Feature
Masons Ajar
An ancient fraternity builds a new campus following.
A
few hours before Dan Gale Rosen, Harvard sophomore, went to the Gloucester Freemasonic Lodge to receive his second degree of membership in the centuries-old society, several of his high school friends asked him to teach them the order's secret handshake. "I told everyone, 'There is no handshake, you're being stupid,'" he remembers. "Then, of course, I went there and learned the handshake."
For Rosen, one of a growing number of student Freemasons attending elite colleges in the U.S. and abroad, the incident seemed indicative of the ancient organization's modern dilemma. The Freemasons face an ongoing struggle to maintain their traditions in the face of dwindling membership and mounting public interest in their more esoteric activities. "People have preconceived notions that turn out to be true," Rosen explains, "but at the same time, there's nothing to do with goats, nothing creepy or weird."
Fueled by such conspiracy-saturated blockbusters as The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure, cultural infatuation with the Freemasons' rituals and rites is indeed on the rise. Last year, the House of the Temple of the Scottish Rite in Washington, D.C. hosted over 12,000 visitors, a threefold increase from 2003. The chapter offers tours of the temple's opulent interior, which is adorned with a massive wooden throne, several copper snakes, and, allegedly, three-yard-thick walls stuffed with human body parts. At the same time, the fraternity, which has boasted such eminent members as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Oscar Wilde, is dying. In the last half-century, the Freemasons' ranks in the United States have dwindled from a peak of 4 million in 1959 to 1.3 million in 2006. At 19, Rosen is the youngest member of the Gloucester Lodge by more than twenty years. Now, in order to counteract their aging demographic and exaggerated public persona, the Masons are attempting to broaden their accessibility to outsiders and appeal to potential initiates. Colleges are on the front lines of their attack.
Oxford and Cambridge have long housed sizeable contingencies of Masons on campus. Harvard's Masonic Lodge, which currently includes about seventy students, was forced to relocate from its traditional home in the Faculty Club's Library Room to more spacious quarters at the Masonic Lodge of Boston to accommodate its rapidly expanding membership. Additionally, a nationwide change in the order's stipulations recently dropped the minimum age for applications from 21 to 18, allowing freshmen to enter the society upon matriculation. "Every once in a while I get invited to go paintballing with the Harvard Freemasons," notes Rosen, who chose to join a lodge close to his home rather than one affiliated with the University. "The number of young people involved really depends on your location."
Surprisingly, Yale is not one of those locations. In the haven of secret societies, the most furtive of these is nowhere to be found. "To my knowledge there has never been a Freemasons' organization in Yale College, at least not in the ten years I've been here," said Dean Edgar Letriz, the current overseer of student activities. This is not to say that New Haven lacks Masonic credentials. A dedicated building containing four local lodges stands on Whitney Avenue. The Grand Lodge of Connecticut is only twenty minutes away in Wallingford. So why, with so many of its peer institutions leading the charge of student Freemasonry, has Yale backed down from the fraternal fray?
Part of the problem might stem from a lack of openness. Although the New Haven Freemasons maintain an active profile in local charities, they have yet to reach out to the Yale student community with the same vigor as their peers in other university towns. A call to the lodge inquiring into the group's ongoing activities and application procedures elicited not an explanation but a firm rebuke. "This is a secret organization," stated the receptionist, whose name was not given. "You have to be a member to talk to another member." It is precisely this kind of clandestine catch-22 that other collegiate lodges are trying to avoid.
The Harvard Freemasons, for instance, distribute a promotional video to interested students in which the Grand Master of Massachusetts sits at a table and invokes the civic virtues of his order. Entitled "The Grand Master's Invitation," the segment directs the motivated viewer to an informational website and, contrary to the professed attitude of the New Haven lodge, urges undergraduates to find out more about the Masons. At Oxford, commonly available information about the organization abounds. "We certainly encourage our members to be very open with their peers about membership," explains Geoffrey Bourne-Taylor, Secretary of the school's Apollo University Lodge. "I encourage new members to leave their joining booklets in their college common rooms for others to read. The Lodge website is promulgated as much as possible and we have many enquiries through the Oxford Province website, too." Even outside the academic bubble, the Masons are making an unprecedented push for recruitment. "There's a big fancy website, radio ads," points out Rosen. "There's a TV ad with Benjamin Franklin saying 'You can help your country!'"
