Secret Society of the Week: The Order of Camels
I've been neglecting the old blog - a few proper articles to come shortly, but for the time being, playing myself back in with a short post on one of my favourite American fraternal organisations:
Founded in 1920 in response to the American prohibition laws that were ushered in by the Eighteenth Amendment of 1919 and the Volstead Act of 1920. The order was strongly opposed to prohibition. The camel was selected as the order's emblem because it could withstand long dry periods. Members took but one oath, namely, to oppose prohibition. Any male over twenty-two was eligible to join the society. Local lodges were called "Caravans". The society was founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Did exactly what it said on the tin. A sensible society with a purpose and not too much faffing about. Whenever I start to get sick of the various cliques listed in the "Encyclopedia Of Fraternal Organisations", I turn back to the entry on the Camels and remind myself that there are still some sane people in this bloody world.
Next week: The Prince Hall Masons.
Prohibition was pretty explicitly anti-Catholic, and Catholics (especially Irish and Germans) reciprocated in kind. Volstead was defeated in 1922, almost immediately after Prohibition went into effect. He had also been defeated in 1920, but the election was invalidated because his leftist opponent, a Lutheran minister, accused him of atheism. True fact.
ReplyDeleteThe Catholic church regarded moonshining as a form of civil disobedience, and an employee at St. John's Abbey helped farmers set up non-toxic copper stills. Large areas of Minnesota lived mostly on moonshining, which was a godsend, since agriculture was in depression a decade before the rest of the world.
For more information, the book is Elaine Davis's "Minnesota 13". On my bicycle bar-hopping tour I unexpectedly ran into the author in New Munich, MN, in a bar across the street from the ruins of an old brewery (with the big chimney and everything).
New Munich, MN (pop. 200) was not named after Munich, Germany. It was named after Munich, MN, now a ghost town, a mile or two away. Munich, MN was named after Munich, Germany, though.
My own great grandfather's Sioux City brewery, older than Budweiser, was closed down in 1890 by Iowa prohibition. A prohibitionist had been shot there the year before, but it didn't help.
Emerson, I wrote a Wiki article for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipka_Rebellion
ReplyDeleteThere's one on Minnesota 13 too but it looks like it needs a lot of work.
Quibble: was this, therefore, a secret society?
ReplyDeleteonly in the sense in which the Secret Service is a secret service and the Gestapo were secret police, I suppose. You weren't allowed into Caravan meetings if you weren't a member, and they might have wanted to secretly discuss their political strategy (which ended up with submitting a plank to the 1920 Republican Convention - I notice, along with someone who wanted to constitute the Hague Tribunal as a proper international court!)
ReplyDeleteThe Masons also dispute that they are a "secret society" - they prefer "a society with secrets".
hahaha and I see that the guy calling for the Hague tribunal was "John C Cheney" of Indiana! As far as I can tell from Wikipedia, not an ancestor of Dick.
ReplyDeleteAh, OK. I see.
ReplyDeleteI think secret membership is a pretty good line.
ReplyDelete"Secret" does seem to have a sense which just means "unaccountable" though - the Geheime Staatspolizei were many things, but they certainly weren't geheime. In general "secret police" forces are ones that everybody knows about.
ReplyDeleteLike America's secret wars in Central America, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, which were reported in the press as "secret wars."
ReplyDeleteA war within which there were alleged massacres of hundreds of men women and children, which were reported as alleged massacres in the American press. The European press also published alleged photographs of alleged corpses and quoted alleged eyewitness accounts from alleged survivors.
Yeah, my humor is pretty heavy-handed there, but who is to blame? Me or the American alleged newspapers?
Me, probably.
ReplyDeleteNotsneaky, at least the Michał Czajkowski / Sadyk Pasha entry iss fine. You got me thinking. And then I went to the Mari / Chermiss. Lots of good stuff in that area.
Yeah the Chermiss are interesting too but I don't know much about them.
ReplyDeleteThere were some Mari communities in Ukraine at this time, around Bar. A local 1565 census counted 50 households in Bar. Like Lipkas, they fought against the Crimean Tatars (all of this had to do with the fall out of the break up of the Golden Horde) and were given land and privileges (exceptions from taxas, freedom to run around and be pagan, etc.) in exchange. Then apparently the Chmielnicki Uprising destroyed their way of life and they turned to banditry (and who can blame them?)
Have you read any of Khodarkovsky's books?
ReplyDeleteThe two I've read have been about the final imposition of Czarist rule in the 18th and 19th centuries, beginning when the various peoples were mostly independent, and ending when they weren't. The Kalmyk story is amazing.
Does the suspicion not immediately arise that this was basically a secret boozing society? (And therefore it had a "secret" element under the strictest interpretation of the term.) I find it hard to envisage gangs of like-minded drink-deprived blokes spending their evenings nipping down the local Caravan and intoning "Oooh, I do wish Prohibition was over" over tumblers of lemonade.
ReplyDelete