FROM MUTUAL AID TO THE WELFARE STATE.

• Author: Akst, Daniel
• Position: Review

FROM MUTUAL AID TO THE WELFARE STATE Fraternal Societies and Social Service, 1890-1967 by David T. Beito University of North Carolina Press, $55.00

RALPH KRAMDEN AND ED Norton were a couple of working stiffs from Brooklyn. They labored all day to drive a bus up and down Madison Avenue and kept the city's sewers flowing, but they were also something much more exalted--something mysterious, grand, and, at some level, even sacred. Yes, they were Raccoons, and as members of this great fraternal organization they got to wear those Austro-Hungarian naval uniforms with the fringed epaulets and Davy Crockett caps. Remember the tail-wagging Raccoon handshake? The yodel-like greeting?

That Jackie Gleason and Art Carney played characters in a lodge tells us something about how long fraternal organizations have been the butt of jokes in this country. In From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967, David T. Beito, an historian at the University of Alabama, shows that some people were joking about lodges even before the '50s, when "The Honeymooners" was made. But their members took these fraternal organizations much more seriously, and by the time Beito is finished we know why: because in an era when there was little if any social safety net, the lodge provided the only insurance many members could afford or obtain.

In his fascinating but strangely affectless new book, Beito tells the remarkable story of fraternal organizations--all those Masons, Moose, Oddfellows, Woodmen, and so forth--as mutual benefit societies that enabled vast numbers of Americans to safeguard their families without the stigma of charity or the snare of long-term dependence. "A conservative estimate," Beito writes with stunning matter-of-factness, "would be that one-third of all adult males over age 19 were members in 1910."

The scope and breadth of these organizations and the benefits they provided is startling. "By 1895 half the value of all life insurance policies in force was on the fraternal plan," Beito writes, adding that by 1908 "the 200 leading societies had paid well over $1 billion in death benefits? But all was not smooth sailing, and Beito shows how the problems these organizations encountered foreshadow the difficulties governments, employers, and health maintenance organizations would struggle with later when trying to accomplish the same social welfare ends.

Organized medicine, for instance, mustered furious opposition to...