"Let us live for those who love us": faith, family, and the contours of manhood among the knights of Columbus in late nineteenth-century Connecticut.

Like many men of the late nineteenth century, James T. Mullen was a veteran of fraternity. In the Civil War, he fought alongside his Connecticut brethren in the 9th Connecticut Volunteer Regiment. After the war, Mullen joined other Catholic veterans who continued military service through membership in the Sarsfield Guard, an exclusively Irish-Catholic militia unit that was part of the National Guard of Connecticut. In 1874 he was among the Catholic men of the Sarsfield Guard who founded the Order of the Red Knights, a primarily-social fraternal organization named for the red blankets the first Knights had used to cover themselves in their initiation ceremony. Prior to its demise in 1880 the Red Knights had evolved into a fraternal society with strong Irish ethnic identifications, secret rituals, and limited sick and death benefit functions. On February 2, 1882, Mullen again participated in a fraternal founding. This time, sitting among fellow Irish-Catholic men--most of them former Red Knights--in the basement of St. Mary's parish in New Haven, Mullen took part in the creation of a Catholic fraternal order that would experience unparalleled success in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, far outpacing all other Catholic fraternities and growing in a brief ten-year time span to a membership of some 6,500 "sound and good" Catholic men. On that cold February night Mullen and his brethren voted to "organize a purely original organization": they named it the Connecticut Knights of Columbus. (1)

Mullen was not unusual among his fellow townsmen, both Catholic and non-Catholic. In Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, Mark Carnes argues that in the latter third of the nineteenth century, between fifteen and forty percent of American males belonged to fraternal orders. (2) These figures are even more impressive when one realizes that Carnes eliminated a sizable portion of American males--Catholics--from these calculations. In the opening passages of Secret Ritual, Carnes' sole reference to Catholic men states that "Relatively few Catholics belonged to the orders, which were repeatedly proscribed by papal edicts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." (3) To be sure, James Mullen did not belong to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, or the Improved Order of Red Men (though some Catholic men did), but neither was he without access to fraternal societies. In fact, late nineteenth-century New Haven was a tangle of Catholic fraternal orders, both ethnic and benevolent: New Haven's Irish Catholic men could choose among the Knights of St. Patrick, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the Sons of Erin, the Catholic Order of Foresters, the Red Knights, The Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, the Hibernian Society, the Catholic Benevolent League, the Ancient Order of Foresters, the St. Vincent's Death Benefit League, any number of local parish TAB (total abstinence) societies, as well as the Knights of Columbus.

By excluding Catholic fraternal organizations from his study, Carnes has dismissed the experience of thousands of Catholic men. More significantly, the omission undermines Carnes' project by distorting the carefully rendered portrait of the masculine identity that he argues Victorian age fraternal rituals both reflected and reified. Carnes argues that in this "Golden Age of Fraternity," the popularity of fraternal secret societies was a response to an extreme gender divide within Victorian society. According to Carnes, fraternal ritual evolved in response to men's need "to break away from the emotional moorings of childhood" in a Victorian society in which they were overwhelmed by the domestic power of women. (4) This is evident, Carnes argues, in the ubiquity of themes related to "disengagement from the mother" in the rituals of fraternal orders. He writes of initiatory rituals:

   The implicit meanings of the symbols suggest that many men were
   deeply troubled by the gender bifurcations of Victorian society,
   which deprived them of a religious experience with which they could

   identify and of a family environment in which they could freely
   express nurturing and paternal emotions. (5)

Focusing primarily on secret rituals, Carnes concludes that men reacted to the tensions they experienced around gender by creating exclusive male societies in which they performed cathartic rites that symbolically distanced them from ties to their mothers, reclaiming a distant father in her place. Carnes posits that all but the highest fraternal rituals perpetuated the Victorian gendering of society, constructing male identities that were predicated upon men's alienation from women in the household and from religious spheres that also carried the taint of femaleness in Victorian society. In contrast, the highest degrees contained a scandalous message, one that "few Victorian men could have admitted to themselves," that manhood included both male qualities of aggression and female qualities of nurturance. (6)

The inclusion of the Knights of Columbus complicates Carnes' picture, for within this same context of Victorian gender norms the Knights consistently praised an ideal of manhood (7) that was predicated upon deep attachments to religious faith and that valorized men's integration into their families. In the revised introduction to his authoritative history, Faith and Fraternalism: the History of the Knights of Columbus, Christopher Kauffman observes that while the Knights appropriated fraternal forms and structures from Victorian culture, the messages conveyed by their ceremonials "were based upon Columbian moral and religious themes that fostered deep attachment to their Catholic faith." (8) Columbian manhood located men primarily within their families and within their parishes, in striking contrast to Carnes' portrait of fraternal manhood that was realized through ritualized escape from female-identified spheres of home and church. And whereas the rituals enacted by fraternal orders in Carnes' study encouraged male identification with a symbolic authoritative father--to the exclusion of connection with a mother-figure--literature produced by the Knights of Columbus valorized affectionate bonds between men and their mothers, and idealized the relationship between men and their wives and children.

