[JRFF 6.1 (2016) 94–130] ISSN (Print) 1757–2460 ISSN (Online) 1757–2479

[JRFF 6.1 (2016) 94–130] ISSN (print) 1757–2460 http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/jrff.34717 ISSN (online) 1757–2479

Crossing Gender and Colour Lines in American Fraternalism: A Study on Joseph W. Kinsley (1843–1905)

Jeffrey Tyssens1

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Email: [email protected]

Abstract

At first sight, Joseph W. Kinsley could be considered as one of those uncountable ‘grandees’ of American fraternalism whose lives have all fallen into a justified oblivion. Closer scrutiny however reveals a career within different fraternal societies that went far beyond the habitual accumulation of titles and responsibilities in the mainstream orders. Kinsley endeavoured experiments with new types of fraternities wherein the normal exclusion of women and African Americans was to be transcended, first in a frontier town in Montana, later in the federal capital. If all of these orders eventually failed, their short-lived histories nevertheless shed light on those men and women, black and white, who tried to make use of the specific context of the American west to break with segregation and gender exclusiveness. They brought this new formula to other parts of the country. Whatever the limitations of his projects and of the views that he held on race and gender, Kinsley does appear as one of the lonely pioneers who tried to break with deep-rooted fraternal orthodoxies regarding these same categories.

Keywords: Fraternalism, women, African Americans, desegregation.

Introduction For the past 15 years, scholars of American fraternalism have recognized that the integrative role of fraternal societies, that old ‘topos’ of a specific historical and sociological literature, has been subject to considerable doubt. This was notably demonstrated by sociologist Jason Kaufman in his seminal book, For the Common Good? Indeed, societal cleavages of gender, religion, ethnicity and race seem rather to have been reinforced by

1. Jeffrey Tyssens is Professor of Contemporary History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, and Chairman of the Interdisciplinary Research Group Free masonry.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 95 the exclusion practices of white or predominantly white fraternal orders, which were definitely stimulating a broader process of ‘competitive voluntarism’ within the fraternal field at large.2 There are many examples of these exclusions. The best known is no doubt the way African American freemasons, although theoretically accepted in lodges of ‘Caucasians’, eventually found themselves to be ostracized by the white grand lodges and had no other option but to create their own lodges and grand lodges, thus generating Prince Hall masonry. One cannot help but be struck by the force of this refusal not only of the admittance of African Americans in mainstream lodges, but also of any recognition of the lodges and grand lodges the excluded group created: it is only recently that this rejection— clearly inspired by racism though it was often veiled by questions of regularity—has been tentatively abolished.3 Freemasons were hardly the only ones to exclude blacks or other racial minorities. The same observation can be made, for example, for the Odd Fellows, who were once the largest fraternal society of the US. There, African Americans were refused as well, again forcing them to construct a parallel order. All nineteenth-century attempts by Odd Fellows to cross that eternal ‘color line’ failed miserably.4 All of that did not stop black fraternities from prospering.5 It is even clear that they contributed considerably to the construction of the African American community6 which was not only gravitating around the churches, however important those were. If only for the financial means they provided for their communities, notably for civic struggles, the fraternities were of undeniable importance:

2. Jason Kaufman, For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity (Oxford: University Press, 2002). 3. Cécile Révauger, Noirs et francs-maçons. Comment la ségrégation raciale s’est installée chez les frères américains (Paris: Dervy, 2014); Peter P. Hinks and Stephen Kantrowitz, eds., All Men Free and Brethren. Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2013). 4. Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, Brothers of a Vow. Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia (Athens & London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 47–48. 5. That does not mean they only copied the white examples: some orders, with their specific biblical frames of reference, were autonomously generated by the black community itself. See Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos & Marshall Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African-American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 2006), 45–55. 6. Which does not imply that black community leaders were always favourably disposed towards fraternalism. Frederick Douglass (1818–95) was opposed to African Americans entering freemasonry, as he considered it a waste of time and energy. See, Stephen Kantrowitz, ‘”Intended for the Better Government of Man”: The Political History of African American Freemasonry in the Era of Emancipation’, Journal of American History 96.4 (2010): 1001.

Cooper argues, ‘Fraternal orders were bastions of financial capital in black communities’.7 Apparently these black fraternal structures were perceived as sufficiently menacing for their white counterparts to launch a series of litigations between 1904 and 1929 aimed at their dissolution.8 The non-admission of women took a somewhat different form. Women were definitely not allowed into most of the fraternities as such and were consequently also excluded from their benefit systems. However, by means of the so-called auxiliaries, which were open for women with a kinship tie to a member of the fraternal order that patronized it, there nevertheless was a certain connection: there was no segregation like the one that was imposed against the secret societies of black citizens. But obviously masculine lodge life as such remained hermetically closed to female presence. Was this exclusiveness based on gender and race really ubiquitous and absolute? One could have that impression, certainly when observing the often aggressive refusal of any opening whatsoever. Furthermore, literature usually focusses on this large majority of non-integrated and non-mixed fraternities.9 It seems that reality, though, was somewhat more complex. There were fraternities who (if only timidly) went beyond these exclusions, whether by admitting women or African Americans. And even among those who normally refused to open their doors, there were exceptions to the rule. We know there have been some tendencies within freemasonry to allow men and women on an equal basis10 and even the ‘color line’ was to be abolished for some white fraternalists.11 Some black freemasons had contacts with their white counterparts and,

7. Brittney C. Cooper, ‘‘’They Are Nevertheless Our Brethren”: The Order of the Eastern Star and the Battle for Women’s leadership, 1874–1926’, Hinks and Kantrowitz, eds. All Men Free and Brethren, 117. 8. Skocpol, Liazos & Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 135–67. 9. Even the earliest studies did not try to find integrated initiatives. See Carter G. Woodson, ‘Insurance Business Among Negroes’, Journal of Negro History 14.2 (1929): 202–26; James B. Browning, ‘The Beginnings of Insurance Enterprise among Negroes’, Journal of Negro History 22.4 (1937): 417–32. 10. John Slifko, ‘An Historical Geography of Louis Goaziou and the Early Years of L’Ordre Maçonnique Mixte et International “Le Droit Humain”’, American Federation of Human Rights: the Significance of the Industrial Monongahela Valley of Western Pennsylvania’, Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism 4.1–2 (2013): 88– 109. 11. One of the most striking examples is definitely that of William H. Upton (1854–1906), Grand Master of the state of Washington, who openly questioned the arguments for the non-recognition of the Prince Hall lodges. See, John Arthur, William Henry Upton: Grand Master 1898–9. Memorial Address before M(ost) W(orshipful) Grand Lodge F(ree) & A(ccepted) M(asons) (Tacoma, Washington: Allen & Lamborn, 1907), 4–20; Jeffrey Croteau, ‘Prince Hall: Masonry and the Man’, The Northern Light, February 2011, 12–13; Révauger, Noirs et francs-maçons, 249–50.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 97 be it on very rare occasions, notably in the early days of black masonry in the north, they participated in the same lodge meetings.12 This obviously brings us to the men in white fraternities who wanted to abolish these classical exclusions. Who were they? What could moti vate their willingness to go against the current? In what geographical context can we see them acting against the colour or the gender line? What was their project? Opening their fraternal gatherings to black people? To women? Or, perhaps the adventurous ones amongst them, to both of them at the same time? And then, if their project actually led to something, who were the blacks and the women, or more particularly even, the black women, who entered into these new fraternities? It is precisely in this respect that the action of Joseph William Kinsley (1843–1905) becomes most interesting. Kinsley, an insurance salesman, journalist, editor and full-time fraternalist, is hardly a well-known man in the history of American fraternalism. He appears at first sight to be just one more of those innumerable ‘grand’ officers who led, at a given moment and with a given level of responsibility, one or other of the fraternal orders, that is, one of those men whose biographies only count in a purely prosopographical context. Kinsley however proved so exceptional in his ambitions for the reform of American fraternalism that a more profound study of his life is overdue.

From East to West, from Commercial Insurance to Fraternal Benefit The biographical data we possess regarding Joseph W. Kinsley are quite fragmented but they do allow us to reconstruct his particular trajectories.13 We know he was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 24 August 1843. He seems to have been a descendant of an old family that had migrated from England to Rhode Island in the early days of colonization. He was the oldest son of Henry Kinsley (1818–73) and Elizabeth Allison (1820–96)—who was of English stock as well.14

12. Chernoh M. Sesay Jr., ‘Emancipation and the Social Origins of Black Freemasonry’, Hinks & Kantrowitz, eds., All Men Free and Brethren, 28. 13. The only extended biographical note can be found in Joaquin Miller, An Illustrated History of the State of Montana (Chicago, IL: Lewis Publishing Company, 1894), 777–79. In as far we do not refer to other sources, this is the basis of our reconstruction. 14. Vital Records of Cambridge (Massachusetts) to the year 1850. Volume 2. Marriages and Deaths. Compiled by Thomas W. Baldwin, A.B., S.B., Member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (Boston, MA: 1915), 15. The genealogical data of the Family History Department of the Mormon church, although very informative, do contain some inconsistencies. See, ‘Ancestral File’, database, FamilySearch. Available at https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/2:1:MWK4–9C5, last accessed 26 February 2015, entry for Henry KINSLEY Jr.

We know the denominational affiliation of the family: they belonged to one of the Methodist Episcopal churches of the city. The Kinsleys do not appear to have been particularly wealthy. After having been a glass maker, father Henry was a police officer at some local post in Cambridge for many years and acted as well as a ‘health officer’.15 When he died in 1873, he left a legacy of debts, forcing the family to sell the little real estate that had come to them.16 The widowed mother does not seem to have made much of a profit from that sale as only a couple of years afterwards she had to start a ‘bread and cake store’ in front of the Cambridge police office, hoping most probably to sell some of her produce to the former colleagues of her deceased husband.17 With this modest background, it is not surprising that young Joseph did not have much formal education, later references to his intelligence notwithstanding. He seems to have been in school in Cambridge until age 11, when he entered an apprenticeship in a print shop. He completed his seven-year apprenticeship with an academic printer working for Harvard University.18 In 1861, though only 18, he responded immediately to President Lincoln’s appeal for troops to fight the Civil War and enlisted in the Union Army. What motivated this quick response? Unfortunately, we do not have any evidence on the matter. Whatever the case, Kinsley entered the 16th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a unit formed in the spring and the summer of 1861 in Middlesex County. Kinsley signed up for service with the qualification as a ‘printer’ on 2 July 1861.19 He served as a simple soldier for one and a half years. In January 1863, he mustered out, after having been wounded (he was to be deaf in one ear for the rest of his life) and having fallen gravely ill while in hospital.

15. The Cambridge Directory for 1860 (Cambridge: Thurston, Miles & Pritchett, 1860), 123, 232; Cambridge Press, 21 July 1888, 3. The fact was mentioned at the occasion of the death of Alice, Joseph’s sister. See as well, Boston Daily Globe (13 February 1873), 8. A health officer was responsible before the mayor for notifying every dangerous situation in town, whether of a hygienic or any other nature. See John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 71. 16. Cambridge Chronicle (18 September 1875), 3. The real estate they still owned in 1860 was valued at $300. 17. Cambridge Chronicle (20 April 1878), 5. 18. His last work, made in 1861, is presumed to have been the composition of the American edition of Charles Dickens’s works. It is not clear though what edition this may have been. See Walter E. Smith, Charles Dickens’ First American Editions. A Bibliography (Calabasas, CA: D. Brass Rare Books, 2012). 19. Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War. Compiled bythe Adjutant General (Norwood: Norwood Press, 1931), Volume II, 219.

