. ‘A parrot-wise repetition of the dialogue is not all-sufficient, no matter how
strongly the ceremonies may appeal to the visual sense’. Quality of performance could
be improved through longer and more disciplined rehearsals (‘most Masonic actors
are not what their professional brothers call quick studies’) and elucidation of the rit-
ual’s symbolism, so that the cast was not only ‘equipped with something more than a
guesswork knowledge of their own lines’, but ‘imbued with a spirit of enthusiasm for
the work’. Above all, this meant submission to the director’s authority in matters of
staging, discipline and conception. Urging the actors to improve their performance, he
emphasised their duty to ‘yield unquestioning obedience to the director and strive with
all earnestness to supplement his work’.39
Sargent thus sought a more spectatorial experience, with higher performance stan-
dards and more distance, physically, socially and symbolically, between enactors and

initiates. It was by becoming a better work of theatre – more expertly acted, more accu-
rately and beautifully staged, a professional product to be consumed by an appreciative
audience of spectators – that the Scottish Rite could ‘drive home lessons that are never
forgotten.’40
For three other Scottish Rite commentators – William Knox, Frances H. E.
O’Donnell and one who called himself Codex – the problem was not bad drama, but
dramatisation itself. All three targeted the visual spectacle of the staged ritual, coupled
with its commodification, as the principal threat to Masonry’s moral and philosoph-
ical integrity. Fearing that ‘Spectacular Display’ would overwhelm the spoken text,
they questioned the staged ritual’s positioning of initiates as onlookers rather than pro-
tagonists, and worried that its colourful but undemanding character would attract the
unserious and undeserving. Above all, they saw the visual as a lower order of commu-
nication, incapable of conveying the ‘intellectual feasts’ of the Scottish Rite degrees
while dulling the rational faculties and moral sensibilities of its recipients.41
Knox, O’Donnell and Codex were Scottish Rite traditionalists who conceived the
Rite as an elite organisation existing to impart moral teaching to a worthy few. But
their attacks were empowered through their use of contemporary cultural criticism and
scientific thought. Organising their critique around a series of unequal antimonies –
ephemeral versus eternal, passive versus active, feeling versus rationality, primitive
versus civilised, purchased sensation versus priceless learning, the eye versus the ear
– they spoke in a gender-, class- and race-coded language that fused a critique of
consumer society with a concern for the feminisation and popularisation of the Rite
itself.
The critics were undoubtedly contemptuous of what Knox described as the ‘strut-
tings and mouthings of indifferent amateur actors’ amid ‘lurid scenic display’. But more
than cultural snobbery was at work here. Unlike Epes Sargent, they located the failures
of the staged ritual primarily in its commodification and commercialisation, rather than
its remediable aesthetic limitations. ‘The tendency of the time’, Codex lamented, ‘is to
relegate the onlookers (the Brethren) to mere spectators of a theatrical performance’.
Not only had the ritual lost the demanding quality of a ritual trial, it had become a
financial transaction: ‘They are perched in a gallery and have no more to do with the
ceremonies of the evening than a man who buys a seat in a dress circle of a theatre
at a grand spectacular show’. If theatre was a major reference point, then commerce
as well as diversion was implied in the parallel. The result, Codex concluded, was ‘a
coldness about this that strikes me as most un-Masonic’. It was the coldness of social
distance and pecuniary exchange. Knox agreed: in an era when ‘success is summed up
in the amount of material profit’, ‘selling degrees’ had emerged as ‘one of the greatest
money-making businesses of the day’.42
Commercial success, in this view, rested upon gaudy sensationalism, what
O’Donnell termed the ‘passing show’ of a ‘costly reproduction in tinsel’. Knox was even
more cutting in his description of the ‘moving wires . . . stalking ghosts, diaphanous
forms, unearthly yells, groans, shrieks, flashing lights, storms, earthquakes’ that now
enlivened Scottish Rite drama.43 The result, he argued, was the recruitment of new
members oblivious to the order’s ‘intellectual feasts’, motivated primarily by the lure
of exciting ritual and social standing.
In castigating the Scottish Rite’s turn towards spectacle and away from the written
and spoken word, Knox, O’Donnell and Codex echoed the many cultural critics of