The ideal of manhood that emerges from the early records and publications of the Knights is one that was relatively untroubled by anxieties that a contagious feminization might result from men's commitments to faith and family. Rather, the first generation of Knights equated American manhood directly with Catholic religious faith and, by extension, the ungrudging performance of familial obligations. Thus, Columbian manhood was, in many ways, explicitly about idealized religious attachments and "nurturing and paternal" emotions that Carnes denies to the men in fraternity in his study. Columbian manhood emphasized chivalrous character, harmonious marriage, social responsibility, and Catholic respectability. Carnes argues that Victorian men would have resisted such messages unless they were masked in secrecy and coded within fraternal rituals, yet straightforward articulations of Columbian manhood--from ritual to publications to public displays--consistently emphasized the vigorous presence of men in parishes and the tender presence of men within households, seemingly without negative consequences for the order's ability to recruit new members.

The close examination of the early records and publications of the Knights of Columbus that follows suggests that Carnes' portrait of alienated Victorian males who resisted female domestic power by creating fraternities is based upon an exaggerated model of the gendered bifurcation of public spheres from private and religious ones in Victorian society. Such rigid and abstract formulations of the influence of "separate spheres" fail to take into account how men's location within complex webs of obligation and identity mitigated extreme experiences of gendered exclusivity in their lives. For the founding generation of Knights, the commitments that followed from being immigrant Catholics muddied the supposed "separateness" of separate spheres, embedding powerful evocations of faith and family in their rituals and rhetoric. Members of the first generation of the Knights of Columbus were not just fraternal members; they were at the same time fathers, husbands, sons, parishioners, and friends. And though the early Knights identified themselves as Catholics, they also claimed identities as veterans, workers, immigrants, and citizens. Because Columbian fraternal forms addressed men primarily as members of parishes and households rather than as refugees from them, they provide a valuable window into the subtle interplay of identities and commitments that shaped the experience of men in late 19th-century fraternities. In the same vein, historical methods that similarly locate historical actors within intersections of family life and faith traditions offer important insights into the fullness and complexity of the lives lived in the past.

"we perform this duty"

In his first annual report to the Knights of Columbus as Supreme Knight, James T. Mullen addressed fellow founders of the order stating, "there is a voice low and soft that tells me that many houses and many families will live to bless your unselfish efforts." (9) Two years after the parish basement meeting where Mullen and his Catholic brethren founded the Knights of Columbus, William Geary wrote a series of letters to the editor of the Connecticut Catholic in an effort to promote membership in the fledgling Knights. Geary's letters were aimed at young Catholic men: they described and offered to them, through membership in the Knights of Columbus, the opportunity to claim a specific type of American Catholic manhood, a manhood predicated upon the fraternal performance of "duty"--first to family, then to faith, parish, and ultimately country. In one such letter, printed in the Connecticut Catholic on June 14, 1884, William Geary highlighted the mutual benefit function of the Knights, arguing that by joining the Knights of Columbus Catholic men fulfill a moral duty to provide for the financial security of their families. Geary concluded his letter by suggesting a connection between familial obligation and the fraternal ritualism of the Knights. "Let us live not as the bubbles on the waves, which, when bursted, vanish and leave no trace of their existence," he exhorted, "but rather in the language of our ritual:

   Let us live for those who love us,
   For those we know are true;
   For the heavens that smile above us,
   And the good that we can do." (10)

The publications and public activities of the Knights of Columbus in the order's first twenty years similarly reflect the Knights' efforts to construct a man-hood that both valorized the unique obligations that bound Catholic men--particularly first-generation immigrants--to family and parish, and generalized those obligations as the duties of all respectable, aspiring American men. The particular formulation of Catholic manhood that was specific to the Knights was shaped by the historical context of Catholicism in late nineteenth-century New Haven, a context that included changing patterns of ethnic immigration, a wide range of Catholic voluntary societies, persistent anti-Catholic rhetoric, Catholic awareness of anti-Masonic papal encyclicals, the development of the "national parish," and the consolidation of Irish clericalism. In this context, the rituals of the Knights encouraged men to take pride in their Catholic faith and to defend it against charges that such faith was incompatible with patriotic American manhood.

