Native American Freemasonry
Porter, Joy
The Journal of American
History
By R. William Weisberger
Book Review
December 2012
Rec’d: January 2, 2013
Cover Letter
878
The Journal of American History
Norman E. Saul
University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas433
Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism
and Performance in America. By Joy Porter.
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
xxiv, 329 pp. $60.00.)
Joy Porter of Swansea University in Wales is a
prominent scholar of Native Americans. She is
especially known for authoring To Be Indian:
The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker
(2001) and for coediting (with Kenneth M.
Roemer) The Cambridge Companion to Native
American Literature (2005). In her pensive study
of Freemasonry and American Indians, Porter
attempts to illustrate the pertinent cultural and
social significance of the Craft to Native Americans from the revolution through World War
I. In ten topically and chronologically arranged
chapters, she persuasively argues that Masonic
doctrines and symbols attracted eminent Native
Americans to the order. Porter also cogently demonstrates that lodge activities enabled Indians
to occupy leadership positions in these bodies
and fostered their acculturation into American
civil society.
In the first two chapters, Porter describes
how American Freemasons and Indians perceived
each other: Freemasons are lauded for their virtuosity, linguistic eloquence, and they are portrayed, to some extent, as being activists. Native
Americans, conversely, looked to Freemasonry
for middle-class recognition, spirituality (as
exemplified by the accomplishments of the Reverend Philip J. Deloria), and privacy.
The next four chapters persuasively explain
the major scholarship on the evolution and principles of Freemasonry, and they examine the
cultural and social attractiveness of the Craft
to important Native Americans. Porter lucidly
explains how Masonic symbols and tenets such
as individualism, the work ethic, faith, hope,
benevolence, virtue, perfection, death, and resurrection appealed to particular tribes, often
because the principles resembled those found
in native organizations, such as the Senecas’
Little Water Medicine Society.
Porter provides impressive accounts of the
seminal thinking of David Stevenson and
Margaret C. Jacob about Freemasonry’s development and doctrines. Stevenson claims that
it evolved from the customs and legends of
seventeenth-century Scottish lodges. Jacob accentuates the Enlightenment features of the
order, believing that deistic, Newtonian, whiggish, and republican tenets constituted the
ideological core of Freemasonry and enabled
its cosmopolitan lodges to operate as a viable
transatlantic institution. Porter also discusses
the numerous contributions of Arthur Caswell
Parker and Ely S. Parker to Freemasonry.
The last four chapters describe the lives of
other eminent Native Americans between 1750
and 1920. Porter gives a vivid account of the
Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, who supported
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diversity of direction and approach but still
adds his own cogent analysis along with citations to those of his Russian colleagues.
Sogrin demonstrates the current high level of
the Russian study of American history, though,
as he admits, it is still not clearly devoid of its
Marxist strait jacket of the Soviet period. Yet
more scholarly study of American history, in all
of its aspects, is being done in Russia than anywhere outside the United States; unfortunately,
few American historians know anything about
it, nor of the recent conferences devoted to
American history, for example, one in Volgograd on Russia and the American Civil War in
October 2011, at which Sogrin presented a
political analysis of the war. Nor are American
historians aware of the fundamental work of
Russians in such periodicals as Amerikanskii
Ezhegodnik (American yearbook), edited by
Sogrin and published by the Academy of Sciences, and Amercana, a rich source of Russian
scholarship from the hinterland (Volgograd).
Though perhaps understandably missing
some of the most recent American historical
currents, Sogrin’s work is a superb overview of
what the American idea means to history and
a work that American historians can envy and
strive to improve upon. Above all, despite the
language problem, much can still be learned
from Russian publications in American history
through English summaries (unfortunately
lacking in Sogrin’s book) and notations and citations. Sogrin has issued a challenge to American
historians for an overall survey of the American historical idea—can it be done better?
December 2012
Book Reviews
R. William Weisberger
Butler County Community College
Butler, Pennsylvania
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas370
Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race.
By Bruce Nelson. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. xiv, 333 pp. Cloth $45.00.)
Bruce Nelson’s expansive approach to the history
of Irish nationalism and race updates older, formulaic attempts to chart the nationalist course
by framing the topic within tides of imperial
expansion and racial identity constructed between
the mid-1800s and the 1920s. His study challenges revisionist ratifications of Irish nationalism
as “sectarian and ethnocentric, backward-looking,
and stubbornly antimodern” and confirms the
internationalist turn of the past decade as an important progression in the writing of Irish nationalist history (p. 49).
Nelson begins with British images of Irishness
as “the antithesis of Anglo-Saxon virtue,” rooted
in the 1100s and contested throughout Ireland’s
history (p. 17). Modern incarnations of Irish
nationalism rising in the aftermath of the Irish
Rebellion of 1798 and shepherded to the 1850s by
Daniel O’Connell generated international awareness of domestic Irish struggles. According to
Nelson, O’Connell’s solicitation of Irish American support for abolitionism, in association with
his signing of the 1841 Address from the People
of Ireland to Their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America (the “Irish Address”), revealed
liberal, transatlantic currents within the burgeoning nationalist agenda. Recapitulating Angela
Murphy’s recent arguments, Nelson shows that
although O’Connell failed to convince Irish emigrants who were struggling against powerful
American cultural and political imperatives, his
efforts expanded nationalism’s transatlantic base.
Frederick Douglass’s experience with Ireland’s troubled socioeconomic landscape in
1845 further illuminated the internationalist
perspective. Nelson engages and even reproaches
Douglass for his affirmation of Irish peasants as
pitiable but not enslaved, and for his consequential distancing of his nationalist hosts. Counterposing O’Connellite Catholic-Enlightenment
pacifism against the Irish nationalist activist John
Mitchel’s radicalism, Nelson then documents
Boer inspiration of Ireland’s nationalists, concluding that “race trumped religion” (p. 146).
Absorbing depictions of Irish leaders who were
blind to black South African oppression while
they faithfully pursued the goal of independence
over the South African leader Jan Smuts’s pancolonial response to British imperialism are
enriched by the contrast that Nelson draws
between Erskine Childers’s republicanism and
Smuts’s internationalist vision.
Nelson then examines green and black crosscurrents a world away in the United States, as
Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du
Bois and others variously scrutinized and appraised Irish operations within their campaigns
for justice and equality. Éamon de Valera, Frank
Walsh, Harry Boland, Terence MacSwiney,
Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, and others emerge
as actors within international currents of freedom
and white association, rendering Irish nationalism a more complex, nuanced, and internationalist movement than traditionalist historians or
revisionists typically allow. Nelson concludes on
the liberal note that “a broader and more
complex sense of racial affinity” characterized “a
generous, inclusive Irish nationalism” by the early
twentieth century (pp. 240, 256). His expansive
narrative will encourage those new to the topic
to track entangled nationalist and racial discourses across a broad continuum of time and
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British territorial motives during the American
Revolution, and she shows how the Cherokee
chief John Ross and his nephew William P. Ross
helped establish the Cherokee nation in Oklahoma during and after the Civil War. She also
assesses the importance of the Mason Will Rogers
in promoting the Native American cause. In the
last chapter, Porter maintains that as the fraternal
age experienced decline during the 1960s, Indian
involvement in Masonry was greatly reduced.
This elegantly written book has much to
recommend it. It is meticulously documented
and is based on archival and secondary sources
housed in major Masonic libraries in cities on
both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The book
serves as a metric for studies of Native Americans and of other minority groups who have
participated in Freemasonry. Porter might
have written a concluding chapter to bolster
her cogent theses; nevertheless, her study
breaks new ground and should be read by
both historians and general readers.
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