their era who recognised that ‘the merchandising of thrills and chills’, the ‘vending
[of] vicarious intense experience’ had become central to an emerging mass culture.
It was the sense that ‘culture could be purchased secondhand, through spectatorship
. . . as well as through mass consumption’, Jackson Lears argues, that ‘posed a direct
threat to Protestant and republican doctrines of coherent selfhood’, doctrines which,
with their emphasis on labour, discipline and self-denial, were precisely exemplified
by the tenets of Freemasonry as understood by the traditionalists.44 Spectacle, on the
other hand, as displayed in the newly dramatised Scottish Rite, entailed a surrender to
sensation that swept away the discrete boundaries of this autonomous, and implicitly
masculine, self. Despite the male-only composition of its membership, Scottish Rite
dramatisation appeared to the critics as a project of feminisation that put the coherence
and integrity of masculine identity at risk.
This view was most obviously expressed in comments about the visual richness
of the staged ritual. Modes of presentation that fuelled the order’s growing popularity
simultaneously violated conventions of masculine self-presentation. At a time when
upstanding men dressed in sombre black suits, Scottish Rite drama arrayed them in
dazzling colours and voluminous robes positioning them as both the audience and
the protagonists of a strikingly lit, lavishly staged and opulently costumed drama. The
exclusion of women, who ordinarily served as the focal point of pictorial representation
in nineteenth-century theatre, left male ritual enactors as both the representatives of
virtue, a formulaic feminine role, and the objects of male spectatorial gaze, an equally
feminised position.45
Codex addressed this quite directly, identifying ‘extravagance’ of costume with
what he saw as the related dangers of Catholicism and effeminacy. Charging that
Scottish Rite costumes were patterned after vestments of ‘the Romish Church’, he
complained that ‘we have the clothing of the Lady of Babylon, if we do not have her
dogmas’. The personification of the Church of Rome as a lady, or more likely as a
whore, was linked to Catholicism’s ritual vestments, which seemed, to his Protestant
eyes, suspiciously feminine, in clear contrast to the modest garb of the Protestant clergy.
‘Slowly and insidiously this Jesuitism is cropping up again. This time in the shape of
man millinery’ – that is, through the appeal of fancy and thus effeminising dress.46
More subtly, however, the charge of feminisation was conveyed through a larger
critique of spectacle and its marketing, a claim that the Scottish Rite had chosen visual
pleasure over the more rigorous, edifying demands of the written and spoken word. In
this view, dramatisation compromised Freemasonry’s character as a system of ethical
knowledge that could only be acquired through disciplined, concerted effort, a process
the critics framed in implicitly gendered terms. Here they echoed formulations current
since the eighteenth century, when, as Jennifer Jones argues, French Enlightenment
thinkers theorised the difference between ‘objects that worked on the eyes, and objects
that worked on the soul . . . objects that captured the passive viewer through sensual
delight and [those] that demanded domination by the mind and intellect’.47
O’Donnell in particular excoriated the ‘frivolous innovation’ and ‘foolish vanities’
that ‘detract[ed] from the majestic grandeur of philosophical teaching’. Arguing that
the aim of Masonry was ‘to give knowledge rather than to please’, O’Donnell implied a
gendered dichotomy between learning and pleasure, in which, as Jones notes, ‘women’s
psychological and sensory apparatus made them ideally suited to consume, and their
passivity rendered them particularly vulnerable to capture by their sensual delight in

agreeable and frivolous objects’. In calling for a rejection of the ritual, O’Donnell
sought to call the Scottish Rite back to its masculine mission, for ‘to please’ and to be
pleased were surely the province of ‘the gentler sex’. Thus, he concluded, ‘Let Wisdom
and Strength be the masters, and Beauty the chaste handmaiden of the ceremonies’.
Masonry was and needed to remain a project of masculine moral formation, ‘the Moral
Manhood among Men’.48
But O’Donnell took a further step, deploying a species of evolutionary thought
in which racial pseudo-science lent authority to the moralistic critique of spectacle.
The eye and the ear, he argued, occupied a position that was developmental as well
as moral. Because ‘the crude impressions of infancy are received mostly via the Eye’,
it might be acceptable to use pictures to entice a beginning reader. But ‘after the first
stages of education are passed . . . the Ear becomes more attentive, and . . . Reason
begins more to take the place of mere Impression’ in ‘the development of the Higher
Thought Processes’. With this scenario in mind, the full implications of O’Donnell’s
critique become clear. In employing spectacle, the staged ritual operated as a kind
of kindergarten, striking at the integrity of an institution, which ‘is not a Primary,
Grammar, or High School of Ethics, but the ne plus ultra College’. Most disturbingly,
its vividly pictorial quality catered to ‘the mind of the child, the savage, and the ignorant
[which] everywhere is best reached through the sense of Sight’.49
O’Donnell’s attack was grounded in the then-current notion of recapitulation. This
belief, that ‘every individual repeats in its own life history the life history of its race,
passing through the lower forms of its ancestors on its way to maturity’, was what
allowed him to equate ‘the mind of the child’ with that of the ‘savage’. Recapitulation
theory posited that children and savages shared characteristics: ‘lack of will power,
reflection, and persistence; feeble attention span; weak capacity for abstraction; imita-
tiveness and lack of originality; impulsiveness and general emotionalism’, all qualities
that pictorial display was believed to cater to and intensify.50 If the child was an evolu-
tionary throwback to earlier stages of human development, an analogue to present-day
‘primitive’ societies, then the transformation of the Scottish Rite from a text-based
verbal presentation to a pictorial one was, in developmental terms, a form of regression
and even, given the racial connotations of the parallel, of racial degeneracy. Noting
that ‘the Evolution of Species proves the force of majority rule in Nature equally as
in Nations’, O’Donnell articulated a version of the popular Darwinism which, as Gail
Bederman notes, increasingly conflated race, class and gender through the opposition
of ‘civilisation’ to ‘savagery’.51
What then, did it portend when men so avidly participated in the world of colour
and light, texture and taste, the dramatised Scottish Rite and the lavishly furnished
temples offered them? Operating at such a low level, the feminised, compromised
ritual attracted a wider and less worthy range of members than the ‘deserving men of
superior mind and mould of life’ who had once been its chief adherents. Those who
were drawn to the new Scottish Rite spectacle were, for O’Donnell, ‘Mob-Men’ or, in
Codex’s words, ‘groundlings’; that is, persons of low status and crude or indiscriminate
taste. For Knox, they were status-seekers and giddy fashion-followers, chasing from
town to town in search of ‘Nobles and Princes and Kings and Scribes’, ‘the biggest
Reunion ever held in these parts’ and the ‘Greatest show on earth’.52 Here one may
discern the subtext of the feminine as well as of class and racial denigration, for the new
members were in effect consumers, and fickle consumers at that. The identification of