Out of the army, Kinsley returned to Cambridge where he resumed his printer’s activity, apparently on an independent basis. Combining the incomplete data from genealogical websites with the traces his family life left in the local press, we can observe that the young veteran married Martha C. Burton (1842–?) from Alfred, Maine in Cambridge in 1864.20 Hardly anything is known about this first marriage, only that they had a son named Burton in 1866, who probably died at a young age, and that they divorced somewhere after 1870.21 In 1873, Kinsley married Caroline Amelia Peck (1847–1930) from Michigan, seemingly also a descendant of an old American family.22 Together they had two daughters: Carrie Shepherd (1875–1954) and the much younger Alice Fedora (1888–1929).23 In the meantime, Kinsley had abandoned his printing press for another occupation. We do not know how his printing business had done: not too well, most probably. Whatever may have been the case, it is quite surprising to observe that this man who was to become so active in mutual benefit fraternalism later on was to pass a considerable part of his early career in the commercial insurance business, which is to say, with the main ‘natural’ enemy of that part of the fraternal world.24 From 1866, he operated for the Stearns, Kinsley & Co. agency and, in Cambridge, for the Hastings, Kinsley & Co. branch that served diverse large societies, mainly offering fire insurances.25 Kinsley must have gained sufficient field experience with these agencies for him go into business for himself, after 1871, when the fires in Chicago caused the bankruptcy of a series of larger companies for which he had worked

20. Cambridge Chronicle (2 April 1864), 2. This marriage is never mentioned in the genealogical series. 21. She was a Congregationalist. See The Manual of the First Church in Cambridge (Congregational) (Boston, MA: S. Usher, 1900), 54. Martha returned to Maine and in 1880 was making a living as teacher, according to the census records. Many thanks to Susan Sommers for bringing to my attention these data in Ancenstry.com 22. Lineage Book. National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Volume LXXVI (Washington DC: Daughters of the American Revolution, 1925), 62. She was to become quite active in the DAR in Washington DC during the last years of her life. See The Evening Star, (14 May 1922), 10. 23. http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=DESC&db=vincentclan &id=I15096, last accessed 26 February 2015. 24. Which leads us to question these barriers as well: there must have been at least some bridges between those sectors. An issue to investigate, no doubt. 25. Publicity for these societies appears for the first time in Cambridge Chronicle, 5 October 1867, 3. See as well Cambridge Chronicle, (12 March 1870), 2; Illuminated and Illustrated Business Directory of Boston (Boston, MA: Devoe, 1870), 166; Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Investigate the Cause and Management of the Great Fire in Boston (Boston, MA: Rockwel & Churchill, 1873), 244–45.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 100 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism until then.26 He set up a partnership with a couple of friends to create a series of new insurance companies in Boston: In 1872 they established the Faneuil Hall Insurance Company, of which he was Secretary and Vice- President until 1876,27 and, in 1874, the Boston Protective Department, which, as a co-founder, he directed again until 1876.28 He was also a member of the Cambridge Board of Underwriters, a local professional association of insurance agents.29 In these same years he also took out a patent for an office tool he had developed.30 It seems that his business was now sufficiently successful for him to ascend the social hierarchy and to acquire a certain social standing in Cambridge. Kinsley could frequently be found in diverse committees of the city’s Republican Party.31 He was also elected Justice of the Peace in Cambridge, serving at least from 1869 to 1874.32 It is most probable that the latter activity was an incentive to study the law, which was to have some consequences later on, albeit in a very different setting. It was also in Cambridge that Joseph W. Kinsley began his fra ternal career. His trajectory shows that he participated fully in that ‘omnivorous’ attitude Americans had with regard to the secret societies in that epoch. His memberships were indeed to be very numerous. We can say however, that his masonic affiliation was the most important, and certainly so for his descendants. When he was buried in Arlington Cemetery after his death in November 1905, his grave was marked by a funerary monument in the form of an obelisk with explicit masonic

26. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Insurance Commissioner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. January 1, 1869. Part I. Fire and Marine Insurance (Boston, MA: Wright & Potter, 1869), 381, 407; Sixteenth Annual Report of the Insurance Commissioner (…) 1871. Part I. Fire and Marine Insurance (Boston, MA: Wright & Potter, 1871), 245–46; Eighteenth Annual Report of the Insurance Commissioner (…) 1873. Part I. Fire and Marine Insurance (Boston, MA: Wright & Potter, 1873), 246. 27. Reports Made to the General Assembly of Illinois at the Twenty-Eighth Session. 8 January 1873 (Springfield, IL: State Journal Printing Office, 1873), 164. 28. Acts and Resolved passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, in the Year 1874, ’75 (Boston, MA: Wright & Potter, 1875), 58–59; First Annual Report of the Boston Protective Department from its Organization, 1 April 1874 to 1 March 1875 (Boston, MA: W.L. Deland, 1875), 3; The Boston Almanac and Business Directory (Boston, MA: Sampson, Davenport & Co., 1877), 83. 29. Cambridge Chronicle, 15 May 1869, 2. 30. http://www.google.com/patents/US132085, last accessed 26 February 2015. 31. Cambridge Chronicle (21 May 1864), 2; (23 November 1867), 1; (18 September 1869), 2. 32. The Massachusetts Register and Business Directory. Containing a Record of State and County Officers, Merchants, Manufacturers, etc. 1869 (Boston, MA: Sampson, Davenport & Co., 1869), 51; Idem 1874, 47; The Cambridge Directory for 1872 (Cambridge, MA: Dudley, 1872), 360.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 101 symbols on the flank that also carried the epitaph.33 This is not surprising of course: masonic membership was then considered the most prestigious of all fraternal affiliations. He entered freemasonry at a quite young age: he was accepted as an entered apprentice in October 1864, at only 21 years of age, in Putnam Lodge, established since 1854 in East Cambridge where Kinsley was living. He was quickly passed and raised. In 1867, he was among the charter members of William Sutton Lodge in Saugus, a lodge named as such in honour of a Union general who was an officer of the Grand Lodge of Masons of Massachusetts.34 We will return to his subsequent masonic memberships. However important freemasonry was, it is quite probable that Kinsley’s first fraternal affiliation was to be found elsewhere. Indeed, already in 1860, when only 17 years-old, he seems to have already been a member of Social Council N°1 of the Sons and Daughters of Temperance,35 a fraternity favouring total abstinence of all liquors. That might seem very young, but the society welcomed members as young as 14 years-old.36 This membership is interesting for still another reason. Initially, this order of teetotalers was organized in the traditional fashion, with the Sons and the Daughters meeting separately. The Social Council, by contrast, since its inception in 1859 wanted to unify men and women in one single society.37 Hence, Kinsley’s first fraternal steps were taken in a mixed context. Would it be all that artificial to presume that this might have had some influence on the attitudes of the mature man regarding the gendered nature of fraternal orders?38 Probably not. There is still another feature of young Kinsley’s fraternal life that could have influenced his later stances. Indeed, we know he was a member

33. See tomb 6598 in section 13 of the cemetery on: http://www.arlingtoncemetery. mil/ANCExplorer, last accessed 25 August 2014. 34. At that time, the Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts did not include the membership roster of the lodges but the Grand Lodge library has put its historical membership cards on a genealogical site and can be consulted, see Ancestry.com. See also Cambridge Directory for 1878 (Cambridge, MA: Greenough & Co., 1878), 494; A Half Century of William Sutton Lodge, F. & A. M. Saugus, Mass.: 1867–1917 (Saugus, MA: Newcomb & Gauss, 1917). 35. Cambridge Chronicle (6 October 1860), 2. 36. The order’s constitution was explicit on that matter. See, Constitution and By- Laws of Pine Division, N° 134, Sons of Temperance (Kingston: Commercial Advertiser Office, 1856), 6. 37. It has been said that the experiment only lasted until 1861. See David Peabody, ‘Notice of the Temperance Organizations in Salem’, Bulletin of the Essex Institute, September 1869, 115. It seems however that Social Council N°1 of Cambridge survived longer, at least until 1869. See The Cambridge Directory for 1869 (Cambridge, MA: John Ford, 1869), 328. 38. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’illusion biographique’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 62–63 (1986): 69–72.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 102 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the fraternal society of veterans of the Union Army, which he joined as it was formed in 1866. It is important to mention that the GAR was one of the rare fraternities where whites and blacks were admitted on equal terms, sometimes even as members of one and the same ‘Post’. As we do not know which post Kinsley joined initially,39 it is impossible to affirm that this membership led him to cooperate directly with African Americans in such a unit of the GAR, but that does not preclude that at least in an indirect way he had a young man’s experience with a fraternalism that was not limited to an exclusively white membership.40 As we will see, Joseph W. Kinsley was to take many leading roles in fraternal life, but not until he left Massachusetts. Circumstances led Kinsley to abandon his professional and fraternal career on the East Coast. According to the biographical note quoted before, family health problems prompted a move to California, apparently to find a more beneficial climate.41 We may presume it was the health of his second wife that pushed for a move to the other end of the continent. By May 1875, when the first of Kinsley’s daughters was not yet born, he and his wife made the first journey to California, in fact to Sacramento, probably to prepare a final settlement.42 Apparently he was involved in insurance matters again, as he found himself in litigation before a Sacramento court only a few weeks after his arrival.43 Was the trial a sign that things

39. In the GAR of Massachusetts hierarchy, young Kinsley does not seem to have had any responsibilities. See Early History of the Department of Massachusetts G.A.R. From 1866 to 1880 Inclusive (Boston, MA: E.B. Stillings & Co., 1895). 40. On the complex situation of the GAR, where segregated and non-segregated posts existed alongside one another, see Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 41. Were there no other reasons as well? It is a possibility. In 1880, Kinsley lost a defamation trial he had pursued against a member of the Ancient Order of United Workmen (AOUW)—an order we will come back to—who possessed a number of letters of an East Coast businessman—from Massachusetts, no doubt—who questioned Kinsley’s professional integrity. The accused wanted to make use of it to block Kinsley’s election in a key office of the AOUW grand lodge of California. The judge ruled that the investigation of the accused was legitimate and consequently rejected Kinsley’s claim. Had there been problems with his insurance business in the Boston area? That is certainly not excluded. It is thus well possible that other motives than the climate (also) prompted Kinsley to seek his fortune on the West Coast. See Daily Alta California (30 January 1880), 1; (4 March 1880), 1. 42. They were mentioned in a passengers list arriving in the state’s capital. See Sacramento Daily Union (11 May 1875), 2. 43. Before a Sacramento court a certain Michael Hayes accused him of slander: Kinsley was said to have affirmed that this Hayes would not have hesitated to light a fire himself in order to obtain insurance money. It is not clear who this Hayes was:

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 103 did not go well in Sacramento? It is possible. Before autumn the couple returned to Boston, as their daughter was born there on 9 October 1875. But they did not stay there either. In the final days of 1876,44 the family headed for California again, not to the state capital this time, but to San Francisco. Upon his arrival in San Francisco on 2 January 1877, Kinsley immediately tried to resume business insuring against fires, as he had in Massachusetts. We can find him listed as the manager of the J.W. Kingsley & Co. agency in 1877.45 At the end 1877, he became an associate of Edward D. Wright to form Kinsley & Wright, General Insurance Agents.46 He also became a member of a young professional association, the Fire Underwriters Association of the Pacific.47 But his business does not seem to have flourished. In May 1878, after only a few months of partnership, Kinsley & Wright dissolved, and in 1879, during an assembly of the Pacific Fire Underwriters, it was noted that Kinsley had retired from the insurance business altogether.48 Definitely, the late 1870s brought a career change which eventually put Kinsley at the heart of the fraternal world of the West Coast: indeed, he was on track to become a sort of professional fraternalist. No doubt, his older fraternal attachments must have led him to this reorientation. It does not seem that his membership of the Grand Army of the Republic played an important role: in San Francisco, we find him as the commander of Lincoln Post N° 1 in 1881, nothing more.49 Freemasonry, by contrast, proved to be more of a point of attachment. Once installed on the West Coast, Kinsley immediately joined local several men of that name and doubtful reputation appear in the Californian press in those days. See Sacramento Daily Union (3 June 1875), 2. 44. In December 1876 Kinsley resigned from the Faneuil Hall company. See Coast Review. A Monthly Journal, Devoted to Fire, Marine and Life Insurance (December 1876): 155. 45. Apparently, a Bostonian associate of the Faneuil Hall company, W.H. Bingham, had joined him to launch that office. See Coast Review. A Monthly Journal, Devoted to Fire, Marine and Life Insurance (January 1877:, 212; (February 1877): 276; The San Francisco Directory For the Year Commencing March, 1877 (…) (San Francisco, CA: Langley, 1877), 495. 46. Coast Review. A Monthly Journal, Devoted to Fire, Marine and Life Insurance (January 1877): 496–97; The San Francisco Directory For the Year Commencing February, 1878 (…) (San Francisco, CA: Langley, 1878), 485. 47. He was a member of the Library Committee in 1878, the society having been founded in 1876. See Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Fire Underwriters Association of the Pacific (…) (S.l.: 1906), 98. 48. Daily Alta California, (3 May 1878), 4; Proceedings of the Fire Underwriters Association of the Pacific for the Years 1879 band 1880 at San Francisco, California (San Francisco, CA: Spaulding & Co., 1880), 42–43. 49. Pacific States Watchman, (1 May 1881), 149.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 104 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism lodges. He resigned in Saugus on 1 July 1877 and in December of that same year he was already elected a Master of Ceremonies of Pacific Lodge N° 136 in San Francisco. A year later he became Senior Deacon.50 In 1880, he affiliated with another lodge in that same city, King Solomon’s Lodge N° 260, with which he was to stay until he left California.51 We can also trace him as one of the first members of the Masonic Veteran Association of the Pacific Coast in 1879.52 In those years, we observe that Kinsley held an active role as a liaison officer with women’s orders connected to masonry. In 1880, he appears as the Grand Assistant Patron of the Eastern Star for the Golden State.53 His renewed lodge activities most probably explain why already in 1878 Kinsley, though still an insurance agent, took up printing again and started editing the Masonic Monthly. Once his insurance business ended, he focussed completely on J.W. Kinsley & Co—Book and Job Printers, a shop specialized in ‘society printing’ for fraternal orders. The print shop even had its offices in the Shields’ Building, which was a kind of headquarters of fraternal life in San Francisco.54 Rapidly, he became the fraternal editor in town, also publishing the Pacific (States) Workman, the periodical of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and the Fraternal Record, a journal aimed at local fraternities, that was to merge with the Pacific States Workman in July 1881. While enlarging his activities in this way, Kinsley had become an associate (somewhere in 1880–81) of Joseph O. Jephson,55 another

50. Daily Alta California, (20 December 1877), 1; Proceedings of the M(ost) W(orshipful) Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of California (1878), 758; idem (1879), 304. 51. Proceedings of the M(ost) W(orshipful) Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of California (1880), 701, 778; idem (1881), 403; idem (1882), 865. In 1883, Kinsley was suspended for non-payment of his dues. In 1884, he re-affiliated to his lodge and then formally retired. It is not clear if he was affiliated somewhere else, between his San Francisco years and his adherence to a lodge in Montana in 1890. We do not find him on the rosters of lodges in his respective places of residence before 1890: not in Weber Lodge N°6 in Ogden (Utah), nor in Ashlar Lodge N°29 in Billings (Montana). 52. Edwin A. Sherman, Brief History, Constitution and Statutes of the Masonic Veteran Association of the Pacific Coast and the Entire Roll of Members from the Beginning, December 27, 1878, to January 1, 1901 (Oakland, CA: Carruth & Carruth, 1901), 29. 53. History of the Order Eastern Star in California (San Francisco, CA: Grand Chapter, 1929), Appendices. 54. In 1881, the building, destroyed by the fires following the big earthquake of 1906, comprised a series of offices and eight lodge rooms serving ‘lodges’, ‘councils’ etc. of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, of the Knights of Honor, of the American Legion of Honor, of the Chosen Friends and of two lodges of Odd Fellows. See Pacific States Watchman (15 January 1881), 1; The San Francisco Call (16 June 1906), 4. 55. Joseph Oliver Jephson (1841–98), an Irish immigrant, was an indefatigable fraternalist too, certainly at the end of the 1880s. Besides the freemasons and AOUW where he operated with Kinsley, we can find him, often as an officer, in the following

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 105 printer in town.56 This collaboration was most probably a product of the fraternal network as well: both men knew each other in Pacific Lodge N° 136, and they found one another in the same AOUW lodge as well. That last element is most important, as AOUW membership brought a new shade to Kinsley’s fraternal engagement that was to bring him to the top of the fraternal hierarchy. It was a token of how much his fraternal memberships had become broader. We find him in the Order of Chosen Friends (at the Social Council N° 46)57—an order that seems to have been the first mutual benefit fraternity to open to men and women without any distinction –58 and in the American Legion of Honor (in the Golden Shore Council), but it was mainly in the Ancient Order of United Workmen that he was to become most active. Note that this choice, for a former man of the commercial sector, was unexpected: in California as much as anywhere else, both sectors often lived in open hostility towards one another.59 Despite this, Kinsley joined the AOUW Franklin Lodge N° 44 in August 1878, that is, shortly after his arrival in orders, some well-known, others less: American Legion of Honor, Legion of the West, Order of the Beacon Light, Order of United Endowment Associates, Knights of Honor, Ancient Order Foresters of America, Order of Chosen Friends and the Knights of Pythias. See Daily Alta California (28 December 1886), 2; (22 May 1888), 2; (23 July 1889), 2; (3 September 1889), 2; (20 February 1890), 1; (19 March 1890), 8; (4 November 1890), 2; The San Francisco Call ( 25 May 1896), 8; (3 April 1898), 12. Jephson belonged to a Protestant denomination: not only was he a mason (nearly impossible for a Catholic in those days), but he was also a militant of the American Party in California, a nativist and anti-Catholic formation. See Daily Alta California (4 December 1884), 8; John Higham, ‘The American Party, 1886–1891’, Pacific Historical Review (February 1950): 37–46. 56. In the city’s Directory of 1880, Jephson is still mentioned without a link to Kinsley. In 1881, they appear as partners. See San Francisco Directory for the Year com mencing April, 1880 (…) (San Francisco, CA: Francis, Valentine & Co., 1880), 478; idem 1881, 538. 57. Pacific States Watchman (1 June 1881), 181; (15 August 1881), 269; (15 September 1881), 309; (1 October 1881), 317, 324. 58. Albert Stevens, The Cyclopaedia of Fraternities (New York: Paterson, 1899), 138, 171–74. 59. Early in 1882, when the commercial insurers published a study showing that the actuarial schemes of orders such as the AOUW were deficient, an observation that was not without foundation, as the future was to show, a polemic was launched against it by the Pacific States Workman, then edited by Kinsley. See Pacific States Watchman (15 March 1882), 85; Coast Review. A Monthly Journal, Devoted to Fire, Marine and Life Insurance (January 1882): 23–24; (February 1882): 77–86. It was an article in that last issue, ‘An Expose of the Fallacies of Co-Operative Life Insurance, as Practiced by Several Societies and Advocated by a Few Fanatical “Organs” and Individuals’, a text with some strong language, that caused the incident. The editors of the Coast Review were charged with slander several times because of their sharp articles. See Daily Alta California (8 June 1876), 2; (27 May 1877), 1; (3 April 1891), 2; The San Francisco Call (7 April 1889), 3; (23 September 1891), 2.

San Francisco, when this lodge was founded. He immediately took an officers’ post. In December of that same year, he became a charter member of St. John Lodge N° 73 (AOUW), with a membership of United Workmen who were also freemasons.60 His associate Jephson was there with him. Kinsley also became one of the delegates of the California Grand Lodge at the supreme lodge meetings. In 1880, he was chosen as Grand Lecturer. That same year the AOUW Supreme Lodge made Kinsley the Deputy Supreme Master Workman for the state of Nevada, where the order had just started to organize. This new charge made him travel a lot, notably to install new lodges, often in remote and isolated places. He started with Nevada and quickly his charge was enlarged to include Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana. This work was paid61 and as it surely must have consumed most of his time, Kinsley closed his print shop, somewhere about 1882.62 That same year he combined his fraternal responsibilities with a position as reporter for The Examiner, but that does not seem to have lasted long.63 As of 1883, Kinsley was no longer residing in San Francisco but was based in Ogden, Utah. That was not a coincidence, since Kinsley had successfully created an AOUW Grand Lodge federating the lodges of Nevada, Idaho, Utah and Montana in 1883.64 With the creation of this grand lodge, Joseph W. Kinsley was elected its first Grand Master. In 1884, he was re-elected.65

60. Logansport Pharos Tribune (27 August 1891), 3. 61. He earned $2,500 a year, plus expenses. See Journal of Proceedings of the Second Session of the Grand Lodge of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, Jurisdiction of Nevada, Held at the Hall of St. James Lodge, Winnemucca, Nevada, May 9th, 10th and 11th 1882 (Virginia: WM. Sutherland Printers, 1882), 29. The creation of a new lodge earned him a bonus of $50. See Digest of the Constitutions, Laws and Decisions of the Ancient Order of United Workmen (Buffalo, NY: Baker, Jones & Co., 1879), 17. 62. As of 1882, we find his former partner Jephson advertising alone. See Pacific States Watchman (15 May 1882), 154. The publication of the Masonic Monthly was interrupted in January 1881. See Proceedings of the M(ost) W(orshipful) Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of California (1882), 922. 63. San Francisco Directory for the Year commencing April, 1882 (…) (San Francisco, CA: Francis, Valentine & Co., 1882), 565. This connection with a journal of Democratic opinion is somewhat unexpected for this longstanding Republican. See John P. Young, Journalism in California. Pacific Coast and Exposition Biographies (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Publishing Co, 1915), 105. 64. The order had grown rapidly, although the states’ population was small and dispersed. See Pacific States Watchman (1 September 1883), 269. Kinsley gave incentive to recruitment by giving a $3 bonus to those bringing in a new member. See AOUW Storey Lodge No. 3 Minute Books 1904–1906, 26 September 1905, Berkeley University, Bancroft Library, P-G 214 v. 11 (box 4). 65. Pacific States Watchman (15 May, 1883), 157; (24 May 1884), 157.

