| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

George Emery and J. C. Herbert Emery. A Young Man's Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860–1929. (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services [Hannah Institute] studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society, number 7.) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 184. $55.00.
"Odd Fellows"—the words evoke Jackie Gleason's antics as Ralph Kramden, exalted member of the Loyal Order of Racoons. Many have regarded fraternal orders, festooned with exotic rituals and encumbered with folksy insurance, as something of a joke. Little wonder they collapsed during the twentieth century. In 1989, however, I contended that the rituals exerted a powerful hold on many men (Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America). But I had assumed, along with most scholars, the unsoundness of fraternal insurance, which, devoid of actuarial principles and administered by lodge officials, inevitably succumbed to the rationality and efficiency of the modern insurance corporations.	1
The authors of the present volume, George Emery and J. C. Herbert Emery, held similar assumptions but chose to test them. They focused on the Independent Order of Odd Fellows in the United States and Canada. The Odd Fellows, with over two million members, were the largest of the orders that provided sick (disability) benefits, and by 1920 the order had substantially eliminated its insurance system. (The Freemasons, a more powerful and influential order, provided no systematized insurance.) The authors culled data from government reports and scores of lodge records on membership, premium payments, and benefits. These they subjected to a battery of econometric tests, some of them quite elegant.	. . .

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