Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017
The 20th century
Three centuries of freemasonry
The 20th century was characterized by a spiralling chain of international conflicts of hitherto unknown proportions and a process of radical societal modernization. At the outset of the 20th century, freemasonry had transformed from its original and dynamic 18th-century global network character to an integrated phenomenon of elite sociability confined within individual national states and empires. Masonic universalism of the earlier period had changed into diverging and mutually exclusive national definitions of what constituted universal civilization. The British, French, and German empires all competed for their specific versions of world culture. Triggered by the growing international spirit promoted by world exhibitions and the Olympic movement, by the end of the 19th century attempts had been made to create some form of universal masonic organization, an initiative that, however, in the long run remained unsuccessful. The tensions that eventually led to the outbreak of World War I demonstrate that for all its fraternal ethos, freemasonry was unable to overcome ideological and power divides between European states. During the war, we find rare instances of practised brotherhood across the frontlines, such as meetings between French and German military lodges or fraternal treatment of injured and imprisoned masonic officers and soldiers. But on a larger organizational level, the differences became insurmountable. After the human disaster of World War I, a new grand lodge building of the UGLE was erected as a masonic peace memorial in Great Queen Street in London.
In some countries that had gained political independence after the war (such as Finland), freemasonry was restored. The internal schism within freemasonry was cemented by the 1929 UGLE publication of rules for recognition that excluded a sizeable number of grand lodges from regular communications. In Germany, the defeat and the humiliating conditions of the Versailles treaty revived conspiracy myths about freemasonry that had been circulating since the end of the 19th century. During the 1920s, these were merged with the ideology of national socialism. This view of freemasonry was also prevalent in fascist ideologies and regimes of Spain, Portugal, Italy, or Serbia. But at the same time, Soviet state communism outlawed freemasonry, condemning it as a tool of bourgeois politics. Exile lodges were established in France, England, and the USA. It is no surprise that modern political totalitarian systems were incompatible with the idea of a self-organized global brotherhood.
Ultimately, the German grand lodges had sought to reconcile themselves with the Nazi regime but had failed miserably. Between 1933 and 1935, masonic lodges were closed down and their property seized, while individual freemasons faced persecution, though frequently because of other factors than their masonic membership. The Nazi obsession with eradicating freemasonry expressed itself also through a quasi-scientific treatment of the lodges and the organization of anti-masonic exhibitions, where seized objects were sensationally exposed to curious crowds. In Franco’s Spain, the Falange violently suppressed freemasonry. Franco himself wrote anonymous tracts accusing freemasonry and communism of undermining the Spanish nation; in Salamanca, a lodge was transformed to a public anti-masonic exhibition centre.
As soon as World War II commenced it was clear that the fascist anti-masonry of Nazi politics would be played out in the occupied countries starting with France and the Channel Islands, where lodges were closed down and property seized or destroyed. The actions against freemasonry were coordinated by the infamous security service, Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) in Berlin. One division of it was concerned with research into five ideological enemies: freemasonry, Jewry, political churches, Marxism, and liberalism. Seized and looted documents, libraries, and objects were recorded and analysed in order to gather proof for the alleged Judeo-masonic plot. In France this work was headed by the anti-masonic service ’Service des Sociétés Secrètes’ under the Vichy government, which prepared card indexes of freemasons who were believed to pose a danger to the regime. Hundreds of freemasons were sent to prison. Manuscripts and prints from looted masonic lodges were also amassed for further analysis in the national library in Paris and an anti-masonic exhibition was organized as early as 1940, which shows the importance given to freemasonry.
Interestingly, the Soviet secret service later looted the masonic collections that had been transported to the RSHA in Berlin a second time, which is why large numbers of collections, particularly from the occupied countries, ended up in Moscow. Apart from Britain and Ireland (with the exception of the Channel Islands), only the grand lodges of Sweden and Switzerland were not affected by fascist or communist persecution in Europe during World War II, and in Finland the situation of freemasonry was highly contested.
