Four Industrial Revolutions: Four Stages of English Freemasonry

By: Gerald Reilly

IMAGE CREDIT:  The Square Magazine Digital Collection

Industrial = the production and distribution of food, clothing, shelter, and communication add for beyond personal and family consumption in in premises (mills/factories) dedicated for the purpose.

Technology = applying the predictability and control emanating from scientific methodology to materials and production.

Revolution = rapid change: exceeding limits.

Humankind = (i) designers and users of tools (technology); and, (ii) capable of large-scale, language-based, cooperation – this is the real genius of species sapiens.

History = nature + culture.

The previous article [Four Industrial Revolutions: Four Stages of English Freemasonry – The Square Magazine] it was suggested that freemasons were ‘practitioners of the enlightenment’ (Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment).

Indeed; as the vanguard of enlightenment in its rational, radical, romantic, and revolutionary manifestations, freemasonries served their generation.

Advances in scientific methodology changed people’s relationship with nature and ‘industrialised’ production and distribution.

Freemasonries provided working models in the development of both civic and civil society. Some freemasonries have yet to join humankind’s journey from that first enlightenment period.

The First Industrial Revolution accelerated the migration of people from rural to urban. Railway timetables and factory working required time to be measured in minutes rather than hours.

In particular, the railways enabled, hitherto unimagined, new circulation and connectivity. This extended horizons and generated new possibilities.

In part, railways were financed/constructed/managed by freemasons; along the line, stations were built to which hotels were often conjoined: these became meeting places for new lodges.

Building on the potential of the 1st Industrial Revolution; from 1874 a 2nd Industrial Revolution introduced new add energy sources, materials and processes.

These generated: mass production, mass consumption, mass transit, mass media and sadly, mass warfare.

Individuality and locality gave way to collective, nationwide, activity. In particular, steel enabled the operation of heavier capacity railways; the replacement of coal/steam with oil and then electricity, exponentially increased their speed.

Steel-frame construction and electrically operated elevators enabled housing transformation from rural cottage to skyscraper.

Primacy of process became the new religion; it worshipped at the altar of efficiency, this required a new relationship between man and machine.

Thus the ‘Modernist Movement’ was identified. Previously a product was made on a machine controlled by a man.

Products were now being produced on lines of machines each contributing but a part in a manufacturing work flow.

Many machine-assisted craftsman became semiskilled/unskilled operators: toolmakers became an artisanal elite. The tracing board became a drawing board for the specialist and technocrat.

The models created by freemasonries in the 1st Industrial Revolution could not accommodate the demands of advancing scientific methodology and, its technological application.

The 2nd Industrial Revolution led to revolutionising organisation, management and administration in government, business, and civil society.

Steel a column of strength; electrical power, wisdom; and, machine precision, beauty. At the commencement of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, the electric telegraph was the speediest means of communication. It was soon followed by the telephone and radio; later with satellites.

Perhaps most significantly, in 1876, Nicholas Otto built the first internal combustion (air/liquid) engine from which followed the road and road vehicle revolution.

IMAGE CREDIT:  The Square Magazine Digital Collection

For a while, it was claimed that Brother Henry Ford (1863 – 1947) was producing more motor vehicles than the rest of the world combined.

In Palestine Lodge No. 357, Detroit, Michigan, Ford was raised to the Sublime Degree of Master Mason in 1894.

He received the 33rd degree of Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in 1940. History records occasions when Ford said and wrote words to the effect, “All history is more or less bunk”.

Yet, he wrote autobiography and, of whose life and work, there are many biographies. Of its type, the Ford Motor Museum is one of the finest in the world.

He said, “I invented nothing new; I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work”. (All history is bunk?) He also said, “In 1914 all the European leaders knew history yet they blundered into the worst war ever.” Seemingly, Brother Ford was not overly of the establishment; many masons were.

Whilst the freemasonries of the 1st Industrial Revolution can be characterised as Whig and dissenter, with the Prince of Wales becoming Grand Master in 1874, English Freemasonry became establishment.

Even though the rise of mass movements and bureaucratization had reduced the masonic pivotal civic and civil role, its commitment to establishment, and progressive business narratives, ensured this would be the period of its most significant growth and influence.