woman, child and savage is extended to encompass the lower echelons of American
society, their class and ethnic position connoted by their herd-like behaviour, unrefined
taste and childlike credulity in the face of the market for spectacle and sensation. At this
imperial moment, one might further speculate, those who could be captivated, enthralled
or overpowered by spectacle might be equated with the captured, the colonised, all of
them opposed to those whose superior intellect and discipline entitled them to master
subject peoples just as they did verbal texts.53
Vocabularies of Masonic consumption

The question of whether the dramatised Scottish Rite was an unprecedented step into
a feminised, colonised and thereby degraded world of consumption, as critics charged,
or the vigorous assertion of masculine empowerment that its enthusiasts celebrated,
must be placed within the larger history of Masonic consumption practices. In this
context, the Scottish Rite’s elevation of grand spectacle to the centre of its initiatory
rituals did indeed represent a significant innovation. Yet, the innovation resided not
so much in the introduction of consumer choice to the Masonic repertoire as in the
differing symbolic uses to which it was put. For throughout its history, Freemasonry
had depended on commodity purchase to help produce varying and historically specific
versions of honourable manhood.
With their explicit referencing of stonemasons’ tools and artisans’ leather aprons to
signify moral worth, eighteenth-century British Freemasons had expressed the values of
an emerging capitalist order. By ascending the degrees of membership, from apprentice
to journeyman to master of the craft, the aristocrats, gentlemen, wealthy bourgeois and
middling tradesmen who were drawn to the order proclaimed the value of economically
productive activity.54 They accomplished this, however, not by actually engaging in craft
labour, but through rituals and conviviality that depended on the medium of purchase
for their enactment. Both the convivial practices and the ritual objects that Masons used
to express their symbolic identity as producers were located in the century’s burgeoning
array of consumer possibilities.
Masonic membership was itself a purchased good. As Margaret Jacob notes:
money in the form of dues, initiation fees, fines for misconduct, charitable funds and loans, was the
instrument of the new sociability [which] flourished where men had the money to support it. They
paid to be equal; they then paid to rise in the wisdom of the philosophical degrees; with money
they adjudicated extreme social differences within an ideological framework that recognized only
equality and merit.55
Thus, fraternal conviviality itself was anchored in commerce. Pubs and hostel-
ries were the quasi-public spaces where Masons most often met to consume the food
and drink that sustained their communal rituals. Significantly, these were commercial
spaces, with access based on purchase. The services they offered were essential to the
Masonic project of bringing together men of diverse backgrounds in relations of equal-
ity.56 In early Masonic practice, for example, drink was an important ‘group activity
[in which] all participated equally . . . served from the communal punch bowl which so
many societies purchased’, while the ‘drinking vessels were almost always exactly the
same size and shape, often decorated with a common symbol or inscription’. As a result,
Masonic lodges emerged as an important niche market for Britain’s fledgling pottery