In Ogden, Kinsley worked for some time as editor of the local journal, the Ogden Pilot,66 and at the same time began a legal career, having passed the Utah bar exam as an autodidact. Then, he moved to Billings, Montana, where he both published the Billings Rustler (until 1885) and practiced law.67 After he sold the Billings newspaper in 1886, we find him registered as a lawyer and again as insurance agent in Helena,68 which was to become the capital of Montana.69 His law office—which he seems to have run until 1900—did bring him a certain notoriety as it proved to be where the first woman in the state was admitted to the bar.70 In Helena, he was again an active member of the local Republican Party.71 As we could expect, Kinsley resumed his fraternal activities in his new hometown.72 As a freemason, he affiliated with King Solomon Lodge N° 9 in Helena in 1890.73 He was quickly elected Senior Warden (in 1891 and 1892) and became the lodge’s Master in 1893. He remained a regular member of that lodge until 1901 and was suspended in 1902 for non-payment of his dues.74 We also know he joined the local unit

66. The New North-West, Portland, Oregon (16 November 1883), 3. 67. The River Press, Fort Benton, Montana (10 December 1884), 7; (18 February 1885), 3. 68. There are traces of his participation in a mining society. See The Helena Independent (3 March 1889), 3. 69. McKenney’s Pacific Coats Directory for 1886–1887 giving name, Business, and Address of Business and Professional Men of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Montana (San Francisco, CA: McKenney & Co., 1886), 965. He was a founder of the Home Fire Insurance Company of Montana. See The River Press (29 April 1885), 3; Daily Yellowstone Journal, Miles City, Montana (3 May 1885), 2; (17 August 1886), 3; The Helena Independent (28 April 1889), 4; The Insurance Journal (1890), 262. 70. It concerns Ella Knowles (1860–1911), first female lawyer of Montana, advocate of the profession’s opening for women at large, a suffragette and also the first female member of the House of the State Legislature of Montana, for the Populist Party. She was Kinsley’s associate until early 1891. See Progressive Men of the State of Montana (Chicago, IL: A.W. Bowen, s.d.), 472–74; T. A. Larson, ‘Montana Women and the Battle for the Ballot’, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 28 (1973), 24– 41; Richard B. Roeder, ‘Crossing the Gender Line: Ella L. Knowles, Montana’s First Woman Lawyer’, idem, 32 (1982), 64–75; Paula Petrik, No Step Backward. Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, Helena, Montana, 1865–1900 (Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society Press, 1987), 22; The Helena Independent (1 January 1891), 1. 71. The Helena Independent (24 March 1889), 5. 72. We find him in other sociable contexts as well, notably in a New England immigrants’ club, where his future associate Ella Knowles was a member as well. See Great Falls Tribune (1 December 1888), 3; The Helena Independent (5 January 1889), 4. 73. Striking detail: From 1891, Kinsley had his legal office in the Masonic Temple Building of Helena. See The Helena Independent (4 June 1891), 8. 74. This suspension was decided when Kinsley had already left Montana and was living in Washington DC. Probably, the epistolary contact had been interrupted.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 108 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism of the Grand Army of the Republic, Wadsworth Post N° 3.75 Evidently, he remained very active within the Ancient Order of United Workmen, joining Capital Lodge N°2 (where he was the Master Workman)76 and of Montana Lodge N°1—Select Knights. Characterized as the ‘war horse of the AOUW’,77 he became Grand Master Workman of the AOUW Grand Lodge of Montana in 1890. This was the autonomous grand lodge he had helped to create.78 After holding several offices in the supreme lodge,79 he finally reached the top position in the order in 1891, when he was elected Supreme Master Workman for the USA.80 As precious little source material survives from the period Kinsley led the order, we hardly know what policy he had. There is some reason to assume, though, that he was not entirely satisfied with the influence he was able to exert over the order, even though he continued to be affiliated with it for some time afterward.81 We say this because, only a few years later, he used the model of the Ancient Order of United Workmen as a mutual benefit fraternity as the basis for the construction of just another fraternal order that explicitly broke with the race and gender exclusions upheld by traditional secret societies. When Kinsley moved to Washington DC somewhere around 1900—it is certain that at least in the summer of that year he was residing in the federal capital—82 for unknown reasons,83 he continued his endeavour of breaking with the misogynist and segregationist practices of the established fraternal

See The Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of Montana (1890), 49; (1891), 67; (1892), 18, 58; (1893), 7, 65; (1901), 82; (1902), 104. 75. Department of Montana. Grand Army of the Republic. Proceedings of the First, Sec ond, Third and Fourth Encampments 1885–1886–1887–1888 (Helena, MT: Fisk, 1888), 2. 76. The Helena Independent (1 December 1890), 8. 77. The Helena Independent (25 February 1890), 5. 78. The Helena Independent (21 August 1890), 1; (16 September 1890), 1; (19 December 1890), 4. 79. See Daily Alta California (9 July 1889), 2; The San Francisco Call (12 June 1894), 3. 80. The Helena Independent (21 June 1891), 1; Logansport Pharos Tribune (27 August 1891), 3. 81. We find him in 1899 as the organizer of lodges and grand lodges in New Mexico and Arizona. See The Copper Era (21 September 1899), 4; The Border Vidette (30 September 1899), 2; Tombstone Prospector (2 October 1899), 4; The Florence Tribune (7 October 1899), 3; The Arizona Republican (9 October 1899), 5; Arizona Weekly Journal- Miner (8 November 1899), 3; The Coconino Sun (25 November 1899), 14; Albuquerque Daily Citizen (1 December 1899), 2; The Carlsbad Current (30 December 1899), 7. 82. A first mention can be found in The Evening Star (28 July 1900), 13. 83. It seems he briefly worked in the government, but quickly resumed his lawyer’s activity. See The Washington Times (24 July 1901), 8; The River Press (15 November 1905), 3; Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia (1901), 11.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 109 societies.84 His unexpected death—in 1905, due to apoplexy—85 broke the development of this new dynamic, which we treat in more depth in the next sections of this article.

Opening Brotherhood: Men and Women, Whites and Blacks We have already noted that in his first years of involvement in fraternalism, Kinsley was presented at several occasions with practices that went against the traditional exclusions of the main American orders. As a youngster in Massachusetts, he experienced a mixed fraternity favouring temperance. As a still young civil war veteran he had joined the more or less desegregated Grand Army of the Republic (the situation was not uniform though). Having reached maturity, he became member of the Order of Chosen Friends where men and women were admitted equally. As a freemason in California, he established a formal tie to the Order of the Eastern Star. Did all of this imply that Kinsley had an explicit opinion on that inclusion? When he took his first steps as a fraternal editor in San Francisco, things were still rather ambiguous in this respect. In the Masonic Monthly, for example, he published articles that on the one hand showed sympathy towards the admission of women, notably with a laudatory article (taken from another journal) concerning Elizabeth St. Léger who was supposedly the first woman to have been made a mason,86 but on the other hand he did continue to reject the entry of women in the lodges. There is no doubt whatsoever that this rejection was motivated—however respectful the language he used –87 by a very traditional perspective upon the place of women in society: We exclude her from our lodge-rooms because our esoteric ceremonies are not suitable for her, and because our ancient landmarks are opposed to her admission, but above all things because we believe home is the

84. It is not clear, by the way, what traditional fraternal activities Kinsley maintained in DC. In his last years, the Proceedings of the District of Columbia—which contains the membership rosters of the capital’s masonic lodges—do not mention him, not even when he was no longer affiliated to a Montana lodge. He does seem to have had some contacts again with the Grand Army of the Republic, as the local Garfield Post took care of military honours during his burial at Arlington. 85. The Evening Star (8 November 1905), 3. 86. The Masonic Monthly (August 1880), 158–60. On the issue of this presumed initiation and the representation of a hypothetical acceptance of women in masonry, see Cécile Révauger, ‘Aldworth, née St Léger, Elizabeth’, in Le Monde maçonnique des Lumières (Europe-Amériques & Colonies), eds. Charles Porset & Cécile Révauger (Paris: Champion, 2013), Volume I, 49–53. 87. Even the talkativeness attributed to women was defended as a necessity of nature. See The Masonic Monthly (July 1880), 118.

place for woman, by the fireside with her sisters or children. We do not wish to see woman unsex herself or forget her sex in the performance of the duty of man. For Kinsley’s Masonic Monthly, the hypothesis that women would take obligations linked to the ‘coarser natures’ of men did not present itself as desirable.88 In his other fraternal publications, such as the Pacific States Watchman, texts were published that favoured women more markedly. Kinsley himself seems to have had a particular sensitivity for the economic dependence of married women which he did not hesitate to compare to the slavery of African Americans.89 That same periodical also published articles by women that had come from the east and had distinguished themselves in the professional spheres of California, for example Rachel A.E. Perkins (1834–1929),90 but also by early feminists such as Clarina Nichols (1810–1885).91 Indeed, the Watchman reprinted the latter’s advocacy of women’s suffrage, which had appeared earlier in the Pacific Rural Press.92 This tendency of his seems to have gained momentum in the 1890s. At that time, he rejected the more explicitly misogynous stance taken by the majority of contemporary fraternal societies. In the AOUW Monthly Magazine, an organ he edited while living in Montana, he castigated the condescending or outright hostile attitude of the brethren towards the women’s ‘auxiliaries’.93 He made use of this AOUW publication to laud the women that led the Degree of Honor,