William Geary's letters in the Connecticut Catholic reveal several assumptions about the meaning of manhood. Though his letter focused on the mutual benefit function of the Knights, his appeal to norms of duty suggested that the Catholic men to whom he was writing already understood themselves within complex patterns of obligation. Geary began his letter by evoking the "indisputable fact" that a man is bound to his family by his financial responsibility for it: "it is the duty everyman owes to his family to provide for their comfort in this life and to place them beyond want and privation when adversity or death deprives them of care and protection." (11) Geary contrasted the man "surrounded by sorrowing wife and little ones" who had failed to plan for adversity, to the man united "under a bond of common brotherhood" in the Knights of Columbus who in doing so lightened the burden his "loving ones" must carry after his death. Whether they succeed or fail to realize their duties, men are fully immersed in their families. Geary's words were affectionate: men are immersed in relationships characterized primarily as loving. Men have obligations to several levels of society--family, individual, and community. Membership in the Knights connects these multiple layers of obligation, and helps men simultaneously fulfill duties on all levels. Geary stated, "while we perform this duty [death payments to widows] to ourselves, we also perform our duty to our neighbors, producing in its grandest sense the noble virtue of charity." He continued, "There is no man, however humble his lot or calling, but can be the means, the cause of good." (12) Geary posited a universalizable manhood, available regardless of class or social position to all men who participated in the bonds of manly obligation. Geary exhorted men to join the Knights so that they could mutually encourage each other toward positive behavior. "Unite together then Catholic men, in the Order of the Knights of Columbus," he wrote, "and emulate each other by your good works and deeds." (13)

Members of the first generation of Knights were accustomed to bonds of family and religious obligation long before they joined fraternal orders. Of the twenty-eight men who entered their names in the Insurance Register of the San Salvador Council (the first council of the Knights of Columbus) between 1882 and 1884, sixteen men, or fifty-seven percent (57%) listed Ireland as their place of birth. (14) The founding generation of Knights counted a majority of first-generation immigrants among their number. Jay Dolan has described the currents of money and kinship that flowed across the Atlantic between Ireland and the United States in the late nineteenth century. Irish men, whose passage to the United States typically had been purchased with the pooled resources of Irish relatives, often sent money back to Ireland to support those left behind and to pay the passage of additional members to the U.S. (15) As immigrants or the sons of immigrants, the men of the San Salvador Council would have witnessed and likely participated in the trans-Atlantic economy of Irish mobility, continuing these practices once established in the U.S. When the Knights' ritual proclaimed "let us live for those who love us," it reflected this experience of familial obligation and valorized the priorities that organized the lives of many Irish immigrants.

As Catholics in predominantly Irish parishes, the first Knights of Columbus also would have been acclimated to the obligations demanded of them by faith and church. The Knights variously required men to certify that they were "practical Catholics" or "Catholics in good standing" at the time of their application for membership. (16) At the annual convention of the Board of Government in 1887, Supreme Knight John J. Phelan responded to questions of whether to admit non-Catholic men into the Knights with a forceful speech that ended in the statement: "The Order cannot stultify itself or allow itself to masquerade in the garb of sanctity it wittingly desecrates. Our laws design us to be Catholics pure and simple." (17) Lay initiative was central to the founding of Catholic parishes in the colonial period through the nineteenth century. This was especially true of Irish national parishes (like St. Mary's in New Haven) where parish members participated in establishing, funding, building, requesting a priest for, and continuing to govern the parish through a system of trustees. (18) The founding Knights who sat in the basement of St. Mary's--a church that had been established recently, and only after a bitter struggle with the Protestant elite whose homes surrounded the church building on Hillhouse Avenue--would have been versed in the duties that accompanied active Catholic faith, duties that distinguished them from their Protestant neighbors on Hillhouse Avenue.

"the Catholic citizen should be a knight"

The November, 1903 issue of the Columbiad, "a monthly paper devoted to the interests of the Knights of Columbus," (19) beautifully illustrates the powerful religious content that was central to the Knights' concept of duty and fraternity. Featuring the theme "The Christian Knight," the 1903 issue explored ways that Columbian manhood shared traits of vigorous, virtuous, manly faith with chivalrous medieval Christian knights. The issue offered a genealogy that placed the origins of "Christian chivalry" among Arthurian knights, tracing chivalry's subsequent incarnations through knights in the Crusades to the person of Columbus, and ultimately to the American Knights who bore his name. "The Christian Knight," the article argued, was distinguished by his chivalrous character: "he was the knight of spotless life, of Christian faith, of dauntless courage, of unblemished honor, faithful to his word, loyal and true, like the knights of King Arthur." (20) Chivalry oriented men toward social good and inculcated in them "beautiful qualities" of "manly virtue, valor, humanity, courtesy, justice and honor." It motivated knights, both medieval and modern, to "rescue the helpless from captivity, to protect the orphans and widows, and assist the sick and poor." The article stressed the explicit Catholicity of Christian chivalry, comparing the ideals that bound knights to service with the characteristic vows of Catholic monastic life. "The better to fulfill their duties as knights," the article said of monastics, "they organized themselves in different military orders, and bound themselves by the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, to devote themselves wholly to the service of God." (21)