industry.57 Given that pottery and china are typically seen as domestic, and thereby
feminised objects, the identification of men’s associations as an important early market
for them complicates received understandings about the gendered character of mass-
marketed consumer goods, while making clear that Freemasons’ ability to represent
themselves as producers was crucially dependent upon their activities as consumers.
The transformation of the Scottish Rite did not, then, mark the first entrance of
Masons into the realm of consumer culture from one of prelapsarian disregard, as
the traditionalists had argued. Rather it marked a significant change, not only in the
scale of involvement, but also in its symbolic valence. When an eighteenth-century
British Mason donned a ceremonial version of the artisan’s leather apron, or drank
from a communal punch bowl, he acquired and made use of leisure-time effects to
depict himself as a hard-working producer. In doing so, such men used consumption
to signify their distance from it, and their superiority to those more overtly in its
thrall.58 In distinct contrast, when an early twentieth-century American Mason was
initiated into the higher degrees of the Scottish Rite, he departed from, rather than
reinforced, previously dominant norms of masculine under-consumption, instead using
consumption both to engage in and signify an enthusiastic embrace of sensation and
pleasure.
It was this frank characterisation of Freemasonry as a purveyor of pleasure, rather
than a medium for masculine ethical regeneration, that so disturbed traditionalists.
Their critiques of the dramatised, commodified ritual reveal a complex intertwining of
class, racial and gender claims, joined in the concept of ‘manliness’, the Victorian era’s
dominant conception of explicitly white and implicitly Protestant bourgeois manhood,
but one that had become increasingly unstable by century’s end. For if the turn of the
century is notable for its deployment of and fascination with the visual, it is also known
as a historical moment when ‘middle-class men seem to have been unusually interested
in, even obsessed with manhood’.59
Manliness, as Gail Bederman notes, was a moral concept, an ideal to which men
aspired, rather than the entitlement of all males. With self-restraint, rationality, powerful
will and unceasing and goal-directed effort as its hallmarks, the ideal of ‘self-made man-
hood’, as E. Anthony Rotundo terms it, was a disciplined mode of conduct especially
appropriate in a small-scale market economy based on the labour of self-employed
entrepreneurs.60 By the 1890s, however, the hegemony of ‘manliness’ seemed under
assault, confronted by labour unrest, class-based electoral challenges and an array
of middle-class women’s movements, ‘all of which worked to question middle-class
men’s claim on public power and authority’. Simultaneously the era saw a contrac-
tion of small entrepreneurship, the nineteenth-century economic base of middle-class
manliness. Finally, the turn of the century was characterised by new opportunities
for commercial leisure, opportunities that expanded women’s place in public life but
complicated men’s: ‘The consumer culture’s ethos of pleasure and frivolity clashed
with ideals of manly self-restraint, further undermining the potency of middle-class
manliness’.61
These challenges prompted a range of attempted reformulations. Bederman, for
example, emphasises the emergence of a discourse of ‘civilisation’ which used evolu-
tionary thought ‘to explain male supremacy in terms of white racial dominance, and,
conversely, to explain white supremacy in terms of male power’, a discourse typi-
fied by O’Donnell’s use of recapitulation theory. Rotundo identifies a transition from

‘self-made’ to ‘passionate manhood’, whereby men affirmed the option of cultivating

their individuality through consumption and diversion. As the nineteenth century ended,
play, leisured entertainment and consumer engagement – once considered marks of ef-
feminacy – became approved modes of masculine self-expression. A man could define
his self-worth, not just in the workplace, but through enjoyment and self-fulfilment
outside of it.62 These themes, so evident in the Scottish Rite literature, make it clear
that the debate over the transformed ritual was part of a larger contest ‘to explain what
men are, how they ought to behave, and what sorts of power and authority they may
claim, as men’.63
The critiques revealed the tensions produced by alternative conceptions of the
Masonic experience: a traditional view of ritual as the exemplification of a system of
moral instruction and testing versus its emergent status as a leisure activity. The shift
from lodge room to auditorium, the use of elaborate stage effects and the definition of
initiates as an audience placed the Scottish Rite squarely within the expanding realm
of popular entertainment and gave it a competitive advantage within the populous
fraternal world. At the same time, its character as a men’s organisation provided it with
a distinctive niche in the broader universe of popular entertainment because it offered
dramatic spectacle for a male-only audience at a time when mainstream theatre was
increasingly seen as a feminine pastime.
These changes also revealed a tension between competing visions of manhood.
Critics of the dramatised ritual spoke for an earlier vision of manliness, which empha-
sised the redeeming qualities of hard work and self-discipline, whether in pursuit of
economic gain or Masonic enlightenment. True Masonry was identified with true man-
hood, both of which were defined through opposition to a series of ‘others’ – the child,
the savage, the ‘mob’ and the feminine, all of which were thought to be distinguished
by their affinity for the visual. Thus the shift from the ear to the eye, from oratory
to spectacle, served as the focal point for all that troubled Masonic traditionalists. It
was theatrical display that promoted the commodification of the order; it was theatrical
display that catered to the tastes of the child-like savage and the credulous mob; it was
theatrical display that threatened to ‘unman’ its members through their placement as
bedazzled spectators or, as colourfully attired performers, the objects of spectatorial
gaze.
Proponents of the new ritual offered an alternative view of manhood, characterised
by an affirmation of consumption and, more subtly, by an acceptance of the emerging
corporate order. The latter can be seen in Sargent’s defence of the staged ritual. In his
view, the ritual acquired its power, not from the self-reliant efforts of each individual
initiate, but from their collective access to a superior product. That product in turn
derived its authority from the professionalisation of Masonic enactors, who must be
knowledgeable about the text, well-rehearsed and, above all, willing to submit them-
selves to the expert supervision of a single powerful director whose unified conception
produced a coherent and illuminating effect. The enactment of the Scottish Rite would
thus mirror an emerging Taylorist model of production, as well as contribute to its pro-
liferation of consumer options and their adoption as a form of masculine entitlement.
Within this new formulation, with its union of class and gender, the power and
appeal of Masonry resided in the splendour of its consumption practices. Consider, for
example, the yearly Maundy Thursday banquets, obligatory for all Knights Rose Croix
(Eighteenth Degree Masons). In Butte, Montana, in 1902, the banquet included oysters

