Secret Societies in Detroit

Bill Loomis

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781439671924
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Secret societies have operated in Detroit for most of the city's history. Many started for fun and companionship. Others had more serious ends in mind. The African American Mysteries: The Order of the Men of Oppression helped enslaved people escape the South for freedom in Canada. During the Civil War, so-called black lantern societies like the Knights of the Golden Circle and the Union League waged a covert war in Detroit and across the northern Midwest. In the last century, it wasn't uncommon for a sober suburbanite to catch the train to Detroit and don yellow silk pantaloons, a purple fez and embroidered vest to drink "Tarantula juice." Join Bill Loomis in this fascinating look into the secret world of these groups.

PART I.

BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

1

MASONS FROM THE START

The Order of Free and Accepted Masons is very old. No one is sure of its beginning, but documents in Europe connected to the group have been dated to 1390. It began as an ancient guild of stonemasons who built medieval churches, chapels, cathedrals, monasteries and more. It was and always has been a secret society. Many of its mysterious symbols, hand grips and signs are claimed to be rooted in the medieval masons’ values: the symbols of a compass, level and arch, for instance. Because the masons worked independently of the church and moved about from one job to another, they were referred to as the “free” masons. While considered sinister by some, their stated mission has always been benign: “Make good men better.”

And today’s Masonic lodges in the United States have a largely harmless image, seen as a place for small-town businessmen (the order is limited to men; women belong to the Eastern Stars) to engage in social gatherings, networking and opportunities for charity. But the group was not always so harmless.

It is a group that might seem to be a humble union of craftsmen, but its influence in Europe, North America and even Detroit was powerful and was feared and hated by some, such as the Catholic Church. The United States Masons (also known as Freemasons) originated in England and became a popular association for leading colonials after the first American lodge was founded in Boston in 1733. Masonic brothers pledged to support one another and provide sanctuary if needed.

Fourteen U.S. presidents have been Masons, starting with George Washington. President Gerald Ford was initiated on September 30, 1949, in Malta Lodge No. 465 in Grand Rapids. The masons attracted the elite of society, and their influence was once immense. Take out a U.S. dollar bill and look at the back. On the left side, across from the eagle on the right, is a seeing eye and a pyramid. What is that? The eye above the pyramid is a Masonic symbol. In Masonic lore, the pyramid symbol is referred to as the eye of God watching over humanity.

Some scholars say as many as twenty-one signers of the Declaration of Independence were Masons. Many historians note that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights both seem to be heavily influenced by the Masonic “civic religion,” which focuses on freedom, free enterprise and a limited role for the state.

But the secretive club was always under suspicion from those who saw the Masons as elite and scheming.

THE HISTORY OF THE MASONS AND THE CITY OF DETROIT GO HAND IN HAND FROM THE START

In 1758, François-Marie Picoté, sieur de Belestre (November 17, 1716–March 30, 1793), became the thirteenth and last official French commandant of Fort Ponchartrain in Detroit. De Belestre was a practicing Mason in Montreal, and Masons claimed that freemasonry was common in French-founded cities and outposts.

Detroit’s first Masonic lodge was established by the British, who took control of Detroit in 1760, and it is claimed that Detroit’s was the oldest Masonic lodge west of the Allegheny Mountains. It was founded only thirty years after the very first lodge in North America. (A Masonic lodge is the basic organizational unit of the Masons. Lodges are started with a charter issued by the state grand lodge.) That first Detroit lodge was founded by Lieutenant John Christie of the Second Battalion, Sixtieth Royal American Foot Regiment (“Royal Americans”), on April 27, 1764. It was named the Zion Lodge No. 10 and was chartered by the Grand Lodge in New York. Most soldiers at the time were British born, but the Royal Americans were recruited along the banks of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. Many of the Americans were Masons, so they petitioned to the grand lodge to form a lodge and confer degrees. At the time, there were about two thousand inhabitants in Detroit and three hundred buildings. The Masons met in a guardhouse of the fort. An additional four lodges were chartered over the next twenty years, and meetings were held in men’s homes. A notice of a meeting from one of the lodges read as follows:

A 1967 painting by Robert A. Thom showing the Masons presenting the money to fund the University of Michigan, originally called the Catholepistemiad, or the University of Michigania. The term Catholepitemiad had nothing to do with the Catholic Church but was used by Augustus B. Woodward, who started the idea of the university. The Masonic Foundation of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Michigan gifted the painting The Founding of the University of Michigan to the university in November 1967. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Detroit 23^rd August, 1799

Brother May—

You are requested to meet the master Wardens and the rest of the Brethren at the house of James Donaldson on the 33^rd of Aug., immediately at 6 o’clock in the evening, being a Lodge of Emergency, and this you are to accept as special summons from Zion Lodge no. 10 of the Registry of Lower Canada. Fail not on your O.B.

