This isn’t the first time mutual aid networks have proliferated across the United States. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, thousands of “fraternal societies” provided access to healthcare, paid leave, and life insurance to workers in nearly every major city. Beyond constituting essential networks of care, these organizations served to strengthen and solidify the labor and socialist movements. As we build solidarity today, we can look to this past to help pave a path forward.
With the exception of churches, mutual aid networks constituted the most popular form of voluntary association in the US throughout the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A 1933 report by the President’s research committee estimates that one in three adult men were members of a fraternal society by 1920.
In the absence of a coherent system of government welfare provision, these informal organizations run by the poor and working class provided more aid than any other institution, private or public. As an 1894 New Hampshire Bureau of Labor report notes, “The tendency to join fraternal organizations for the purpose of obtaining care and relief in the event of sickness is well-nigh universal. To the laboring classes they offer advantages not to be had elsewhere.”
Indeed, by the turn of the century, mutual aid societies had come to perform a wide variety of vital social functions. Many instituted a cradle to grave system, including orphanages, hospitals with full time doctors, and a sick leave allowance for every member.
In the early twentieth century, medical provision in these “fraternal lodges” multiplied fifty-fold, and particularly among immigrants and the poor in cities like New York and Chicago. A 1919 Illinois Health Insurance Commission report found that “wage earners and their families made up a majority of the total Illinois membership in fraternals.” Similarly, an assessment by the American Association for Labor Legislation notes, “Practically the only voluntary health insurance agencies in New York City which furnish their members with medical care are the fraternal societies.”
Services were funded through monthly dues of roughly $2 a year, or approximately one day’s wages. Society doctors were elected by the membership, with their salaries dependent on its size. Among the impressive features of these organizations was the democratic political structure they took: rank-and-file committees regularly debated and voted on how funds would be allocated. Underlying the associations was a principle of “fraternalism,” used equally to describe predominantly male and predominantly female organizations.