on the half shell, lobster salad, roast spring lamb with mint sauce and turkey with calf’s
foot jelly, accompanied by Sauternes, St Julien and burgundy wines. Whatever the con-
dition of oysters and lobster by the time of their arrival in Butte, their function as class
markers was clear, as was their assertion of the prerogatives and pleasures of mascu-
line consumption.64 Elaborate banqueting in a male-only setting had replaced austere
moral lessons as a means of shaping class and gender into a single honorific identity.
A similar interest in consumption is revealed in descriptions of temples that com-
bined, in their members’ eyes, the best features of a fine men’s club and a well-equipped
metropolitan theatre. Scottish Rite publications emphasised ‘superb costuming, elegant
paraphernalia and exquisite scenery and stage equipment . . . remarkable for the vivid-
ness of [their] representation’. Equally enthusiastic accounts detailed the banquet rooms
and lounges, with their ‘rich mahogany’, ‘weathered oak’ and ‘cozy corners’ in the ‘old
Dutch style’, not to mention ‘the largest Axminster Wilton rug ever woven’.65 Again,
a delight in costly and tasteful consumption is palpable, coupled with an attention to
visual detail that Codex or O’Donnell might have found unsettling.
Pleasure was now defined as a masculine right and privilege, a source of pride, as
‘certain uses of leisure time and certain consumer tastes became markers of manliness’.
With its combination of dramatic spectacle, bourgeois comfort and masculine fellow-
ship, the transformed Scottish Rite exemplified the attractions of this perspective. By
redefining itself explicitly as a site of spectatorship and consumption, the Scottish Rite
achieved both enormous growth and an enhanced prestige within the Masonic world.
Bederman correctly notes that it took several generations for the new formulations
‘to overtake Victorian “manliness” as the primary middle-class ideology of powerful
manhood’. Yet the sense of triumph is clear: ‘Lay aside your business for the occasion’,
proclaimed the Little Rock Reunion Program of 1898. ‘Be with us and enjoy the fruits
of our labor . . . judge for yourself whether or not you have a right to feel gratified and
proud that you are a Scottish Rite Mason’.66
Conclusion
Scottish Rite traditionalists were correct in their view that the elaborately staged ritual
and luxuriously furnished interiors of turn-of-the-century temples violated previously
dominant norms of masculine under-consumption. Indeed, the admonition to abandon
productive activity, however temporarily, in favour of enjoyment was a frank challenge
to Freemasonry’s historic view of honourable manhood as residing in the moral dignity
of labour. Yet, despite this new embrace of pleasure, the transformed Scottish Rite
maintained significant continuities with earlier Masonic practice as well, continuities
that allowed for its ongoing self-representation as a distinctively masculine institution.
Taken together, these juxtapositions contribute to a growing scholarly challenge to the
dichotomous representation of women as consumers and men as producers, in favour
of a more complex narrative.
For, as the traditionalists had intuited, the turn towards a more explicit engagement
with consumer society produced an ongoing contradiction: how could men consume
without being labelled feminised consumers? The staged Scottish Rite, with its syn-
thesis of vivid spectacle, fine dining, masculine exclusivity and lofty purpose, offered
one compelling response to this dilemma. Consumption, Leora Auslander has argued,
has ‘tended to be deemed appropriately masculine when it was productive of self and

of a durable legacy beyond the self’.67 Activities motivated by a higher purpose and
accomplished through collective solidarity could be erased as consumption or elevated
above it. By defining it as a project of collective identity formation rather than indi-
vidual gratification, the Scottish Rite could locate consumption within a discourse of
elevated purpose and manly honour.
As a variant of the men’s club, the emergent Scottish Rite, with its dining halls,
smoking lounges, libraries and stages, was a site of luxurious consumption. But, like the
men’s club, Scottish Rite consumption was simultaneously privatised and collectivised,
shielded from the public – especially female gaze – and experienced, most significantly,
through the medium of membership.68 Dazzling ritual, august surroundings and organ-
isationally mandated socialising were all mobilised to inspire a long-term identification
with a greater, grander whole.
Thus, the transformed Scottish Rite, along with the men’s clubs and spectator
sports emerging at much the same time, relied upon forms and practices of consump-
tion predicated upon notions of membership that seemed to be absent from women’s
commercial culture. Such practices suggest that Masonry, and by extension other men’s
organisations and activities, have operated as one significant vehicle for a largely un-
recognised form of masculine consumption. They further suggest that masculine con-
sumption may have secured its invisibility through the construction of collectivity, a
collectivity defined in part by its explicit or de facto exclusion of women, and in part by
the higher purpose it implied. The Scottish Rite experience, like the Masonic history
that preceded it, thus exemplified a wider framing of men’s leisure and consumption
as acts of collective masculine affiliation, a framing that obscured their commodified
character and guarded them from an association with the feminine, while working to
promote new conceptions of men’s material entitlement. Whether best seen as an elab-
oration of Masonic tradition or a departure from it, it is clear that the staged ritual, and
the controversy it provoked, served not only to reveal ongoing contradictions within
Freemasonry, but to illuminate the complexities of its role in the larger history of mas-
culine consumption in Europe and the United States, with the varying meanings of
manhood such engagement could propose.
Notes
My thanks to Gail Radford, the anonymous reviewers for Gender & History and especially to Dan Clawson.
1. William Knox, ‘What Excuse?’, New Age 7 (1907), pp. 252–4. ‘Degrees’ here refers to Freemasonry’s
hierarchical structure in which Masons ascend, through multiple initiations, a series of levels or degrees of
membership.
2. Knox, ‘What Excuse?’, pp. 252–3; Francis H. E. O’Donnell, ‘Philosophy and the Drama in Freemasonry’,
New Age 4 (1906), pp. 474–8, here pp. 476–7.
3. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. 51.
4. Mark Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
and Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1989) are early examples. More recently, see Jessica Harland-Jacobs, ‘All in the Family:
Freemasonry and the British Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies 42 (2003),
pp. 448–82; Aviston D. Downes, ‘Freemasonry in Barbados before 1914: The Limits of Brotherhood’, Jour-
nal of Caribbean History 36 (2002), pp. 285–309; Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Civility, Male Friendship,
and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Gender & History 13 (2001), pp. 224–48; Martin
Summers, ‘Diasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production of Black Middle-Class
Masculinity’, Gender & History 15 (2003), pp. 550–74.