Though the passing of the Crusades closed a chapter of Christian knighthood, the article argued, chivalry did not disappear with it. Rather, chivalry was resurrected by Columbus in his courageous and "stupendous project." Through Columbus, the ideal of Christian chivalry continued to the present day among a "band of knights rallying under his name and imbued with the spirit of the knights of old." (22) The article exhorted fellow Knights of Columbus to claim the mantle of chivalry, and to emulate in every action the selfless service performed by generations of Christian knights who came before them:

   The age of chivalry has not passed. There is still the duty for men
   to be generous, faithful and noble, indifferent to their own selfish
   interest, full of high honor, truthful, and just, not aiming to
   follow the erring multitude, but emulous of imitating the example of
   Christian knights of old. (23)

Religious visions of knighthood and chivalry were common themes in the rhetoric of Columbian fraternity. In his lengthy "toast to the Catholic citizen," Grand Knight William A. Maline of Youngstown, Ohio stated: "The Catholic citizen should be a knight, gentle to children, to age and to women, courteous to all whatever their station, clothing his words and deeds with politeness." (24) And in a surprising blurring of gender identification, the May 1899 issue of the Columbiad contained a feature article elevating Joan of Arc as "the ideal type for the Catholic knight of today." Joan united "to her maidenly virtues the martial courage and ardor of the noblest knights of chivalry," the author argued. The "glorious maid of Orleans" faced adversity, discouragement, and the jeers of those in high places while maintaining unwavering faith. She stood as exemplar for Catholic men because "every phase of her life and character contains a lesson fraught with the loftiest inspiration for the man who would have his life tend to the good of his fellow men and the glory of God." (25)

In all these cases, knighthood marked the intersection of robust Catholic faith, the performance of duty, and the articulation of Catholic manhood. Knighthood valorized individual self-sacrifice for greater social welfare. The portrait of the knight as one set apart from the "erring multitudes," pursuing right despite social pressure to assimilate, provided Catholic men with a positive interpretation of the separation they would have experienced relative to the Protestant-dominated social and political context in New Haven. Knight-hood rendered them exemplars rather than aberrations. It provided them with a mythical alternative to an American manhood based upon Protestant propriety, republican citizenship, or successful economic competition--one that accounted for the unique obligations that they shouldered as Catholics and as recent immigrants. Chivalry also united multiple layers of individual, familial, religious and social obligation into a singular, coherent code of conduct, perhaps diffusing tensions inherent to circumstances in which specific obligations appeared to be in conflict with each other. The rhetoric of Knighthood located individual Knights of Columbus within an unbroken lineage of valiant Christian knights, and specifically valorized the Catholic component of chivalrous manhood.

The series of accompanying images further illustrated the theme of knightly chivalry. The first image depicted a young, wealthy man in medieval dress descending the steps of a church alongside a lovely young bride, presumably immediately following their wedding. The bride is veiled, with flowers still in hand, and a priest and joyful parents follow the young couple down the steps. A wild-eyed knight in armor greets the young groom a step below him and gestures urgently into the distance where swords wave, men in armor prepare for battle, and women lean out of windows to view the commotion. Our young Catholic groom must choose between the celebration (and consummation) of his marriage, and the obligations of warfare. The caption reads "The Call of Duty." In the second image, entitled "On the Eve of Battle," the young man, having chosen to fulfill his martial obligations, kneels in full battle armor before an elderly, seated bishop who solemnly knights him with a jeweled sword. A child with bowed head holds the train of the young knight's cloak as a handsome knight holding a crested shield looks on. In the background, a figure reclines on a bed behind partially-drawn curtains suggesting the delayed gratification inherent in the young knight's choice to heed duty's call rather than consummate his marriage. (26)

"No tears now, little Mother"