After the war, freemasonry continued to be prohibited in the countries of the Eastern Bloc. However there are signs that some unofficial masonic activity was going on even in socialist countries. The great turn occurred with the collapse of the Iron Curtain after 1990, when new grand lodges were established in the countries of central and eastern Europe and old grand lodges were revived. Whereas GODF and other grand lodges in France restored their activities relatively quickly after World War II and still today exercise a considerable activity and impact in French culture and society (170,000 members), the situation in divided Germany was far more complex. The existence of American, British, and Canadian freemasonry among the allied occupation forces led to the establishment of two grand lodges which together with the other West German grand lodges formed an umbrella organization. Whereas freemasonry in Germany before Nazi prohibition counted between 60,000 and 80,000 members, the figure has shrunk to around 16,000 today. This has to be compared with Denmark (where freemasonry also was suppressed during the war), which currently has around 10,000 members, despite the country being sixteen times smaller in population. German re-unification has not led to any significant increase in total membership. After almost seventy years of ideological persecution, East Germany has been without active freemasons for two generations and there is no living memory or tradition to continue.
It has yet to be established precisely when and how anti-masonry entered the Arab world, and was integrated into anti-Israeli and anti-Western world conspiracy and victim myths. During the late 19th and early 20th century, freemasonry was not incompatible with Arab culture or Pan-Arab nationalism. However, in its 1988 charter, Hamas branded freemasonry a ’Zionist’ organization and militant Jihadism has generally adopted this view.
As the Canadian scholar of freemasonry J. Scott Kenney has argued, growth of American freemasonry during the first half of the century was aided by the organization of social services and insurance practices when public social programmes were virtually non-existent. During what has been called ’the golden age of fraternalism’, a host of spinoff organizations or so-called ’concordant bodies’ (such as the Shriners) were founded. American freemasonry changed its character in the middle of the century, when big business, government, as well as labour organizations increasingly influenced socio-economic development.
Service clubs like the Rotary (1905) and Lions (1917) attracted more and more members and served social needs in more modernized work-life patterns. Previously, ritual and self-improvement constituted the main focus of the American lodges, but new times occasioned a shift towards high levels of organization, institutionalization, and bureaucracy in the management of various relatively large-scale philanthropies. Masonic membership peaked in the decades following World War II, but like many other community organizations it has experienced a significant decline since the 1960s. Despite many efforts and programmes to recruit new and retain old members, the overall figure has continued to drop.
There are several explanations for this trend; first of all, the gradual substitution of freemasonry’s social service and insurance functions. Secondly, sociologist Robert Putnam claims that traditional social capital in America has increasingly been undermined in the post-war era. In the course of rapid modernization it was replaced by other patterns of leisure organization and gender roles to which freemasonry with its essentially male character was unable to respond. Thirdly, a long period of relative prosperity fostered a culture of self-satisfaction and indifference among the middle classes, where the membership of a community organization was no longer perceived as attractive. Rumours, prejudices, and the occasional scandals associated with freemasonry, which had been quickly disseminated in an age of social media, further deter people from getting involved.
In Britain, it has been suggested that the decline of freemasonry can be linked with the secularization of society as a whole: the Victorian and Anglican character of freemasonry with its quasi-religious undertones would explain a certain amount of the disaffection. On the other hand, it was precisely from religious groups (the Methodists and the United Reformed Church) that attacks on freemasonry were launched during the 1980s and its compatibility with Christianity questioned, as it was in evangelical movements across the globe to the present day. Heavy criticism of British freemasonry, with such publications as The Brotherhood (1983) and Inside the Brotherhood (1989), was left unchallenged, leaving the field open to accusations and allegations that ultimately resulted in two official parliamentary investigations into the role of freemasonry in public life (between 1997 and 1999). Within a period of two decades, British public perception and governmental treatment of freemasonry resembled the situation immediately after the French Revolution. A similar development occurred in the Nordic countries at the end of the 1990s when a Norwegian historian of religion published an exposure of the secretive Swedish rite. When the story broke in the evening press, masonic organizations found themselves perplexed and lacking in credible media strategies to respond to the external pressure. By the 1990s freemasonry was characterized by heavy bureaucratization, over-institutionalization, and an ageing and declining membership. It was unable to counter the increasing amount of negative press in the new digital age and its demands for immediate transparency.