5. The following, however, are exceptional in their attention to Masonic material culture: William D. Moore,
‘From Lodge Room to Theatre: Meeting Spaces of the Scottish Rite’, in C. Lance Brockman (ed.), Theatre
of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1896–1929 (Minneapolis:
Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, 1996), pp. 30–51; C. Lance Brockman, ‘Creating Scenic Illusion for
the Theatre and the Fraternity’, in Brockman, Theatre of the Fraternity, pp. 92–109; Martin Summers,
Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 55–8.
6. Kenon Breazeale, ‘In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer’,
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20 (1994), pp. 1–22.
7. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963) is perhaps the earliest and best-known
statement of this position in Second Wave feminism.
8. For women’s work in the home, see Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household
Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Susan Strasser, Never
Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982).
9. Victoria de Grazia (ed.), with Ellen Furlough, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical
Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), especially de Grazia, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–10;
de Grazia, ‘Changing Consumption Regimes’, pp. 11–24; Jennifer Jones, ‘Coquettes and Grisettes: Women
Buying and Selling in Ancien Régime Paris’, pp. 25–53; David Kuchta, ‘The Making of the Self-Made
Man: Class, Clothing, and English Masculinity, 1688–1832’, pp. 54–78; Leora Auslander, ‘The Gendering
of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France’, pp. 79–112.
10. de Grazia, ‘Introduction’, pp. 4, 7–8; Auslander, ‘Gendering of Consumer Practices’, p. 79.
11. Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 15; Thomas Postlewait, ‘The Hieroglyphic Stage: American The-
atre and Society, Post-Civil War to 1945’, in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds), The Cam-
bridge History of American Theatre, vol. 2: 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp. 107–95, esp. p. 151.
12. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London:
Verso, 1996), p. 90; William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American
Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
13. As Summers notes, this linking of production with manhood was equally central to both black and white
versions of Freemasonry: Manliness and Its Discontents, pp. 26–7.
14. Albert C. Stevens, The Cyclopaedia of Fraternities (2nd edn 1907; repr. Detroit: Gale, 1966), p. 114.
15. Harland-Jacobs, ‘All in the Family’; Downes, ‘Freemasonry in Barbados’; William A. Muraskin, Middle-
Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1975); Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, pp. 1–65; Bayliss J. Camp and Orit Kent, ‘“What
a Mighty Power We Can Be”: Individual and Collective Identity in African American and White Fraternal
Initiation Rituals’, Social Science History 28 (2004), pp. 439–83.
16. Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984); Carnes, Secret Ritual; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood.
17. Rituals were often written and rewritten with the goal of attracting members, e.g. the Odd Fellows in 1835,
1845 and 1880, and the Knights of Pythias in 1866, 1882 and 1892. See Carnes, Secret Ritual, pp. 98–104,
for the Improved Order of Red Men’s struggle to develop a successful ritual.
18. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American
Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 239–73; James D.
Carter, History of the Supreme Council, 33, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Southern
Jurisdiction, U.S.A. 1891–1921 (Washington, DC: The Supreme Council, 33 Degree, 1971); S. Brent Morris,
‘Boom to Bust in the Twentieth Century: Freemasonry and American Fraternities’, The 1988 Anson Jones
Lecture, presented to the Texas Lodge of Research, 19 March 1988.
19. Moore, ‘The Masonic Lodge Room’; Edward W. Wolner, ‘Chicago’s Fraternity Temples: The Origins of
Skyscraper Rhetoric and the First of the World’s Tallest Office Buildings’, in Roberta Moudry (ed.), The
American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 98–119.
William D. Moore, ‘From Lodge Room to Theatre: Meeting Spaces of the Scottish Rite’, in Brockman
(ed.), Theatre of the Fraternity, pp. 30–51, discusses the evolution of staging and seating arrangements.
20. Charles T. McClenachan, The Book of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1867; repr.
New York: A. H. Kellogg, 1901), pp. 199–200.
21. These changes are discussed in Brockman (ed.), Theatre of the Fraternity, especially the essays by Moore,
‘From Lodge Room to Theatre’; Clawson, ‘Spectatorship and Masculinity in the Scottish Rite’, pp. 52–71;
Carnes, ‘Scottish Rite and the Visual Semiotics of Gender’, pp. 72–91 and Brockman, ‘Creating Scenic

