The George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, is a towering structure, a replica of the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt—or, at least, a replica of what people used to think the ancient lighthouse looked like. It features a colossal statue of the first president, monster columns made of granite, and enormous murals depicting significant moments in the life of George Washington, Freemason.
The visitor can gaze upon a trowel Washington used when he was laying the cornerstone of the Capitol building, a lock of Washington’s hair, a clock that was stopped at the moment of Washington’s death, an exact replica of the Masonic lodge where Washington attended meetings, and a Masonic apron that belonged to one of his successors, president James K. Polk. But what really hooked me during my visit to this magnificent treasure-house was a pair of blue, vinyl sofas in one of the building’s lodge rooms, sofas done in the unmistakable fake-leather style of the 1970s, and yet preserved so perfectly they might have been manufactured yesterday.
What was it about those tawdry, little-used sofas? They haunted me as I toured the building, gazing upon display cases filled with photographs of crew-cut men in suits, aprons, and Shriner fezzes, captured for eternity in faded color snapshots from the 1960s. Finally it hit me: this is supposed to be a museum of George Washington, but in fact it is a museum of the recent past, a spooky reminder of those years in the middle of the twentieth century when organizations like the Shriners still made cultural sense.
They certainly don’t any longer. I don’t know a single person of my generation who has thought to become a Shriner. I don’t know any Knights of Pythias, either, or any Oddfellows, or any Elks, or even any Rotarians. The Freemasons themselves, the oldest and the largest of the fraternal orders, are fading fast. A chart in the museum I visited shows the flagging membership, and a recent story in the Wall Street Journal describes the group’s efforts to reverse its decline. There is even a campaign under way on the Internet to persuade people to join the Shriners—BeAShrinerNow.com—which depicts that fraternity as a kind of Boy Scouts for grownups.
Once upon a time, however, Americans signed up for these organizations in great ecstatic waves. […]
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