88. The Masonic Monthly (February 1880), 333. The article was anonymous: as Kinsley was the editor, it is most likely that he was the author. 89. Pacific States Watchman (1 February 1881), 42. Same remark as the former note. 90. Rachel A.E. Perkins, daughter of a well-known New York engraver, published in the Watchman under the name of Jewell, referring to her first husband George Parke Jewell, deceased in 1867. She then married Simeon Harris Herring, whose name she used for her activities as a physician. See Pacific Rural Press, (15 January 1881), 38; Emma C. Brewster Jones, The Brewster Genealogy, 1566. A Record of the Descendants of William Brewster of the ‘Mayflower’, Ruling Elder (…) (New York: Grafton Press, 1908), 323; Sherilyn C. Bennion, Equal to the Ocean. Women Editors on the Nineteenth-Century West (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1990), 78. For her articles, see Pacific States Watchman (1 March 1881), 87; (15 March 1882), 87. 91. On Clarina Irene Howard Nichols and her fascinating career as a feminist, abolitionist, teacher, journalist and newspaper publisher, key figure in the acquiring of the first women’s rights in the states where she deployed her militancy (by 1871 in California, after having been active in Vermont, New York, Wisconsin and Kansas), see Joseph G. Gambone, ‘The Forgotten Feminist of Kansas 1. The Papers of Clarina I.H. Nichols, 1854–1885’, The Kansas Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 1973): 12–57. 92. Pacific States Watchman (16 September 1882), 274; Pacific Rural Press (16 September 1882), 202. 93. AOUW Monthly Magazine (July 1898), 34.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 111 the AUOW’s auxiliary.94 Kinsley did not hesitate to cooperate actively with this society.95 Where the ‘color line’ was in question, Kinsley was even more outspoken, even if some areas of shadow did remain. In the 1890s, Kinsley’s biographer affirmed that he had tried to eliminate the rule that reserved entry into the AOUW to whites, as he was ‘a lover of civil liberty’ as well as ‘an extreme abolitionist’.96 That had been made clear quite early. In the Masonic Monthly, as a reader remarked approvingly, the general tenor was positive towards ‘Colored Masonry’.97 Kinsley’s attitude is manifested in a eulogy written at the death of Joshua Smith, a black abolitionist accepted by a white lodge in Massachusetts. In ‘Tribute of Respect to the Memory of a Colored Mason’, Kinsley not only lauds the qualities of this rare Afro-American admitted in a white lodge, but said he had frequented the same Boston lodges as Smith.98 One should be careful though, not to give too much weight to this encounter and to the possible consequences Kinsley may have attached to it: Joshua Smith appears as a kind of fig leaf the Boston lodges used to claim a liberal image for themselves that did not correspond to everyday realities. Furthermore, Smith was of such a light complexion that he could hardly be identified as a man of African descent.99 These ambiguities notwithstanding, Kinsley did translate his egalitarian sentiments to concrete efforts within the fraternal world. Once he had left as the AOUW Supreme Master Workman in 1892, he tried to utilize the order’s particular formula—in which life insurance was at the heart of the endeavour—into a mixed gender and integrated fraternal society. This new step was prepared for over a year with a

94. See AOUW Monthly Magazine (May 1898), 34; (July 1898), 35. Kinsley had himself organized the Degree of Honour in Montana. In that state, there was some reflection about a future enlargement of the AOUW insurance system to women. The first option was the creation of a burial aid fund. Then an optional life insurance scheme was to be introduced. See The Helena Independent (11 August 1892), 5; (15 December 1892), 8; The Anaconda Standard (11 August 1893), 4. 95. He was an ‘adviser to (the) chief of honor’ in Mount Helena Lodge No 1, where his daughter Daisy was among the officers. See The Helena Independent (27 January 1893), 2. 96. Miller, An Illustrated History, 779. It is interesting to note that Kinsley had Jews among his friends in Helena, notably the Genzberger family of which the father was active with him in the AOUW. See The Helena Independent (12 January 1891), 5; (18 January 1891), 5. 97. The Masonic Monthly (September 1879), 184. The author expressed his hope that one day, time helping, blacks and whites would work together in the same lodges. 98. The Masonic Monthly (September 1879), 172–74. 99. On the initiation of Smith, see Stephen Kantrowitz, ‘Brotherhood Denied. Black Freemasonry and the Limits of Reconstruction’, Hinks and Kantrowitz, eds. All Men Free and Brethren, 110–11.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 112 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism series of lectures in Helena that were mostly directed at the local black community. At the time, Helena had a black population of a couple of hundred people, mostly recent settlers who moved north and west after the Civil War.100 The lectures featured Kinsley himself as a speaker, but also included a respected local Afro-American, James Ball. Indeed, Kinsley had managed to warm James Presley Ball sr (1825–1904) to his idea. Ball is a well-known figure in early African American photography, but he was also a leader of the black community in Helena where he lived from 1887 to 1900. He was President of the local Afro-American Club (a pro-Republican society),101 co-founder of the St James African Methodist Episcopal Church, and a member of the committee leading the town’s Republican Party.102 His son was the Editor of The Colored Citizen, an important local African-American newspaper first published in 1894.103 The fraternal society Kinsley and Ball eventually founded in Helena on 27 July 1893 was named the American Order of Home Protection (AOHP). The objective was stated as follows: Whereas, in the course of human progress, the time is propitious for the organization of an American Fraternal Society which shall know no political, religious or color distinction, and, Whereas, circumstances justify and patriotism demands its immediate establishment, now, Therefore, the undersigned constitute and found the American Order of Home Protection, and hereby declare and proclaim its objects to be, To unite in the bonds of Fraternity, Equality and Protection reputable men and women for their own benefit, socially, morally and intellectually.104

100. William L. Lang, ‘The Nearly Forgotten Blacks on Last Chance Gulch, 1900– 1912’, Pacific Northwest Quarterly 70.2 (1979), 50–57; Quintard Taylor, ‘The Emergence of Black Communities in the Pacific Northwest: 1865–1910’, Journal of Negro History 64.4 (1979): 352. 101. The Colored Citizen (5 November 1894), 3. Kinsley participated in at least one meeting of the club. See The Helena Independent (3 October 1892), 4. 102. The local Republicans wanted to nominate him for elected office to break the colour line. See Deborah Willis, ed. J. P. Ball, Daguerrean and Studio Photographer (New York & London: Garland, 1993); Shawn M. Smith, ‘The Photographer’s Touch. J.P. Ball’, Maurice O. Wallace & Shawn M. Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress. Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 321–28; The Colored Citizen (3 September 1894), 2; (10 September 1894), 2; (17 September 1894), 2: (24 September 1894), 2. 103. The journal was financially supported by a number of whites in a period when they hoped to gain black votes in favour of making Helena the state capital. It only published for a few months. See Rex C. Myers, ‘Montana’s Negro Newspapers, 1894–1911’, Montana Journalism Review (1973), 16, 17–22; Barbara C. Behan, ‘Forgotten Heritage: African Americans in the Montana Territory, 1864–1889’, Journal of African American History 91.1 (2006): 34. Kinsley paid for publicity for his lawyer’s office. See The Colored Citizen (10 September 1894), 3. 104. Beneficiary Rules and Constitution of Subordinate Councils A.O.H.P. (Helena, MT: State Pub. Co., 1893), 2.

The protective system the new society established was in fact double: It planned to open homes for widows and orphans105 and to establish a benefit fund offering life insurance based on the assessment system the AOUW had introduced a quarter of a century earlier. The technical set-up very closely resembled that of the AOUW, but there were some differences as well. Men, women and members of the 50–59 age group were insured in three different classes, with contributions and premiums reduced by half for women,106 no doubt to make the system more accessible. The constitution elaborated a hierarchy consisting of local ‘(Subordinate) Councils’, ‘State Legislatures’ on the next stage and finally a ‘National Senate’ (with an executive ‘National Cabinet’ and a President at the head) that was to direct the fraternity on a federal level. In the particular terminology used here, another influence can be detected, that is, of the Order of Chosen Friends. Very little had been decided with regard to the ritual aspects of the order’s activity. The constitution only mentioned initiation and the attribution of one further degree.107 Definitely, the symbolical part of the thing was even more reduced to the bare necessities than in the AOUW. An interesting feature of the new fraternity was the reference in its name to the concept of ‘home protection’. The expression was used by Frances E. Willard (1839–98), the well-known leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a Christian socialist of the 1890s, to designate a genuine ideology that combined temperance, the suffrage demand, feminist egalitarianism and a traditional view of the family.108 She had elaborated on the formula in two public lectures in 1876 and

105. The AOUW Grand Lodge of Montana had also worked in that field, not long before the creation of the AOHP. In 1893, the Supreme Lodge had outsourced the initiative to the Degree of Honour. See The Helena Independent (28 October 1892), 8; The Anaconda Standard (9 August 1893), 5. 106. Beneficiary Rules, 3–5. 107. Beneficiary Rules, 33. 108. For this particular expression, she had been inspired by a Canadian feminist, Laetitia Youmans (1827–96), who had given a similar sense to an existing concept regarding importation tariffs. See Harry G. Levine, ‘Temperance and Women in 19th-Century United States’, Oriana J. Kalant, ed. Alcohol and Drug Problems in Women (New York: Plenum Press, 1980), 55–57; Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, ‘Home Protection: The WCTU’s Conversion to Woman Suffrage’, Janet Sharistanian, ed. Gender, Ideology and Action: Historical Perspectives on Women’s Public Lives (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 95–120; Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity. Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 128–46.

1879,109 and did so as well in the WCTU manuals.110 In its original meaning, the home protection principle implied that, by dint of women’s voting rights (at least through a partial suffrage for specific matters but preferably through a full-fledged participation in all elections) which would impose a prohibition on intoxicating liquors and prevent the abuses that resulted from alcohol, women were to be placed in a position allowing them to protect the family in general, the men included. We do not know if Kinsley was acquainted with Willard’s writings and her specific approach of ‘domesticity’, but keeping in mind his own ‘dry’ profile111 and his denominational identity—Willard was a Methodist like he was—it is certainly not improbable. It must be mentioned that some fraternities had supported Willard and her WCTU, notably the Grangers (officially the Order of Patrons of Husbandry) and the Knights of Labor.112 Finally, the fact that Kinsley’s new fraternity wanted to enable women to insure their relatives—a rare thing in American fraternalism back then— fitted the ‘home protection’ idea perfectly. Let us now investigate in more detail the founders of this uncommon fraternal society. Among the ten charter members, all men by the way,113 four were Euro-Americans. Besides Kinsley, who became the first President,114 we mainly find AOUW officers that were known in the state of Montana. The least visible was Albert Frank, a Republican militant working in the printing business of Helena and the Secretary of the local Good Templars lodge, a temperance order.115 After migrating to Montana to work in mining, John Wasson Eddy (1835–1910) became a lawyer, judge and an occasional literary man, all the while being a noted Republican too: he was Grand Master Workman of the Montana AOUW as a successor of Kinsley in 1891–92.116 James Sullivan (1842–1900), an Irish immigrant, had held several posts within the same grand lodge.