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The policies and workings of Grand Lodge were debated in the columns of the Times. In its issue, 10th August 1895, The Freemason reported on the Craft in the House of Commons, that nine members of the Cabinet were eminent Freemasons and that there were several below Cabinet rank.

Freemasonry moved with the flow by enhancing the efficiency of policy-making, procedure and practice which impacted on organisation, administration and operation. Typewriters were installed in Freemasons Hall and non-masons were employed, some female.

Provincial organisation became more effective to greater decentralisation. Freemasons moved their lodge-rooms in taverns to purpose-built town centre locations.

In newer constituencies local masons provided elected civic leadership and accepted influential roles in civil society.

Local lodges formed an indispensable part of civic processions such as those organised for the Golden and Diamond Jubilees of Queen Victoria.

This period also marked the emergence of Freemasonry as one of the most well-resourced and well-organised national philanthropic bodies.

Initially, Modernism thrived on optimism based on global economic growth; empires competed for their place in the sun.

Seismic eruption on imperial tectonic fault-lines fragmented their boundaries. This led to the tragedy of the first World War and challenged the imperial milieu of confidence and certainty.

The rebuilt Freemasons Hall was named in memory of those lost in WWI: its design was Modernist (not called Art Deco until 1965)

Freemason’s Hall, London

PHOTO CREDIT: The Square Magazine Collection

This style was imitated elsewhere in masonry; examples including the Royal Masonic Hospital and a provincial masonic centre in Braintree, Essex. The clean unadorned modernist lines celebrate geometry and secularism; the rise of the latter accelerated after the reality-check of WWI.

masonic hospital, braintree essex

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Similarly, after WWII. The loss of life, destruction of infrastructure and the cost of recovery created monotonal existence.

However, the grey of austerity was swept away by the psychedelic pendulum years of the ‘Swinging 60s’. Darting its rays, not as light but lightning, struck powerfully albeit briefly.

Yet some of its influence remains; some of its values were not dissimilar to those of Freemasonry universal. For many young Americans, the 1960s were the dawning of a golden age reinforced with the swearing-in of the youthful-looking and charismatic President JF Kennedy.

It was believed that big government could generate big answers to big problems and this set for the 60s decade an agenda for the big job of eliminating injustice and inequality.

In big organisations, big solutions were being computed on mainframes with the post WWII development of Alan Turing’s Colossus machine. How prescient was his 1953 Turing Test which today gives us the ‘t’ in ‘Captcha’.

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During the pendulum years, Britain’s popular music provided much of the language underpinning the radical rebellion of the ‘Swinging ‘60s’ as experienced with the lyrics of: Revolution; Times they are a Changin; Give Peace a Chance; What we need is a great big melting-pot and many others.

Depending on one’s age, fashions were now either outrageous or avant garde; this characterised a consumer revolution unleashed by the radical demands and purchasing power of the post WWII ‘Baby-boomers’.

Centred on Carnaby Street, London was transformed into freedom’s capital of hope and promise; there, anything and everything was possible.

Younger people were seriously challenging traditional norms and values. However, ‘60s ‘love and peace’ was replaced with sullen compliance and reducing circumstances; old empires continued their economic greying.

The values and growth from 1874 were being checked as post modernism was emerging from the ‘60s melting pot.

The next article in this series will look at the Third Industrial Revolution 1984 – 2015. Also known as the 1st Digital Revolution based on silicon, MSDOS CADCAM and, the blue-collar robotics which replaced trillions of manual operations.

Perhaps some freemasonries, being too enlightenment-minded to be of post-modernist use, accelerated the greying of their demographics.

Whilst never a youth club, the average age of freemasons was moving with indecent haste from mid-forties to late-fifties and beyond and, was overly slow to adopt and symbolise digital working tools.

Yet In 1984, Stephen Knight’s, The Brotherhood: The Secret World of the Freemasons, provided, ‘….a wake-up call to English Freemasonry…. Freemasonry has evolved, and taken a long look at what it is and how it should fit in with modern society…..That gave birth to what has become known as the Openness Policy’. (John Hamil, Freemasonry Today No. 42 Summer 2018).

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