In 1919 a Kansas City Mason was asked to look in on a boy whose father had just died. He took the boy to lunch, asked what he wanted, and was told: a club, for me and my friends. Within four years American Freemasonry had produced three youth organizations that are still running.
Frank Land and Louis Lower
Frank Sherman Land ran the employment and relief work at the Scottish Rite Temple in Kansas City — the man other Masons came to when somebody needed help.
In 1919, brethren asked him to look after Louis Lower, a teenager whose Mason father had recently died. Land met him, listened, and asked what would actually be useful. Lower's answer was not money or a job. He said that he and his friends had nowhere to go and nothing to belong to.
Land told him to bring the friends. Lower brought eight of them. The nine boys and Land formed a club, and Land — who understood that boys will take seriously a thing that takes itself seriously — gave them a ritual, officers, and a name.
They took it from Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the medieval Knights Templar, burned in 1314 after refusing to let a false confession stand. The choice tells you what Land thought the organization was for: the point of de Molay, to a seventeen-year-old, is that he was tortured into saying something untrue and then publicly took it back, knowing exactly what it would cost him.
DeMolay spread across the country with startling speed and became international. Its two central obligations — filial love (a specific duty to one's parents, and above all to one's mother) and comradeship — came straight out of that first conversation with a boy who had just buried his father.
Its alumni list is remarkable: Walt Disney, John Wayne, Walter Cronkite, Bill Clinton, Buddy Ebsen, Mel Blanc, and a long roll of others. Land himself was later honored by the Scottish Rite and by lodges around the world, but he seems to have regarded the founding as the accident it was — he was simply asked to check on one boy.
Job's Daughters, 1920
A year later, in Omaha, Ethel T. Wead Mick founded the International Order of Job's Daughters.
Her purpose was the same as Land's, aimed at girls: to give young women of Masonic families a place of their own, with their own officers, their own ritual, and their own work. She founded it in honor of her mother, Elizabeth D. Wead, and members have called her Mother Mick ever since.
The name comes from the Book of Job, and from one verse in particular — the note at the very end of the book, after everything has been taken from Job and restored, that in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job, and that their father gave them an inheritance among their brothers. In the ancient world that last clause is the startling part, and it is not an accident that it is the verse the Order is built on.
Job's Daughters organize as Bethels, presided over by an Honored Queen elected by the members. Their long-standing philanthropy is the Hearing Impaired Kids Endowment fund — HIKE — which buys hearing aids and assistive devices for children whose families cannot afford them.
Rainbow for Girls, 1922
Two years after that, W. Mark Sexson, a Mason in McAlester, Oklahoma, was asked to address a meeting of the Eastern Star and used the occasion to propose an order for girls. He was told to go ahead and write it.
On 6 April 1922, a class of 171 girls was initiated in the auditorium of the Scottish Rite Temple in McAlester — the founding of the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls.
The rainbow is the organizing symbol, its seven colors each carrying a lesson — love, religion, nature, immortality, fidelity, patriotism, service. Rainbow assemblies are led by a Worthy Advisor, and a girl moves through the offices and stations year by year, learning to run a meeting, speak in public, manage a budget, and hand the gavel to her successor.
Rainbow's membership requirements have been broader than the others' for a long time: a girl need not have a Masonic relative to join, only the recommendation of a member or an adult adviser.
What They Are Actually For
It is easy to mistake these for junior versions of the adult bodies. They are not, and the difference matters.
In all three, the young people run the organization. They elect their own officers, preside over their own meetings, conduct their own ritual, plan and fund their own service projects, and manage their own money. Adults advise. They do not preside.
For a fourteen-year-old, presiding over a meeting of forty peers under rules of order — and being held to it — is an education that very few other settings provide. So is standing up and delivering memorized work in front of a room. So is being handed a real budget for a real project and being answerable for it.
These organizations were built in the years around the First World War by people who had noticed that adolescents were being given nothing serious to do. A hundred years later that observation has aged uncomfortably well.
The Honest Part
All three orders are far smaller than they were at mid-century. American youth have more options and less unstructured time, and the fraternal model competes now with school activities, club sports, and everything on a phone. Chapters, Bethels, and Assemblies have closed across the country, including in Colorado.
What has kept the survivors alive is not nostalgia. It is adults who show up consistently — advisers who drive to the meeting every single time, and lodges that provide a room, a meal, and money for a project without trying to take the meeting over.
That is the practical ask, and it falls on lodges like ours. A young person's experience of these orders depends almost entirely on whether a handful of adults in their town decided it was worth their Tuesday nights.
Frank Land was asked to check on one boy in 1919. He asked the right question and then did the work. Everything else followed from that.