By Order of the Body,

Ben. Rand, Secretary of Zion Lodge

Locally, of $3,000 in seed money raised to start the University of Michigan in 1817, $2,100 came from Masonic Lodge Zion Lodge No. 62 and from individual Freemasons. Opened in Detroit in 1817, the school moved to Ann Arbor in 1837.

Detroit membership grew steadily. Masons love hierarchy and ranks. The senior officer of a Masonic lodge is the master, normally addressed and referred to as the “Worshipful Master.” The worshipful master sits on the east of the lodge room, chairs all of the business of his lodge and is vested with considerable powers. He also presides over ritual and ceremonies. Lodges also have senior and junior wardens, a secretary, a treasurer, a deacon, a steward and a tiler (who guards the outer door from intruders). Grand lodges preside over the state and grant charters for new lodges. They are headed by grand master masons. Detroit’s very first grand master mason was Lewis Cass.

Each ranking officer has individual “jewels” signifying his position, as well as velvet collars, chains and more. In addition, members carried ceremonial swords, short officer aprons, gavels, the Bible, rods and clothing for candidates. All Masons wore white gloves, aprons, shirts, hats, caps, breast jewels and a variety of rings, pins and watches. All of this is referred to as “regalia.”

Even though Masons were secretive, they loved to march in parades through the city streets. This comment on a parade in Philadelphia in 1851 was typical of the times: “The number of Masons in this procession was about eighteen hundred, and a finer looking and more respectable body of men was never seen in any public parade in this city.…The Grand Officers in full regalia were on the right, followed by officers and members of the blue lodges attired in white aprons and blue scarves.”

THE RISE OF THE ANTI-MASONS

In 1826, the anti-masonic movement emerged in western New York state and spread to Detroit. The anti-masonic movement strongly opposed Freemasonry, believing it to be a corrupt and elitist closed society secretly ruling much of the country in defiance of American principles. The anti-masonic party was founded in 1828, in the aftermath of the disappearance of William Morgan, a bricklayer and former Mason from Batavia, New York, who had become a prominent critic of the Masonic organization and threatened to reveal its secrets. Many believed an unfounded conspiracy that the Masons abducted and murdered Morgan for speaking out against Masonry. Subsequently, many churches and other groups condemned Masonry. Some Masons were prominent businessmen and politicians, so the backlash against the Masons was also a form of anti-elitism. The anti-masonic political party became the first third party in the United States during John Quincy Adams’s presidency.

A published illustration showing the alleged abduction of Morgan. Suspicion of Freemasonry was so pervasive that the Anti-Mason Party became a third political party during the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Public domain.

It was said that people who moved to the Michigan Territory in the late 1820s and 1830s from counties in western New York, where William Morgan was from, brought the anti-masonic movement to Michigan and Detroit. In Detroit, the anger fomented by the anti-masons toward Masons pitted neighbors against neighbors and was said to split families. Masons in villages like Stoney Creek in Oakland County were driven from their churches.

ANTI-MASON JUDGE SAMUEL W. DEXTER

Samuel William Dexter arrived in Detroit from western New York in 1824. A Harvard graduate and a practicing lawyer, Dexter came from a prominent eastern family. (His father was a U.S. senator, secretary of war under Adams and secretary of the treasury under Jefferson.)

Dexter chose to settle on the Michigan frontier. He arrived with $80,000 and spent the first four months exploring southern Michigan, traveling on horseback. He proceeded to purchase 926 acres of land in Michigan. On that land, Dexter founded Byron, Michigan (named after the poet), and Saginaw. He also purchased land in Webster and Scio Townships in Washtenaw County, on which he later founded the village of Dexter. He built a sawmill and a gristmill on Mill Creek and a log cabin nearby. Dexter returned to Massachusetts in 1825 and married his second wife, Susan Dunham. He was appointed the village of Dexter’s first postmaster, and in 1826, when Washtenaw was formally organized as a county, he was chosen as its first chief justice. From then on, he was always referred to as Judge Dexter. He claimed that the village of Dexter was named after his father.

He was a temperate man and rigidly opposed to oathbound secret societies, such as the Masons. Along with the founder of Ann Arbor, John Allen, in 1829, Dexter began an anti-masonic newspaper, the Ann Arbor Emigrant. It was the first newspaper in Washtenaw County. Together the two men made Washtenaw County a hotbed of anti-masonic politics. In 1831, the Ann Arbor Emigrant published, “Masons have taken such and such obligations upon themselves therefore I will denounce them as a set of cut-throats, perjurers and traitors till they come out and secede from masonry.”

In 1829, fearful of angry mobs, Grand Master Lewis Cass ordered the grand lodge and advised all subordinate lodges in Michigan to suspend their activity. This continued for eleven years as the wave of antipathy toward Freemasonry swept across Michigan and the rest of the world. With the reelection of Andrew Jackson, a well-known grand master mason, anti-masons lost faith in the cause and their political party and joined the Whigs. By 1840, the anti-masons had been forgotten.