109. Carolyn De Swarte Gifford and Amy R. Slagell, eds., Let Something Good Be Said. Speeches and Writings of Frances E. Willard (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 17–25, 34–41. 110. Frances E. Willard, Home Protection Manual: Containing an Argument for the Temperance Ballot for Woman, and How to Obtain It, As a Means of Home Protection; Also Constitution and Plan of Work for State and Local W.C.T. Unions (New York: The Independent, 1879). 111. The AOUW stance on drink was very much the same. 112. Mary Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana, IL: Uni versity of Illinois Press, 1983), 62–66. 113. On a local level, things were somewhat different. There we do find women, black and white, with officers’ responsibilities. See further. 114. The Omaha Daily Bee (20 October 1893), 8. 115. The Helena Independent (24 April 1892), 5; (13 November 1892), 8; (30 January 1893), 8. 116. The Helena Independent (14 May 1890), 8; (17 June 1892), 1; (27 August 1891),

He had become a member in 1882, when Kinsley was organizing lodges in the territory, and co-founded the grand lodge with him. In turn, he became Grand Master Workman as well. He had been the mayor of Helena for the Democratic Party. Before engaging in the real estate sector, investing in mining and being nominated as a territorial auditor, he had been the proprietor of a large barber shop, a detail which is not without its significance, as we will soon see.117 All three were members of the same Capital Lodge N°2 AOUW, where other adherents of the AOHP can be identified.118 This means that the founding team included six African-Americans.119 We have already mentioned photographer and AOHP Vice-President Ball, but the other four we managed to identify120 are just as interesting, although lesser-known. The first, John Lambert ‘Duke’ Dutrieuille (1837– 1911), who took the office of Ex-President of the AOHP, had a barber shop in Fort Benton, Montana before opening a new one in Helena.121 Dutrieuille was an esteemed member of his community and was described as having a ‘considerable education’. He had been a Republican, but had changed his party allegiance in the 1890s, seemingly to throw off the yoke of the GOP ‘bosses’ who did not serve black interests and did not really favour a genuine emancipation.122 Dutrieuille was not the only barber in

8; River Press (11 April 1883), 6. The Montana Historical Society conserves a small collection of his personal papers. 117. Pocahontas Record (19 November 1885), 4; The New North-West (19 December 1890), 2; The Helena Independent (19 December 1890), 8; (17 June 1892), 1; The Anaconda Standard (23 November 1900), 1; Helena Illustrated. Capital of the State of Montana. A History of the Early Settlement and the Helena of To-Day (Helena, MT: Trescher, 1890), 46–48; Joaquin Miller, An Illustrated History, 98–99. 118. The Helena Independent (3 July 1894), 8. 119. The Weekly Tribune (1 September 1893), 5; The Helena Independent (1 November 1894), 6. It is interesting to note that the ‘finance committee’ of the order, which managed the insurance system, was entirely staffed by African Americans. See The Helena Independent (29 July 1893), 8. 120. The only black man on the team we were not able to identify is a certain Charles K. Brown. Strangely, he is not mentioned on the list of African Americans residing in Helena. See http://svcalt.mt.gov/research/AfricanAmerican/CensusData/ Non-CensusCitations.pdf, last accessed 1 August 2015) 121. Apparently with a growing success, as he opened a larger and better- located shop. On top of that, he had staff working for him. See The Benton Record (8 August 1879), 3; The River Press (6 April 1881), 8; (10 September 1884), 7; The Helena Independent (21 October 1890), 5; (21 August 1893), 8; (3 November 1893), 5. 122. He seems not to have been unique, and Helena was not the only town where blacks abandoned the Republican Party in those days. In this case, the candidacy of Democrat T.E. Collins, who had supported a proposal to desegregate the Fort Benton schools, drew black votes that might traditionally have been cast for Republican candidates. The latter political ‘automatism’—the ‘liberty’ the Republican Party had generously given the blacks to vote for it and for it alone—was openly contested by

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 116 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism the group. Joseph E.W. Clarke (1865–1947), a native of Washington DC, was a barber as well. He had worked for Dutrieuille before opening his own shop. Later, we meet him again as a founder of the local African American Protective League, a society created in 1909 to oppose the introduction within the State of Montana of legislation prohibiting interracial marriage.123 Apparently, he was no Republican, either.124 John E. Carpenter was also the owner of a barber shop, this one located in the capital city’s International Hotel.125 George M. Lee (1860–1933) had first worked as a janitor at the Montana Supreme Court in Helena, and was later employed as a clerk at the Helena Hotel. Later he seems to have been employed at a bank.126 Lee was a Republican and was active in Helena’s fraternities and clubs, notably in the Summer Social Club, the Silver Leaf Club127 and the Lyceum, a debating society.128 Finally, James Wesley Crump (1845–1919), again a janitor in a local bank, was a Republican Party member, and was on the membership rosters of the Silver Leaf Club and later of Ball’s Afro-American Club.129 The connections with the existing African American fraternities are more difficult to establish, as

Dutrieuille in an eloquent letter to the local press: ‘Well now, what does that liberty mean? It means the right to vote without let or hindrance the republican ticket at state, county or municipal elections, and at general elections particularly. It means that we rescued you from slavery of the body to put you into slavery of the mind and a slavery of the soul. You are to vote for the republican party, no matter how venal, how corrupt they may be. Vote under the lash and after the election be ignored entirely until the next election season’. See The Helena Independent (25 September 1892), 5; Taylor, ‘The Emergence of Black Communities in the Pacific Northwest’, p. 348. 123. Quintard Taylor Jr., In Search of the Racial Frontier. African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York & London: Norton & Co., 1999), 212. 124. The Helena Independent (21 August 1893), 8; The Colored Citizen (3 September 1894), 3; (17 September 1894), 3; Lang, ‘The Nearly Forgotten Blacks’, 57; Lewis & Clark County—Montana Forestvale Cemetery Burial Index—1890—7/1/2009, http:// www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mtlcgs/Forestvale/forestvale-c.html. Last accessed 31 July 2015. 125. The Colored Citizen (3 September 1894), 3. 126. Annual Report of the Auditor and Treasurer of the State of Montana for the Fiscal Year 1889 (Helena, MT: Journal Publishing Co., 1890), 27; The Independent Record (8 December 1933), 3. 127. The goals were of a cultural nature. It seems that a mutual benefit objective was at stake too. It is not clear how this was organized. See The Helena Independent (11 April 1891), 8. 128. The Helena Independent (4 June 1891), 8; (21 January 1892), 8; (11 April 1891), 8; Wichita Tribune (December 1898), 3; Lewis & Clark County—Montana Forestvale Cemetery Burial Index—1890—7/1/2009, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mtlcgs/ Forestvale/forestvale-l.html. Last accessed 31 July 2015. 129. The Helena Independent (2 May 1889), 4; (21 October 1890), 8; (11 April 1891), 8; (10 September 1892), 4; (1 August 1893), 1; The Colored Citizen (3 September 1894), 2–3.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 117 the sources do not reveal much about them.130 We know however that Crump, Lee and Carpenter belonged to the Golden City Lodge N° 3455 of the black Odd Fellows.131 Crump was a Civil War veteran and a member of the Wadsworth Post N° 3 of the Grand Army of the Republic which was Kinsley’s ‘Post’ as well.132 Crump seems to have been a Prince Hall mason just as George Lee was.133 We can also observe that the black founders usually had a direct or indirect link with the St James African Methodist Episcopal Church.134 One can only be struck by the occupational profile of the black founders of the AOHP. Indeed, along with some maintenance and administrative employments, the founding team was constituted mainly by barbers. That is not at all a coincidence. As it is shown by Douglas Bristol’s fascinating book about black barbers, Knights of the Razor. Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom, African American barbers were not only a group with lots of everyday contact with Euro-Americans, but because of the training needed for their occupation and the respectability to which they aspired, they were also among the most prominent members of the black communities. Barbers often held leadership positions,135 notably in church boards and fraternities, just as often as preachers or journalists did.136 To this observation, we must add that the hotel sector, which we see appearing often in the trajectories we mentioned, similarly offered better than average jobs to blacks in that era. The barbers themselves were often linked to hotels through the placement

130. As women and the auxiliaries are concerned, we do not know anything at all, although two of the latter were present in the city. See Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 211. 131. The Helena Independent (11 March 1892), 5; The Colored Citizen (15 October 1894), 2. 132. By-Laws and Roster of Wadsworth Post N° 3 Department of Montana (S.l.: GAR, 1915), 20, 26. 133. The Colored Citizen (3 September 1894), 3; Grand Army of the Republic. Journal of the Eighteenth Annual Encampment of the Department of Montana. Held at Helena, Montana, April 24–26, 1902 (Helena, MT: Thurber, 1902), 5; The Montana Plaindealer (25 March 1910), 1; Great Falls Tribune (25 January 2013). 134. We can find them, for example, in the lists of contributors and witnesses at marriages. See The Helena Independent (7 May 1890), 8; (26 June 1890), 8; (22 February 1894), 5. 135. In our case this was even stated explicitly in a press polemic within the state’s black community at large. See The Anaconda Standard (4 November 1894), 10. 136. Douglas Walter Bristol Jr., Knights of the Razor. Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore, WA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 2–7; Quincy T. Mills, Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 60–107; Behan, ‘Forgotten Heritage’, 29, 35.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 118 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism of their shops, creating a supplementary node in the network.137 Hence, the black founders of the AOHP clearly belonged to the elite of their community. They also were part of groups which had the most frequent contacts with whites. This feature was reinforced by the membership of part of them in the Republican Party, something white fraternalists did as well. Those connections could be made too by dint of memberships of veteran fraternities such as the GAR, which clearly was integrated in Helena.138 Locally, the creation of the Washington Council N°1 AOHP in Helena, where the order had its own ‘hall’, was perceived by the African Americans as a token of the more egalitarian climate in the city.139 In Helena some success had been obtained as well—be it not without difficulty—in the abrogation of some segregationist practices, notably in the schools.140 But the social life had remained segregated nevertheless,141 a fact that made the AOHP quite an exceptional place of encounter. The AOHP was definitely perceived to be the first mutual benefit society of the USA to be genuinely racially integrated.142 But was it also an attractive formula, leading to the creation of new councils, inside and outside of the fraternity’s northwestern cradle? Quite rapidly, a second council was established in Helena. Together, both bodies seem to have recruited about 300 members in quite a short time.143 Several founders like Kinsley, but also black officers such as Dutrieuille and certainly as Ball, acted as organizers and travelled around to create new councils elsewhere.144 As of December 1893 new councils were established across Montana in Butte, Missoula, Anaconda, and probably Great Falls and Stevensville as well.145 Others were to follow outside of Montana, more specifically in

137. Lawrence B. de Graaf, ‘Race, Sex, and Region: Black Women in the American West, 1850–1920’, Pacific Historical Review,49.2 (1980): 300. 138. Department of Montana. Grand Army of the Republic. Proceedings of the First, Second, Third and Fourth Encampments 1885–1886–1887–1888 (Helena, MT: Fisk, 1888). 139. The Helena Independent (6 August 1893), 1; (1 November 1894), 6. 140. Behan, ‘Forgotten Heritage: African Americans in the Montana Territory, 1864–1889’, 26–27. 141. Lang, ‘The Nearly Forgotten Blacks’, 51; Taylor, ‘The Emergence of Black Communities in the Pacific Northwest’, 351. 142. Miller, An Illustrated History, 779. 143. Once the first council had attained 120 members, it was thought expedient to create a second one, the Monroe Council. See The Helena Independent (9 February 1894), 8; (22 November 1894), 5; The Colored Citizen (3 September 1894), 3. 144. The Helena Independent (6 August 1893), 1; (8 September 1893), 5: The Omaha Daily Bee (20 October 1893), 5; The Anaconda Standard (5 January 1894), 4. 145. All were centres of blacks’ presence in the State. See Barbara C. Behan, ‘Forgotten Heritage’, 34. We have tried to determine whether these new sections were grafted upon older networks, notably those of the churches which clearly existed already and often transcended state borders. But it does not appear that AME