Though most articles in the Columbiad focused on the cultivation of fraternity and individual masculine character, articles such as "The Child in the House," on fatherhood and child-rearing, "The Little Mother's Christmas," and "A Rainy Day and What it Brought" suggest that (again, in contrast to Carnes' alienated fraternal members) the first generation of the Knights of Columbus understood the performance of duty within a normative context of affectionate interactions between genders and generations within the household. In December 1903 the Columbiad included an article on "The Child in the House" which encouraged fathers to temper criticism of their children's faults with kindness, and cautioned them to pay particular attention to environmental conditions that might contribute to childish rebellion. Similar to Geary's letter to the Connecticut Catholic, the article began by affirming paternal duty, encouraging men to "assist their children intelligently and sympathetically to overcome" faults and character flaws. It warned that parents who "hack and hew at childish faults" without investigating their cause may do "irreparable" injury to a child's character and ultimately damage the relationship between parent and child. Within this model, paternal discipline emanates from intimate mutuality and concern for the development of the child, rather than from any essential authority of the father. "Each contest wears a little love away," the article explained, "and with maturity comes an estrangement which tears and regrets cannot bridge." (27) Though "kind reproof and calm reasoning" are sometimes adequate to quell misbehavior, fathers should remember that each child's spirit inhabits a "bodily tenament" which also deserves loving parental attention. "The soul that would soar is often fettered by the pork and pancake fed body," the article cautioned, "And very much of depravity lies in the unaired bedroom." (28) Complicating general historical characterizations of a deepening of the chasm between gendered "separate spheres" at the turn of the century, "The Child in the House" assumed that men already were affectionate and active within the domestic sphere of child-rearing. Furthermore, the article encouraged them to become even more active in the minutiae of their children's lives, from diet to hygiene. Aside from the simple significance of its inclusion in Columbian literature, the specific portrait of manhood that emerged from the article is one in which the "expression of nurturing and paternal emotions" is a central, natural component.

Nurturing manhood found its most extreme articulation in sentimentalized depictions of relationships between Knights and their children, wives, and mothers in short stories that were published in the Columbiad. In one example, the December 1903 issue of the Columbiad featured the story of "The Little Mother's Christmas," about the reunion of an old-world mother with her immigrant son. Consistent with Dolan's characterization of immigration patterns, the story was told through the voice of an aged German mother arriving in America for the first time. Though her son Fritz had come sixteen years earlier, he had only recently saved enough money to send for her. Fritz had promised to meet her at the boat, but upon arrival in New York she frantically scans the crowded docks for him in vain, struggling against both the cold and New York's dangers using only her German. In confusion and terror the aged woman steps in front of a moving coach, is struck and knocked cold. In a happy coincidence, the coach's gripman happens to be Fritz. He jumps down from the coach, holds his mother's limp body in his arms and weeps. Fritz brings her to his home, and when the mother finally regains consciousness her first vision of her son is a happy Christmas scene inside Fritz's home, complete with a tree and presents, Fritz's wife Elizabeth who is "a picture of maternity and perfect contentment," and even "two chubby children." The story reached its climax in a moment of mutual-recognition and reunion between mother and son:

  'No tears now, little Mother,' he was saying, paying no attention to
  two big ones rolling down his own cheeks. How often she had scolded
  him when he was a growing boy for that same tearful habit, yet how
  comforting it was now, for it showed he had a heart. (29)

Warmed by the shawl and slippers that Fritz and Elizabeth give her, the mother is comforted by her welcome into Fritz's American home. With the mother's integration into the household assured, the story concluded with an image of family unity: "Safe to say, there was no place in all New York where hearts beat more truly in unison with the joybells of the grand old Day than did those of the household where the little mother had come to stay." (30)

In the January 1899 issue of the Columbiad, John P. O'Brien of the New York Council contributed a short story in which the Knights of Columbus softened the callused heart of an estranged husband toward his long-suffering wife. The piece is entitled "A Rainy Day and What it Brought." (31) The story begins with the image of Jane Devereux, "pale and sad," as she stares out her parlor window at the rainy street, contemplating the "seventeen long-drawn years of bitterness and woe" that have comprised her dreary marriage to Paul. Despite his ill temper, Jane's "loving and generous soul," and her "unselfish, angelic nature" have helped her to return Paul's slights with thoughtful acts of love. She had even converted to his religion, Catholicism, thus causing a profound estrangement between Jane and her jealously Protestant family. "In spite of all that he had done through the years to strangle his love for her," the story continues, Jane "rose superior to every trial." (32) But on that rainy day, as Jane contemplated her unhappiness, she resolved to leave Paul. As the vivid thought, "I will make an end to it" settled in her mind, she was startled by the sound of the doorbell. In the mailbox she found a card announcing the formation of a council of the Knights of Columbus, which she immediately cast beside Paul's dinner plate.