Additionally, the Masons have streamlined ascendancy within their ranks-which move up by numbered degrees-by accelerating the process of awarding degrees. "There was one time when I had to memorize a dialogue to move up," recalls Rosen. "But once I got to the meeting they didn't make me recite it, and I advanced anyway." Rosen was somewhat disappointed by the experience and he recognized its underlying contradiction: To make the order more palatable to prospective members, the Gloucester Freemasons had opted to downplay the very rituals that had attracted the Harvard sophomore to the organization in the first place. In order to reach a larger audience, the lodge had pulled back the veil of secrecy that many young initiates view as their impetus for joining. "I had always been interested in secret-society type things-having something I couldn't tell people about, but at the same time helping people through philanthropy," explains Rosen. For him, the ongoing change-of-face within the Masonic community seemed out of step with the group's intrinsically mysterious appeal. An oft-repeated mantra of the fraternity, one quoted abundantly in the press and alluded to by Rosen, sums up the Freemasons' public image for the new century: "We're not a secret society, we're a society with secrets."
William Greene, the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Connecticut, echoes this sentiment. Responsible for overseeing the conduct and organization of Masonic communities throughout the state, Greene describes the current order as a charity rather than an underground association of arcane rituals and covert gatherings. Today, the Freemasons donate $2 million a day to philanthropic causes across the country, raising money and awareness for diabetes and cancer patients in addition to supporting a host of renowned medical facilities. "We have a few secrets, but they're more like personal things," notes Greene, who has been a member of the fraternity for over thirty years. "Even from the beginning, the Masons were community-minded. The biggest difference is that now we talk about it, and before we didn't." According to the Grand Master, the group's newfound transparency is beginning to pay off. "In the last two years, there's been a huge turnaround," he explains. "This is the definite start of a surge in membership." While Greene says that he hasn't explicitly reached out to colleges as a source of new blood, the organization has begun to make extensive use of the internet as a source of information for interested parties. "Young people see us online and appreciate our morals and our civic-minded agenda," continues the Grand Master. "We don't actively recruit new members, but the website gives students a chance to reach out to us and ask us, 'What's this about?' A majority of our new members aren't coming from Masonic families, as was traditionally the case, but from a personal interest in
what we do."
But do the benevolent-and perhaps surprisingly public-behaviors of the real-life Masons gel with the expectations of youthful inductees, raised on the fabulist tales of Nicholas Cage and Dan Brown? Greene, for one, pinpoints the present generation of Freemasons as unusually well-informed. "The younger members coming to us today are used to finding things out about our organization before they ask," he relates. "They know so much more about it from the internet and research they've conducted on their own." Indeed, the process by which Rosen became a Freemason reflects Greene's account almost exactly. As no one in his immediate family was affiliated with the order, the student looked into his local lodge independent of adult influence, eventually asking his car mechanic about joining. "He probably told me a bit more than he should have," Rosen recalls. "But he ended up sponsoring me when I applied for membership."
Still, Rosen's self-motivated approach to Freemasonry is hardly typical. Within collegiate lodges the process of induction is inevitably more peer-oriented, with the order drawing membership from a pre-existing academic and social community. "Membership of the University Lodge is open only to matriculated members of Oxford University," explains Bourne-Taylor. "In truth, such discrimination is contrary to the spirit of Freemasonry, but informal rules usually work out for the best. It is common knowledge that like groups attract. Within the lodge, we see this happening, too, as one new member will encourage the other members of the boat crew to join." But despite this group mentality, Freemasons insist that they foster the individualism of younger, tech-savvy generations-they simply want to provide them with a venue for old-fashioned male-bonding. Above all, the group has made a name for itself as a community of exceptional individuals. "I just got back from a conference in Washington, D.C.," remarks Greene, "and I was sitting a table away from Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn. All these great people were Masons, but they didn't talk about it. Now, people are becoming more aware of the history of our organization." Rosen, on the other hand, feels that the Freemasons' lack of elitism correlates directly with their appeal: "They'll pretty much accept anyone unless they're a convicted rapist."
Bourne-Taylor emphasizes a slightly different angle: "I think that, in the changing world in which we live, Masonry is still very much a cardinal point whence students can take their bearings. It is that well-loved book that one can take from the shelf, read with pleasure from a well-thumbed page, and replace, to be waiting for one's next opportunity, that disinterested friendship that has nothing to prove and does not place barriers of religion or politics between its members. Its ritual seems to fascinate these clever young men; they are a joy to see and hear."
It is important not to overstate the presence of undergraduates within the larger Masonic community-Bourne-Taylor concedes that students probably account for only a "miniscule proportion" of the Grand Lodge of England-but their burgeoning influence on the venerable society is beginning to take effect. "I'm hoping that some of these young people like what we do and say 'I'd like to be associated with these men,'" says Greene. "I hope that this is the start of a tsunami of new members joining the Masons."
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