Omaha, Nebraska,146 in St. Joseph, Missouri, in Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio and, Des Moines, Iowa and, even in Huntsville, Alabama, in the deep south. 147 What racial proportions can we observe within the membership of the American Order? Sources reveal very little about it. With one exception, sources do not discuss the ‘color line’. One of the first officers of the AOHP affirmed that both races were more or less equally present on the membership rosters.148 It is impossible to confirm or to deny that claim. One can nevertheless have some doubts whether racial parity really existed, at least for the totality of the councils. It is, for example, quite improbable in a town such as Omaha, which was to become infamous for its racial confrontations of 1919 and where a brutal lynching of a black man took place in 1919 too.149 Here the local council was probably not able to attract lots of Euro-Americans. One can even presume that in Huntsville, an expanding industrial city in the Jim Crow state of Alabama, there were hardly any white members at all.150 Whatever the proportions may have been, the AOHP was generally perceived by outsiders as a ‘colored people’s insurance society’.151 There were good

churches, however important in the black communities, were a kind of carrier for the AOHP councils. Regarding the very different composition of the AME churches’ conference that comprised those of Montana, see The Anaconda Standard (12 October 1894), 1; The Weekly Tribune (19 October 1894), 8. 146. In this city, a well-known black militant was one of the leaders of the local council (he acted as the Past Chief Councilor): Matthew Oliver Ricketts (1853–1917), a physician who was the son of freed slaves, was the first Republican African American to be elected in the state legislature (in 1892–96, that is, precisely when Kinsley’s fraternity was manifesting itself in Omaha). He proved a firm opponent of all attempts to introduce racial segregation into public services. He was the President of the local branch of the National Afro-American League. Ricketts was a Prince Hall mason. Later, having migrated towards Missouri, he was to play a leading role in the state’s Prince Hall grand lodge (he became Grand Master in 1907). See The McCook Tribune (22 May 1891), 6; Dennis N. Mihelich, ‘The Origins of the Prince Hall Mason Grand Lodge of Nebraska’, Nebraska History Magazine 76.1 (1995), 10–21; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 205; http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/ricketts-matthew- oliver-1853–1917, last accessed 15 March 2015. 147. The Helena Independent (12 December 1893), 1; The Anaconda Standard (11 February 1894), 3; The Weekly Tribune (2 November 1894), 5; The Ravalli Republican (4 March 1896), 3. 148. The Helena Independent (1 November 1894), 6. 149. Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 205–206, 349. 150. ‘60 Years of History from Newspaper Accounts’, Historic Huntsville Quarterly, 5.4 (1979): 10. With the exception of a quote in the north-western press, we have no information at all about this AOHP Council or about its members. The local history periodical that we perused in its entirety is remarkably silent about the town’s black community. 151. The Anaconda Standard (18 July 1894), 5.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 120 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism reasons for that view to develop. It is quite revealing that the first two payments to the assignees of deceased members—the only payments mentioned by the sources—concerned Afro-Americans in both cases. The first payment followed the death of Isabella Lucas (1853–93) of Anaconda, Montana, whose funeral was organized by the AOHP itself.152 The second one—broadly covered by a number of newspapers, as if some publicity had to be made for the benefit of the order—was the funeral of Riley Bell (1862–95), a black resident of Des Moines.153 This brings us to gender relations within the AOHP, as the order wanted to be a mixed fraternity as well as racially integrated. We know even less about the proportions of men and women, than we do about the racial makeup. Although the order’s project consisted of a kind of double emancipation, women never achieved the same status as men within the society. It is indeed revealing that not a single woman was to be found among the founders. But they did play their role in the local units. It is even more difficult to find biographical data about them than about the black men, but we did manage to uncover some small but interesting elements. In the first Council established in Helena, several women held officers’ posts: Lillie Brown was the Secretary, Mary E. Clarke and Olive Lee154 managed the council’s finances, and Annie C. Collins was one of the trustees. In the Council of Omaha (Nebraska), the money was also kept by one of the women, a Nettie Johnson.155 That means that women could definitely be at the heart of the machinery of the local AOHP units, as the day-to-day management of the benefit system—the core mission of the order—was done by them indeed. Those for whom we do possess some information, mostly belonged to the African-American community. In Helena, Mary Ella Clarke, née Rowan (c.1865–1922), was the spouse of Joseph E.W. Clarke whom we already met amongst the charter members of the fraternity.156 The others were more difficult to identify. Was Olive

152. The Anaconda Standard (14 July 1893), 4; (31 December 1893), 4; (15 May 1894), 4. 153. Iowa State Bystander (18 January 1895), 1; (8 February 1895), 1; (8 March 1895), 1; (13 September 1894), 1. 154. Was she the lady of that name, possibly nicknamed ‘Polly’, who, in 1890, was paid a sum of $75 by the state of Montana in the form of a state warrant? If this supposition is indeed correct, it would give us an interesting indication about the financial position of African American women within the type of fraternities we are treating here. This would mean she was indeed able to draw means on her proper name and outside of the traditional domestic sector where black women usually earned their income. See Annual Report of the Auditor and Treasurer of the State of Montana for the Fiscal Year 1890 (Helena, MT: Journal Publishing Co., 1891), 121. 155. We know hardly anything about her. She could have been married to the Chief Councilor of her local, George N. Johnson, who was active in the black sociable world of the town. See The Omaha Daily Bee (11 November 1893), 8; (13 January 1904), 2. 156. Independent Record (9 June 1922), 5; (12 June 1922), 5; http://svcalt.mt.gov/

Lee married to George M. Lee? It is surely possible but by no means a certainty. For the other two names in Helena, we have no information at all. In the new locals that were created subsequently outside of the Helena, women were engaged as well. We have some details regarding Anaconda, where we find women of modest conditions, Malissi Buck (? –1909), as Vice-President of the local Council,157 and two black women, Clara Garvey and Isabella Lucas. Garvey was originally from Helena but had moved to Anaconda to marry Louis R. Ridley, a black head waiter and later manager of a hotel. He was an active member of the Anaconda AME church. Garvey was the secretary of the AOHP local. Isabella Lucas was a Canadian immigrant who was active in the local Colored Literary Society as well as the AME church. She had married a local barber who had his salon annexed to a saloon.158 We find a similar profile in Butte with Annie Ready (1843–94), a black woman who migrated from Tennessee after the Civil War. She first went to Kansas and then headed towards Montana, where she was closely linked to the AME church and joined the AOHP shortly before her death. She had married Washington Ready (?–1897) who, incidentally, worked in Butte as … a barber.159 We have every reason to suspect that the formula proposed by the American Order of Home Protection failed after a relatively short lapse of time. The order was registered on a federal level as an affiliate of the National Fraternal Congress (where Kinsley held a position of research/AfricanAmerican/CensusData/Non-CensusCitations.pdf, last accessed 1 August 2015. 157. In the local press she offered services as a laundress. See The Anaconda Standard (7 February 1893), 3; (11 February 1894), 3; Fergus County Democrat (5 January 1909), 3. It is revealing that she was mentioned, in the Anaconda Standard of 7 February 1893, as a Euro-American in a publicity for a series of laundrywomen of that racial group and who were put in opposition to the incursion of Asian immigrants: ‘There is no reason why the Chinese should be patronized longer’. Was this an indication that the AOHP membership, women or men, were not at all exempt from at least some racial prejudice after all? We know that at least in Helena women and blacks were in economic competition with the Chinese, even if their numbers were plummeting in the 1890s, most probably because of the worsening economic situation. See Petrik, No Step Backward, 11, 19–20. 158. As we indicated before, this link with the broad sector of local hotels and restaurants was important in Anaconda. Indeed, besides the cases already mentioned in the text, we also find another servant in the hotel where Ridley worked, besides the manager of one of the town’s restaurants. Several of these Anaconda black people were members of an African American club, the Montana Social Club, founded in the same period as the local AOHP. See The Anaconda Standard (20 May 1893), 3; (3 July 1893), 5; (14 June 1893), 4; (30 December 1893), 4; (11 February 1894), 3; (2 June 1894), 3; (12 June 1894), 3; (23 September 1894), 6; (3 February 1895), 3; (21 February 1895), 3; (19 June 1895), 3; (7 September 1895), 3; (23 September 1895), 3; The New North-West (16 June 1894), 1. 159. The Anaconda Standard (18 July 1894), 5; (6 May 1897), 3.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 122 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism responsibility in those days) for the years 1893 and 1894, but it began to drop out of sight in 1895.160 In 1896, one can find in the daily press a convocation for a meeting to organize a new Council in Stevensville, Montana,161 but after that the fraternity seems to have disappeared completely. There does not seem to have been a direct connection with the Colored Home Protection that was formed in Kentucky in 1896 and which succeeded in surviving for a longer time.162 Was the failure of Kinsley’s project due to a lack of attractiveness? Were there insufficient members capable of paying the assessments with the needed regularity to maintain the benefit system, the quintessence of this fraternal order? Or were there tensions, racial or other, within the society? We do not know. Whatever the case, it did not discourage Kinsley. Once he arrived in Washington DC, in the first years of the twentieth century, Kinsley and a set of companions engaged again in a fraternal endeavour of a more or less similar nature, hoping to attract members from the city’s considerable African American population. Indeed, in 1903, Kinsley launched a new fraternal society named the Hand-in-Hand Fraternity, sometimes more extensively referred to as the Knights and Ladies of the Hand-in-Hand Fraternity.163 The first meeting, termed a ‘Parlor’, was constituted in the federal capital as the Washington Parlor No 1, with Kinsley as Treasurer and his eldest daughter as Secretary.164 Shortly after that, the Adams Parlor No 2 was constituted, also in DC. The composition of that second parlor showed very well that it was an initiative involving much of the Kinsley family. Among the officers were Kinsley’s wife and son-in-law, Stephen J. Murphy.165 This new society was integrated and mixed just as the AOHP had been.166 But this time we know very little about the African Americans who joined the fraternity. The few names of founders that can be traced with certainty—such as doctor Francis St. Clair and his wife Mary Gordon Keyes (1864–1934)167—only show us the Euro-

160. National Fraternal Congress. Journal of Proceedings (…) 1893 (Poughkeepsie: Evening Star, 1894), 9, 157, 163; idem 1894, 103 161. The Ravalli Republican (4 March 1896), 3. 162. Skocpol, Lazios and Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 31. 163. The Evening Star (26 May 1903), 16; (23 December 1904), 5; The Washington Times (26 May 1903), 3; Insurance Year Book 1905–1906 (Life, casualty and Miscellaneous). Carefully Collected to June 20, 1905 (New York: Spectator Co., 1905), 547. 164. The Washington Times (7 November 1903), 3; (8 November 1903), 5. The idea was to name the ‘Parlors’ after great names in American history. 165. The Evening Star (11 November 1903), 16; The Washington Times (15 November 1903), 8. 166. The Colored American (14 November 1903), 13. 167. Francis Alonzo St Clair (1861–1951) practiced as a specialist of women’s diseases in Washington DC from 1884, notably in the Gospel Mission Clinic. He was a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. His wife was active in the

Americans. For the presence of the non-whites, the only indication that is a little more specific was the national secretary Ethel Johnson, whom we can trace in the Afro-American friendship networks of the capital.168 At a later stage however, this opening towards Afro-Americans does seem to have been realized, even if it is not very clear how the fraternity evolved. The available sources show that Kinsley’s Hand-in-Hand Fraternity was incorporated in 1904.169 Some years later, a fraternity working under the same name and the same incorporation date,170 also in the District was mentioned with a team of officers who were clearly part of the black community.171 It is thus very likely that there was a connection between the two societies. These African Americans were quite renowned in their community: perhaps somewhat less the fraternity’s President John L. Hughston (c.1872–?), whom we meet also within the Colored Elks,172 but certainly the black preacher Alexander C. Garner (1867–1948) of the Plymouth Congregational Church, who was to become active some years later in the local section of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which he co- founded in 1913.173 It is striking though that the people involved in the creation of the Hand-in-Hand Fraternity were completely absent from the later version. Had there been some kind of a conflict? That is definitely not improbable, as the goals of the fraternity as we see it developing in