That night, Paul ate his dinner in usual silence and departed the house, Columbian card in hand, returning only in the "wee sma" hours." The following morning found Paul a changed man: his "matin greeting to Jane was a kind word," and he departed for work whistling a gay tune. By that evening Paul's "metamorphosis" was complete, as he "begged forgiveness in words that came from the depths of the soul." Tears welled-up in Jane's eyes in response, and "in a moment both were sobbing like children." (33) Though Jane remains curious about how Paul's newfound fraternal companions changed his heart, she gladly accepted the affectionate love that he displayed from that day forward. The narrator concluded by assuring readers that, "The gentle spirit, Harmony, reigns today in the Devereux home." (34)

Both "The Little Mother's Christmas" and "A Rainy Day and What it Brought," depicted men claiming emotional bonds with women. Though each sentimental tale began with distance, either physical or emotional, between men and women, each ended with a moment of celebratory reconciliation enacted in the home and the promise of continued domestic harmony. In the Columbiad's fiction, gendered and generational alienation was a temporary problem. Columbian Catholic manhood, here exemplified in the expression of tender emotions toward women, easily overcomes painful separation within the household. Paul and Fritz shed redemptive tears that convince women of their genuine affection. Fritz's sixteen years of dutiful work to save the necessary funds to secure his mother's passage to America comes to fruition in the moment of their reunion. And in the case of Paul, fraternal membership in the Knights of Columbus reintegrates him into his household and injects affection into his marriage.

Membership in the Knights of Columbus provided Catholic men with a discourse of manhood which recognized, valorized, and sometimes sentimentalized the unique obligations that bound them as Catholics and as immigrants, while at the same time it conflated the performance of those duties with general norms of Victorian manliness. Thus, Knighthood constructed a framework in which Catholic men could claim a manhood of middle-class American respectability without forfeiting their preexisting ethnic and religious identities. Espousing ideals of virtue, service and sacrifice, Knighthood also provided its largely immigrant Irish-American adherents with a rhetorical foundation for claims to full American citizenship.

"order, morality, and patriotism"

The theme of respectability saturated the publications and self-promotion of the Knights in their first twenty years. At a preliminary organizational meeting of the Knights in October of 1881 founder Father Michael J. McGivney exhorted the assembled men to appeal to the "other worthy men of New Haven" to join the emergent order. (35) In 1883, in one of his many publicity letters to the editor of the Connecticut Catholic, Fr. McGivney explained:

   By a glance at this examination paper you will perceive that none but
   sound and good men are admitted to be one of us. The reason our
   examination is so strict is, that we deem it better for all concerned
   to have five hundred sound and good men in our order than five
   thousand otherwise. (36)

The early Knights supported claims to respectability by citing the rigorous moral standards they employed to select members. In a letter to the editor of the Columbiad about the problems of overlapping memberships in the Knights and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, D. F. Sheehan of the Medford Council argued that Knighthood demanded a higher standard of character than did other forms of Irish or Catholic fraternity. "It would be well to realize," he stated, "that every Irishman or Irish-American or Irish Catholic is not suited for membership in the good old society." (37)

Father McGivney had long been concerned with issues related to public perception of Irish Catholics, as well as the behavior of Catholics away from public scrutiny. As the parish priest at St. Mary's he had founded and promoted a parish total abstinence society that was associated with the Catholic Temperance Union. Another founding Knight, J. T. Driscoll had served as co-founder of the Catholic Temperance Union of Connecticut. Perhaps seeking to distance Knighthood either from stereotypes that associated the Irish with drunkenness and the lower classes, or from other pub-centered Irish social fraternities, the Knights of Columbus made sobriety a central tenet of membership and, by extension, a component of chivalrous Catholic manhood. Though the Knights had had sobriety stipulations in place from the earliest constitutions forward, in 1899 the Knights engaged in a vigorous debate about the propriety of admitting "liquor dealers" to their ranks. Despite criticism by the Association of Liquor Dealers, the National Council decisively voted to exclude such men from Knighthood. A report about the debate in the Columbiad praised the decision, arguing "when the Order of the Knights of Columbus decreed that no one connected with liquor traffic should be admitted to its membership, it did so in accordance with the highest principles of order, morality, and patriotism." (38)

In addition to advocating temperance, the Knights also were concerned that Catholic men comport themselves with propriety. In publications and public events the Knights strove to present an image of cultivated, middle-class respectability. On the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus' landing in North America, the Knights of Columbus sponsored a parade and celebration on the New Haven town green. The New Haven Union published a souvenir edition to commemorate the celebration. The bulk of the paper's pages were filled with formal photographs of Knights--sober-looking men gazing off into the distance, wearing ties and ascots with mustaches neatly combed--above biographies that included information about each Knight's marital status and children, ward number, party of political affiliation, profession, and membership in other organizations. (39) In 1895 Donahoe's Magazine ran a two-part series on the Knights of Columbus entitled "The Catholic Gentleman in Fraternity," which contained many of the same stately photographs.