Illusion for the Theatre and the Fraternity’, pp. 92–109. See also Carter, History of the Supreme Council,
pp. 159–67, 175, 203–4; William L. Fox, Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle: Two Centuries of Scottish
Rite Freemasonry in America’s Southern Jurisdiction (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997),
pp. 146–7.
22. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, pp. 395, 398; Roy Rosenzweig, ‘Boston Masons, 1900–
1935: The Lower Middle Class in a Divided Society’, Journal of Voluntary Action Research 6 (1977),
pp. 119–26, here p. 123.
23. Roster of Scottish Rite Bodies of the Valley of Little Rock, 1897–98, Library of the House of the Temple
(hereafter LHT), Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, Washington,
DC; R. L. Polk & Co.’s Little Rock City Directory 1897–98 (Little Rock: R. L. Polk, 1897); Scottish Rite
Bodies of St Louis, 1891, LHT; Gould’s St. Louis Directory for 1890 (St Louis: Gould Directory Company,
1890).
24. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office, 1975), ‘Average Annual Earnings in All and Selected Industries and in Occupations’,
Series D 779–793, p. 168.
25. Alphonse Cerza, A History of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in Illinois 1846–1965
(Chicago: Illinois Council of Deliberation, 1966), pp. 54, 187.
26. Dayton Allen Willey, ‘Scottish Rite Temple at Los Angeles’, The New Age 7 (1907), pp. 551–3, here
p. 552.
27. Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–
1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 41.
28. Wolner, ‘Chicago’s Fraternity Temples’, pp. 98, 101.
29. ‘The “California Bodies” of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and Their New Home’,
New Age 3 (1905), pp. 71–4, here p. 72; Reunion Program (Wichita, KS: Wichita Scottish Rite Bodies,
1898), Library of the House of the Temple; Brockman, ‘Creating Scenic Illusion’; Lawrence J. Hill, ‘The
Changing Light of Dramatic Initiation’, in Brockman (ed.), Theatre of the Fraternity, pp. 110–25. Brockman
finds that 20 to 25 per cent of orders to major scenic design companies in the early twentieth century came
from Scottish Rite temples. C. Lance Brockman, ‘The Age of Scenic Art: The Nineteenth Century’, in The
Twin City Scenic Collection: Popular Entertainment 1895–1929 (Minneapolis: University Art Museum,
1987), pp. 43–53.
30. Leach, Land of Desire, pp. 43, 82.
31. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 49; Robin Veder, ‘Tableaux Vivants: Performing Art, Purchasing Status’,
Theatre Annual 48 (1995), pp. 14–29; Leach, Land of Desire, p. 80; Butsch, Making of American Audiences,
pp. 11–15.
32. Scottish Rite written texts were aggressively relativistic: ‘Born in a Protestant land, we are of that faith
. . . born in the Jewish quarter of Aleppo, we should have contemned [sic] Christ as an imposter; in Con-
stantinople we should have cried “Allah il Allah – God is great and Mahomet is his Prophet”. Birthplace
and education give us our faith . . . No man is entitled positively to assert that he is right, where other men,
equally intelligent, hold directly the opposite opinions’. (McClenachan, Scottish Rite, pp. 430–32). Yet the
staged ritual’s colourful depictions of Middle Eastern locales could be linked to the scientific racism of
the day, vividly depicted at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, where the ‘White City’ represented
the artistic and material achievements of ‘civilisation’, with Asian and Middle Eastern societies located
in a middle area in the Midway side-show and ‘savage races’ at the opposite end. Robert W. Rydell, All
the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 65. Thousands of Masonic visitors to the fair were also received at
the massive Masonic Temple, where they had the opportunity to witness an early version of Scottish Rite
staging.
33. Brockman, ‘Age of Scenic Art’, p. 7.
34. Richard Butsch, ‘Bowery B’hoys and Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American
Theater Audiences’, American Quarterly 46 (1994), pp. 374–405, here pp. 379–80.
35. Martina Kessel, ‘The “Whole Man”: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-Century Germany’,
Gender & History 15 (2003), pp. 1–31, here pp. 2–4.
36. O’Donnell, ‘Philosophy and the Drama’, pp. 475–6.
37. Sargent, ‘The Player’, pp. 357–8. Identified as a drama critic thirty-second degree Mason, Sargent was best
known as ‘the most authoritative writer on vaudeville in the east’, writing principally for the New York
Morning Telegraph under the name ‘Chicot’. Clippings in Epes W. Sargent folder, Billy Rose Collection,
New York Public Library, Lincoln Center. Thanks to Richard Butsch for this reference.