Daughters of the American Revolution. See Brown Thurston, 1635–1892 Thurston Genealogies (Portland, OR: 1892), 448. 168. Insurance Yearbook 1905–1906 (…) Carefully Corrected to June 20, 1905 (New York: Spectator Co., 1905), 547; The Colored Citizen (11 June 1904), 6. Besides this, we hardly know anything at all about this Ethel E. Johnson. 169. The Evening Star (23 December 1904), 5. 170. Annual Report of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, Year Ended June 30, 1907. Vol. V Report of Department of Insurance. Part I. Life and Casualty (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), 168. What adds to the confusion, is that other sources mention the incorporation of a fraternity by the same name in March 1907, but that one did not leave any trace in those Washingtonian dailies that carried this kind of information … mystery. See Insurance Yearbook 1907–1908 (…) Carefully Corrected to June 20, 1907 (New York: Spectator Co., 1907), 765; The Spectator. An American Weekly Review of Insurance (2 January 1908), 8. 171. The Evening Star (30 January 1908), 20. 172. Other data on this John L. Hughston are lacking. See Washington Times (3 July 1913), 4. 173. Reverend Alexander C. Garner was born in Maryville, Tennessee as the son of a black veteran of the Civil War. He made a career as a theologian and a preacher, as an intellectual and a fraternalist (he was a member of the Greek letter society Omega Psi Phi, had then become a freemason, an Elk, an Odd Fellow, joined the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and the Independent Order of St. Luke. See The Crisis—A Record of the Darker Races (April 1915), 302; Richmond Times-Dispatch (22 August 1917), 4; The Oracle (October 1939), 72; The Afro-American (15 May 1948), 2; The New York Age (8 May 1948), 1.

1908, some years after Kinsley’s death, were quite different from the beneficiary model Kinsley had always promoted. Indeed, the second team had elaborated a project to create ‘a colored department store’, a kind of shop which was obviously something very different from the original insurance venture, even if both were to be based upon a cooperative model.174

Analysis and Conclusions As such, Kinsley’s drive to open up fraternities, whether for women or for black people, was not all that unique: Here and there, in different voluntary societies, initiatives to break with male exclusiveness or to cross the ‘color line’ can certainly be found. More than once, it was the old abolitionist networks who sought to reproduce themselves after the Civil War by dint of a series of ruptures with old and new segregationist practices. It was a kind of civil society version of the ‘unfinished task’ of emancipation, as historian James McPherson termed it. 175 Joseph W. Kinsley clearly was one of those reformers who applied this project to the fraternal world. But he did complete that project by making a parallel overture towards women. If gender mixing and racial integration were already uncommon, independently of each other, in the sphere of American secret societies, this double rupture with masculine and white exclusivism at the same time was exceptional. How to evaluate the founders’ desire to desegregate fraternalism? More specifically, what is one to make of Kinsley’s repeated efforts to do just that? What existing contacts allowed Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans to gather, notably in the context of frontier towns? One can observe that political affinities helped. Among the founders of orders and their local units, we find mainly, though not exclusively, Republicans. There were of course some Democrats, even among the black men, some of whom were disillusioned by a Republican Party that was more interested in their votes than their well-being. But Republican identifications had their role. We must note that the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ fraternity which was more or less integrated, was not only a society where the Kinsleys of those days could meet African-Americans: With its large membership, the GAR was also part and parcel of the Republican sphere and had been founded with electoral goals, even if these were not openly acknowledged. The non-

174. The Washington Bee (23 May 1908), 5. Maybe this can explain the new incorporation of 1907? 175. James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1975), 13.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 125 segregated GAR Posts, with the aid of a shared Republican sentiment, could establish or at least stimulate new connections.176 When we identify the participants in Kinsley’s new fraternities, the best known were white. On the black side it was mainly the community elites that were present. These were men and women who might appear at first sight as part of the modest layers of society. However, in the context of their community, they belonged to the more favoured and the more respected stratums. They were people with a superior status who often were to be found in leadership roles. For example, the black founders of the American Order of Home Protection had a social and cultural profile that was very similar to the leaders of other Afro-American fraternal societies.177 This milieu of barbers and hotel keepers—service brokers who were often interrelated—of the towns of Montana, so manifestly visible as it was within the AOHP, clearly demonstrates who could be at the vanguard of these associative projects. As the white fraternalists they associated with did not leave many texts that reveal their perception of the color line, not even Kinsley himself, it is difficult to evaluate in what measure they were really detached from the racialist conceptions of their epoch. Most probably, things were not all that clear-cut.178 But however much that may have been the case, they were sufficiently detached from mainstream prejudice to willingly constitute integrated entities in the 1890s, an era when the most aggressive segregationist tendencies were manifesting themselves in the USA. We will probably not be far from the truth if we state that this particular context explains the eventual failure of the fraternities Kinsley created with his friends. It is quite

176. If this is valid, too, for the Women’s Relief Corps, the GAR’s auxiliary, is not clear. There was a Post in Helena, but its link to the AOHP membership is unclear. See Petrik, No Step Backward, 87. 177. Dennis N. Mihelich, ‘A Socioeconomic Portrait of Prince Hall Masonry in Nebraska’, Great Plains Quarterly 1 (1997): 36; Chernoh M. Sesay Jr., ‘Emancipation and the Social Origins of Black Freemasonry’, Hinks & Kantrowitz, eds., All Men Free and Brethren, 29–39. 178. By the way, it is striking that in these communities of colonial settlers of the west, where Chinese immigrants constituted a minority that was just as visible as it was discriminated against, the AOHP did seem to see racial relations only through the simple black-white binomial. The sources remained mostly mute with regard to the visions of Kinsley and his friends on that other group commonly refused by mainstream fraternities. We did refer in an earlier footnote where one of the joining ladies was presented by the local press as being in direct competition with the Chinese. On the current approaches of the complexities of racial and gender relations of power in the colonial context of the frontier, see notably: Antonia Castañeda, ‘Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History: the Discourse, Politics, and Decolonization of History’, Pacific Historical Review 61.4 (1992), 501–33; Margaret D. Jacob, ‘Getting Out of a Rut: Decolonizing Western Women’s History’, idem 79.4 (2010), 585–604.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 126 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism probable that, as mutual benefit societies, they were more attractive for black people—who in those years were often refused coverage in the broader market, and for whom a parallel commercial sector of the African Americans themselves was only in its earliest stage.179 This suggests that sufficient affiliation of ‘Caucasians’ was lacking, even if the leaders of the AOHP said otherwise. If hypothetically some organizational features or specific objectives of these first integrated and mixed fraternities did survive their short existence, it was to be in exclusively Afro-American fraternities. Eventually, this separated way of organizing was more adapted to the will or perhaps we would better say to the necessity of an auto-determination of this community, more at least than this option of an integrated fraternalism which was largely rejected by Euro-Americans anyway.180 That these vanguard fraternalists, white and black, were still imbued by the prejudices of their time is also shown by the place of women in their orders. On the level of the ideas, the ideologies of ‘domesticity’, to which notably the AOHP referred, were definitely open to the attribution of rights (women’s suffrage, possibilities for women to participate in cooperative insurances etc.), but they did continue nevertheless to impose upon women restrictions to particular roles.181 We saw that Kinsley operated entirely within these parameters, even if the ideology of ‘home protection’ could be interpreted as proto-feminist, as is suggested by historian Barbara Epstein. Indeed, Kinsley’s opinions on the matter reflect the same basic contradiction that Frances Willard developed in her worldview. The simultaneous emancipation of women and defence of the traditional Victorian family were not compatible.182 It is quite striking that these men, irrespective of colour, lauded women who entered the public sphere through participation in women’s auxiliaries,

179. In those days there were even monographs—such as the book by Frederick L. Hoffmann, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (published in 1896 by the American Economic Association)—which strongly advised commercial societies not to insure African Americans. See William P. Burrell, ‘The Negro in Insurance’, Hampton Negro Conference (July 1904), 13–32; Woodson, ‘Insurance Business Among Negroes’, 211–12; Skocpol, Lazios & Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 13. 180. August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor, MI: Uni versity of Michigan Press, 1988), 12–16. 181. In this sense, the observations on the AOHP join the conclusions of Paula Petrik as to the emancipation effect of this context of the West for women. That is, whether it would give liberating incentives mainly for the next generation (the ‘daughters’). It was hardly the case for the pioneering women yet, even if some deflection of Victorian ‘true womanhood’, necessitated by the surrounding economic and demographic conditions, could be seen nevertheless. Petrik, No Step Backward, 67, 93–96, 136–39. 182. Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity, 132–33.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. Tyssens Crossing Gender and Colour Lines 127 nonetheless continued to happily monopolize all the dominant positions within fraternities ostensibly created to eliminate gender and racial divisions. The power relations were thus far from symmetrical.183 And there is more. We can see there was a spontaneous joining by women, notably ones who were interested in obtaining life insurance policies that were generally denied them. Further, within local organizations women stepped forward to manage the finances of local units of the order, including insurance functions. Other women nevertheless remained more ambivalent, mostly participating as a family member (spouses mainly) of the leading men. Was this a kind of kinship-based strategy to introduce at least some gender equilibrium into the enterprise? It is certainly not impossible, no doubt more among the white adherents than among the black joiners, for whom the economic relationships within the married couples was generally not the same. However, it would be wrong to underestimate the place of women in the fraternities we have studied, notably the place of black women. It is known that African American women were not simply more active within fraternal networks than their Euro-American counterparts, but that they also participated more keenly in benefit schemes, as they often had their own incomes.184 Was this also the case in these ephemeral integrated fraternities of the 1890s and the 1900s? Unfortunately, we do not have sufficiently detailed biographical data for members of the orders Kinsley created. With the exception of Kinsley’s immediate family members, we hardly know anything about the women involved in the initiative developed in DC in the early twentieth century. But we can say something more about the black sisters that joined this fraternity established at the frontier about a decade earlier. The African American ladies of the AOHP appear to correspond quite well to the description in more general scholarly work about black women in the west. That is, they formed a kind of elite of the African American women at large, seem to have been conscious of their status, and may also have been financially more autonomous.185 Their kinship with men that were at the core of their local black communities, possible evidence of a personal income for one of them, the opportunity of obtaining a life insurance policy we observed for another: all these elements concur with this affirmation. Their engagement in the fraternal societies of the

183. Apparently there were no links between the AOHP women members and the local society favouring women’s suffrage. See Petrik, No Step Backward, 193. 184. Skocpol, Lazios & Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 77–79. 185. de Graaf, ‘Race, Sex, and Region: Black Women in the American West, 1850– 1920’, 289.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2017. 128 Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism particular type we have studied in this article186 shows that they played an active role in these new black communities on the frontier. Their communities were small, but vivid nevertheless, and served as a cradle of a fraternalism with a double vocation, mixed and desegregated at the same time. Theirs was an optimistic choice that eventually proved to be a blind alley.187

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