Promoting the Fraternity across the World
On April 10, 2015 to commemorate the Sesquicentennial (150 years) of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. These notable Civil War reenactors, calling from north to south, each share one thing in common – they are all brother Masons – with many of them hailing from Pennsylvania Lodges.
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Douglas MacArthur lived his entire life, from cradle to grave, in the United States Army. He spent his early years in remote sections of New Mexico, where his father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., commanded an infantry company. As a teenager, Arthur had served with distinction in the Union Army, eventually earning the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading a courageous assault up Missionary Ridge in Tennessee. But he soon discovered that life in the post-Civil War U.S. Army held little of the glamour he knew during the war.
Famed as a frontiersman, folk hero, congressman and Alamo defender, Davy Crockett was one of the most celebrated and mythologized figures in American history. Crockett’s biographers often say there were actually two Crocketts: David, the frontiersman and congressman martyred at the Alamo, and Davy, the larger-than-life folk hero whose exploits were glorified in several books and a series of almanacs
Born Marion Morrison, “the Duke” appeared or starred in over 200 films in his fifty-year career, winning an Oscar for “True Grit,” in 1969. Remembered for his definition of the American individualist of a mythical wild west, he came to represent America to several generations of movie-goers.
When the Grand Orient of France chartered La Loge Française of Richmond, Virginia, in 1849, it became the first French speaking Lodge in the United States. Later that year on November 1, members of the Grand Lodge of Virginia and St. Johns Lodge #36 met with the brothers of La Loge Française in the first recognition of a “regular” or English Lodge and a “clandestine” or French Rite Lodge to take place in America.
Arthur, Duke of Connaught ( Youngest Son of Queen Victoria ) Grand Master of The United Grand Lodge of England 1901 -1939, spent some time on how Freemasonry should commemorate, those of its membership who were killed, or declared missing in The Great War. On the 27th June 1919, he organised a conference in The Albert Hall, and invited representatives from Ireland, Scotland and other Grand Lodges throughout the Commonwealth to attend in London and consider how best to commemorate those, of their membership, who died for King and Country. All those in attendance were presented with a Peace Medal, to commemorate their individual contributions, to the discussions of the day.
The need for this further essay was first made apparent to me when—in my capacity as Secretary of the Lodge and Editor of the Transactions—I began to receive inquiries from Brethren as far away as Vancouver and Singapore, asking for materials and information which might help them to complete their own papers on Kipling, and I found, to my surprise, that while our library contains a great deal of relevant material, there has never been a paper on Kipling in our Transactions.
THE MASONIC RELIEF ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, appears to have made contact with the Grand Lodge of Scotland, in the midst of the 1st World War
There was read to Grand Committee a letter from Right Worshipful Brother W. H. Melish of Cincinnati, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of an Association which has been organised in the United States of America, for the purpose of raising a Relief Fund to aid the needs of Freemasons and their families who are sufferers through the European War
The concept of what constitutes a man is time honored and tested. The traditional role of men has been essential to the development and maintenance of society. Learning to think for ourselves, to form our own judgments, to trust our decisions, to comprehend, to expand our knowledge, to choose this course of action over that, to decide between good and bad, have through the millennia been recognized as the attributes that define a man.