The Knights' social functions--formal dinners, balls, and cotillions--also reflected members' aspirations toward middle-class refinement. In marked contrast to sensationalized accounts of inebriated soirees held by the Friendly Sons of Erin and the Ancient Order of Hibernians that occasionally appeared in the pages of New Haven newspapers, the Columbiad featured measured reports about social events sponsored by individual councils. Such reports typically included descriptions of the decor and menu, excerpts from addresses, and a selected review of the evening's orchestral program. (40) Writing about the exclusion of liquor dealers, one Knight summarized the centrality of public image, decorum, self-control, and temperance to the chivalrous manhood envisioned for the Knights. "There is one ideal," he asserted, "the symmetrical and harmonious evolution of the character of its members, along the lines of honor, temperance and truth, so that the Knights of Columbus shall be recognized everywhere as the typical American Catholic gentleman." (41)

In articles and speeches, men in the Order argued that the moral standards of Knighthood--its attention to honesty, sobriety, and selflessness--made its Catholic adherents ideal American citizens. Perhaps anticipating how Protestant portrayals of Catholic faith as incompatible with American patriotism might be extended to Catholic fraternalism, Knights countered that Catholic fraternalism actually contributed to patriotic loyalty. One Knight evoked the connection between the Knights and their namesake to buttress his argument for Columbian citizenship. "Under the inspiration of him whose name we bear, and with the story of Columbus' life as exemplified in our beautiful Ritual," he stated, "we have the broadest kind of base for patriotism and love of country." (42) In a council speech titled "the True Knight of Columbus in Political Life," another Knight argued that Knightly Catholic manhood could play a redemptive role in American society:

   If any man in all the world should be honest in every relation of
   life, it is a Catholic. If there is any Catholic upon whom the
   obligation bears more force than on another it is a Knight of
   Columbus, a member of an Order which rightly claims to attract to
   itself the best elements in American Catholic life ... But Catholic
   manhood can and logically must stand for more than it does in
   politics. It must be a saving force for the nation. (43)

Columbian Knighthood valorized love of country and service to it, just as it had praised the obligations and affections that bound Catholic men to their families.

Columbian manhood

The ideal of Catholic manhood that emerged among the early Knights of Columbus was one characterized by the confluence of family and fraternalism, Catholicism and Americanism. Knighthood grew out of the Irish immigrant experience in New Haven, and its ideals of chivalry, sacrifice, and faithfulness reflected the unique religious duties to parish life that were incumbent upon first-generation Irish-American Catholics. Columbian manhood was constituted by members' domestic and religious commitments, not in spite of them. And though fraternal meetings removed men from their homes and families, the example of the Knights of Columbus suggests that exclusively-male institutions could have functioned as complements to or as extensions of men's commitments to female-identified religious and domestic spheres, rather than simply as an escape from them. The Knights advocated sensitive and nurturing fatherhood, sentimentalized men's emotional ties to women, and assumed a harmonious relationship between fraternalism and family. The Catholic manhood of the Knights oriented men toward the social requirements of middle-class respectability--namely sobriety, propriety and patriotism--providing Knights with an identity that both expressed their religious and ethnic heritage and reflected their aspirations for assimilation into American life. Ironically, Columbian fraternalism reflected, embraced, and even cultivated the middle-class family culture against which the fraternities in Carnes' study sought to rebel.

Men were drawn to the Knights not because they needed to escape the domesticating power of women in their churches and homes, but because the fraternity offered them both practical benefits (like death and burial payments or business contacts) and ritual idioms that resonated with their experiences and aspirations. The Knights appealed to Catholic men because the organization's ideology reflected men's integration into complex webs of religious and familial obligation, and attached positive, manly value to the performance of duties that were normal components of daily life for Catholic immigrant men in turn of the century New England. The Columbian ideal harmonized Catholicism with American citizenship and patriotism, simultaneously supporting Catholic desires for assimilation into American culture and providing Knights with a symbolic identity that contrasted standard anti-Catholic characterizations of them as an alien presence in the U.S. (44) Thus, men did not escape bonds of religious and domestic attachment in Columbian fraternity, rather, they gained from it rites, rhetoric, and heroic figures that legitimated and valorized the embedded reality of their lives.

ENDNOTES

The author wishes to thank Jon Butler for his guidance, criticism, and encouragement through all stages of this project, Susan Brosnan for providing careful and efficient assistance in the archives of the Knights of Columbus, and Charles E. Robinson for the generosity and kindness that sustained this work and its author.

1. Minutes of meeting, 2 February, 1882, Archives, Knights of Columbus, New Haven, Connecticut (hereafter cited as AKC), KC1-1-4 "minutes 1881-1882."

2. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, 1989), 2.

3. Carnes, 4.

4. Carnes, 119.

5. Carnes, 149.

6. Carnes, 149.

7. I use the terms "manhood" and "manliness" as they were used at the time of the founding of the Knights of Columbus, to describe male identities that implied self-restraint and self-mastery, in contrast to the term "masculinity" which implied the naturalness of unrestrained male sexual and violent impulses. For a more complete discussion of this distinction and its implications, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. (Chicago, 1995).