Freemasonry continued to reorganize and grow in Detroit as the following lodges were chartered: Union Lodge of Strict Observance (1852), Ashlar Lodge (1857), Oriental Lodge (1868), Schiller Lodge (1869) and Kilwinning Lodge (1872).

Another boost to their popularity came in early June 1870, when the Knights Templar, a branch of the Freemasons, arrived from across the country to hold its national convocation and march for its “grand review.” It was nearly one thousand strong, in uniform, walking down the streets of Detroit, as reported in the Detroit Free Press on June 19, 1870:

By eleven o’clock every knightly body was on the ground with eight bands of music to thrill the pulses of the thousands of spectators who lined both walks of the avenue from end to end. Dressed alike, their uniforms rich but not gaudy, their white plumes nodding in the morning breeze, their swords gleaming in the sunshine, and the gallant knights made such a parade as was never before witnessed in Detroit. Up they marched, stepping to the beat of the drums, looking like the knights of olden times. Wherever the head of the tramping column turned, its vision was greeted with flags and banners—waving from staffs, fluttering from windows, held in the hands of ladies, flung across the street, giving the city a holiday appearance.

By the prosperous 1920s, Masonry in Detroit had hit its highest popularity. Gone was much of the quasi-religious costume and ceremony of the nineteenth century. It still maintained its elaborate rituals to promote a sense of exclusivity, but now it grew more secular to accommodate the American value of enterprise. In Detroit, about half the membership of Freemasonry was made up of lower-class white-collar managers who were generally Protestant. This included the assembly line plant foremen. Foremen are plant management’s enforcers. While they were technically part of management and not assembly line workers, they dressed like workers and had no office or phone, though some stood at small podiums off to the side of the assembly line to do minor paperwork. They were paid more than line workers and considered themselves socially above hourly workers. Masonry promoted brotherhood, respectability and sober self-improvement to get ahead in your career. It stood for unqualified Americanism. Importantly, it distinguished native-born Protestant foremen from the line workers who were generally Catholics, uneducated and from an ethnic group, such as German or Polish. Foremen proudly displayed their Masonic rings. Masonry also provided another social communication network among fellow foremen, which gave a buffer to hierarchical dictates from upper management.

As quoted in the book On the Line, Essays in the History of Auto Work, from Ford foundry foreman Roy Campbell remembering the mid-1930s, “If you wanted to get anyplace or hold a job with any responsibility you better be a Mason.” This was pervasive with supervisory employees throughout Detroit plants.

THE GREAT FOLLOWED BY THE GREATEST

Masons continued to add members and build larger Masonic temples. In 1851, the Masons built a brick building at Griswold and Shelby. In 1876, they leased a larger building on Jefferson Avenue. In 1893, they opened what at the time was considered an enormous temple—six stories high and described as a “magnificent addition to the city” by the Detroit Free Press. The main entrance was on Lafayette Boulevard. It had a stone façade in the Romanesque style of the times.

Detroit’s Masonic temple. Public domain.

However, by the spring of 1919, Detroit had sixty lodges and forty thousand members who were struggling with the cramped quarters at the Lafayette Boulevard temple. A meeting was held with representatives from all of the Detroit lodges at the Detroit Athletic Club. It was decided that they would build a new temple at the cost of $2 million. The money would not be raised with bonds but through subscriptions from individual members; a competition was started among the lodges to see who could bring in the most money. The nationally famous architect George D. Mason was selected for the project.

The fundraising campaign spread nationwide as donations came in from Masons across the country, and the $2 million was raised from additional funds to $4 million. With the money in hand, George Mason submitted his designs for what would eventually be the largest masonic temple in the world, located across from Cass Park. (Chicago’s Masonic temple was the largest until 1939, when it was destroyed by fire, making Detroit the largest.)

The groundbreaking ceremony was set for Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1920. On a cold and cloudy day, twenty thousand Masons marched in the Thanksgiving Day parade wearing their famous white gloves and white aprons, row after row stretching curb to curb across Woodward Avenue and up to Bagg Street (now Temple Avenue), the future site of the temple. There Masons and their families gathered for the “turning of the sod” ceremony. The cornerstone was laid on September 18, 1922, a ceremony attended again by tens of thousands of Detroiters. For the ceremony, a trowel was used that once belonged to George Washington, a master Mason, during the construction of the U.S. Capitol. The event was attended by President Warren G. Harding, who spoke at the event.

The building was completed in 1926. George Mason’s unique design was neo-Gothic, using lots of Indiana limestone. It was a style he believed exemplified Masons and their traditions. Included in the massive building are three theaters. One was never completed and is referred to as the “unfinished theater.” Another theater, previously the Scottish Ritual Theater, is now the Jack White Theater, named after Detroit native and rock star Jack White, who generously saved the temple from foreclosure in April 2013 by paying $142,000 in county back taxes. The Masons had helped White’s mother when she was out of work and in need by giving her a job as an usher at the theater.

The building also ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Before The Civil War
• Part II. Victorian Detroit
• Part III. Twentieth-Century Detroit
• Bibliography
• About the Author