38. Epes W. Sargent, ‘Detail and the Drama of the Degree’, New Age 7 (1907), pp. 175–7, here p. 175.
39. Sargent, ‘The Player’, pp. 357–8; Sargent, ‘Detail’, pp. 175, 177.
40. Sargent, ‘The Player’, pp. 357–8; Sargent, ‘Detail’, pp. 175, 177.
41. Knox, ‘What Excuse?’, p. 254.
42. Knox, ‘What Excuse?’, p. 254; Codex, ‘The Stage in Masonry’, The New Age 4 (1906), p. 379; Knox,
‘What Excuse?’, p. 252.
43. O’Donnell, ‘Philosophy and the Drama’, p. 476; Knox, ‘What Excuse?’, pp. 252–3.
44. Jackson Lears, ‘Beyond Veblen: Rethinking Consumer Culture in America’, in Simon J. Bronner (ed.),
Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920 (New York: Norton,
1989), pp. 73–97, here p. 75.
45. Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994), pp. 70–71.
46. Codex, ‘Stage in Masonry’, p. 379, italics in original. The term ‘man-milliner’ was made famous by
Republican politician Roscoe Conkling’s 1877 attack on political reformers. ‘By using “man milliner”’, E.
Anthony Rotundo notes, ‘Conkling evoked the idea of a “man-woman”’. E. Anthony Rotundo, American
Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books,
1993), p. 271.
47. Jones, ‘Coquettes and Grisettes’, p. 36
48. O’Donnell, ‘Philosophy and the Drama’, p. 477; Jones, ‘Coquettes and Grisettes’, p. 36; O’Donnell, ‘Phi-
losophy and the Drama’, pp. 475–6.
49. O’Donnell, ‘Philosophy and the Drama’, p. 475.
50. Russett, Sexual Science, p. 50. Of course these were characteristics associated with women as well. Other
treatments of recapitulation theory include Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History
of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and
Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
51. O’Donnell, ‘Philosophy and the Drama’, p. 474; Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 25, 30.
52. Codex, ‘Stage in Masonry’, p. 379; O’Donnell, ‘Philosophy and the Drama’, p. 476; Knox, ‘What Excuse?’,
pp. 252–3.
53. O’Donnell, ‘Philosophy and the Drama’, p. 476; Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 1–25.
54. Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood, pp. 53, 78–83.
55. Margaret Jacob, ‘Money, Equality, Fraternity: Freemasonry and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century
Europe’, in Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III (eds), The Culture of the Mar-
ket: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 102–25, here pp. 107,
116.
56. John Brewer, ‘Commercialization and Politics’, in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The
Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982), pp. 197–262, here p. 222.
57. Brewer, ‘Commercialization and Politics’, pp. 222–3, 251–2.
58. Kuchta and others argue that the ‘Great Renunciation’, eighteenth-century men’s retreat from fancy dress,
allowed middle-class men to assert their political rights by positioning themselves ‘between two forms of
corruption; an effeminate aristocracy and a vicious working-class’ while enabling aristocratic men, now clad
more simply, to defend their own claims to political leadership and civic virtue. Masonic use of artisans’ tools
and garb to signify moral worth may be seen as a further elaboration of this mode of political symbolism.
Kuchta, ‘Making of the Self-Made Man’; Katya Silverman, ‘Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse’, in
Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986), pp. 139–52.
59. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 10–11.
60. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 10–11; Rotundo, American Manhood, p. 3.
61. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 12–14.
62. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 4; Rotundo, American Manhood, p. 6.
63. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 7.
64. ‘Program, Maundy Thursday Obligatory Feast’, Butte, Montana, 27 March 1902, Library of the House of the
Temple. The Butte menu closely approximates the rules for dining and ordering of courses, including oysters
as the de rigueur first course, specified by famed maı̂tre d’hôtel Oscar Tschirky of the Waldorf-Astoria in
an 1899 periodical What To Eat. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, pp. 49, 58.
65. St Louis Scottish Rite Bodies, ‘Reunion Program’, 11–14 November 1902, Library of the House of the
Temple; Willey, ‘Scottish Rite Temple at Los Angeles’, pp. 553, 551.

66. Rotundo, American Manhood, p. 283; Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 19; Valley of Little Rock,
‘Reunion Program’, 4–7 October 1898’, Library of the House of the Temple.
67. Auslander, ‘Gendering of Consumer Practices’, pp. 79–80.
68. For men’s clubs, see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the
American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and James M. Mayo,
The American Country Club: Its Origins and Development (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1998).


Masculity Consumption and The Transformation of Scottish Rite Masonry

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Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233

Masculinity, Consumption and the

Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Gender and consumption

consumption as an equally important site for the construction of gender.9 As Victoria

The Scottish Rite in the fraternal world

From the lodge room to the stage

Scottish Rite theatre – accommodation and contradiction

‘Degrees for sale’

Vocabularies of Masonic consumption

‘self-made’ to ‘passionate manhood’, whereby men affirmed the option of cultivating

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