The fraternal and service organizations that dominated American associational life for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — the Freemasons, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis, the Knights of Columbus, the Odd Fellows, the Moose Lodge, and dozens of others — were, among other things, systematic friendship machines. They gathered men (and, later, some women) on a regular schedule, around a shared identity, with explicit rituals of membership and belonging, in a context of mutual aid obligations that made the bond between members more than purely social. The friendship they produced was not the primary stated purpose of any of these organizations — the stated purpose was civic service, fraternal solidarity, insurance and mutual aid, or moral character development, depending on the organization — but it was a consistent and documented product of membership.
At their peak, these organizations were massive. The Masons enrolled perhaps 4 million American men at mid-century. The Elks had 1.6 million members. The Rotary International had hundreds of thousands of members in thousands of clubs across every American city of any size. The Knights of Columbus enrolled several million Catholic men. The combined membership of fraternal and service organizations represented a significant fraction of the adult male population — and, through the women's auxiliaries and parallel organizations, a significant fraction of adult women as well.
The decline has been correspondingly dramatic. Most of these organizations have lost between 50 and 80 percent of their peak membership. Many local lodges and clubs have closed. The demographics of surviving membership skew sharply older: the typical current Elks or Masons member is in their sixties or seventies. The organizations' recruitment of younger members has largely failed. The institutional infrastructure — the lodge buildings, the club rooms, the social halls — is being sold off as membership revenues decline.
What has been lost is the specific social form that these organizations embodied: a regular gathering of men who knew each other over years and decades, in a context of mutual obligation, ritual, and shared identity that made the friendship qualitatively different from the friendship produced by purely voluntary casual association. The lodge or club member had a community that was not contingent on his being interesting, entertaining, or current — he belonged by virtue of membership, and the belonging was sustained by institutional infrastructure rather than individual social effort. That form of belonging is substantially absent from the lives of most contemporary men, and its absence is one structural contribution to the friendship poverty that the social isolation data documents.