8. Christopher J. Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882-1982 (New York, 1982), xv.

9. Minutes, first annual meeting, 3 June 1883, AKC, KC1-1-5 "minutes 1883-1884."

10. William M. Geary, "letter to the editor," Connecticut Catholic, 14 June 1884. Vol. IX, No. 7, p. 5. AKC, KC1-2-36 "Connecticut Catholic, 1882-1885."

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Insurance Register, by Council. AKC.

15. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, NY, 1985), 128-9.

16. In his 1882 application for membership, Patrick Carrigan, age 31, certified that he was a "practical Catholic." AKC, KC1-1-6 "Applications for Membership."

17. Minutes, second annual convention of the Board of Government, 14 June 1887. AKC.

18. Dolan, 165.

19. A note on sources: From 1893 to 1898 the Columbiad was published independently by Thomas H. Cummings, a Knight who also served as Director of Ceremonies from 1893 to 1897. In 1898 Daniel P. Tooney, publisher of Donahoe's Magazine, ("The Best in Catholic Literature and Art"), an Irish-Catholic popular literary journal, purchased the Columbiad, and in 1903 the Columbiad became the official organ of the Knights of Columbus. Beginning with the November 1903 issue, the magazine was the official channel for communication from the National Council, its Board of Directors and committees to Knights in local councils. The Archives of the Knights of Columbus contain scattered issues from 1893 to 1902, with a more complete run of the periodical following both its 1898 transition to Tooney and its 1903 transition to editorial control by the National Council. For the purposes of this paper, I qualify my use of the Columbiad by the source of editorial control. I employ Columbiad issues from the magazine's inception through 1903 with the caveat that its content reflects the rhetorical interpretation of the publisher. Excerpts from the Columbiad after 1903 reflect the perspective of the national organization rather than that of a single, independent editor. Though I recognize that such periods of transition, and the span of time between the founding of the Knights of Columbus and its official adoption of the Columbiad, may prove problematic for presenting the development of Columbianism during the Council's earliest years, I argue that issues prior to 1903 may be employed to chronicle council events that are not otherwise reported in Knights of Columbus archival material, as well as general rhetorical expression of Columbian manhood. And issues from 1903 and 1904 may be employed to selectively illustrate the ideal manhood that was in the process of being institutionally-codified during the first twenty years of the Knights of Columbus.

The Columbiad typically featured a combination of special articles, regular columns, and advertisements. Monthly columns included: "Unchanging Truths" written by a priest about basic principles of Catholic faith, "Successful Men" which profiled the Knights who had attained professional and financial distinction, "Work Together," and "Chats with Knights." The remaining pages of the Columbiad contained advertisements for medical services, and for clothing retailers--such as, "McManus and Co., Head to toe outfitters, where QUALITY counts."--suggesting the middle-class aspirations of Knights.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. The Columbiad, October 1899, Vol. 6, No. 10, AKC.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. "The Child in the House," the Columbiad, November 1903, AKC.

28. Ibid.

29. "The Little Mother's Christmas," the Columbiad, December 1903. AKC.

30. Ibid.

31. John P. O'Brien, "A Rainy Day and What it Brought," the Columbiad, January 1899, Vol. 5, No. 11, AKC.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Minutes of meeting, October, 1881, AKC, KC1-1-4 "minutes 1881-1882."

36. Michael J. McGivney, "letter to the editor," typed manuscript, AKC, KC1-2-1 "McGivney correspondence."

37. D. F. Sheehan, letter to the editor, the Columbiad, July 1899, AKC. According to Kauffman, this Columbian focus on Catholic assimilation and Americanism distinguished the Knights from many of the other Catholic fraternal organizations mentioned earlier in this article. Kauffman notes that while Catholic fraternities like the Ancient Order of Hibernians were primarily oriented toward "old world" affiliations and the perpetuation of Irish-Catholic identity, the Knights were distinctively focused on the "new world," specifically on the right of Catholics as "descendants of Columbus" to full participation in American life and civic institutions. See Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism, 9-16.

38. The Columbiad, February 1899, AKC.

39. "Souvenir Edition of the Knights of Columbus Celebration, at New Haven, of the 400th Anniversary of the Discovery of America," New Haven Union, 11 October 1892. Whitney Library, New Haven Colony Historical Society.

40. For example, see the report found in the January 1894 issue of the Columbiad under the heading "Dedication of Their New Home in Lowell." The Columbiad, January 1894, Vol. 1, No 3, AKC.

41. The Columbiad, February 1899, AKC.

42. The Columbiad, November, 1893, AKC.

43. "The True Knight of Columbus in Political Life," reported in the Columbiad, March 1899, Vol. 6, No. 3, AKC.

By Amy Koehlinger

Florida State University

Department of Religion

Tallahassee, FL 32311