Moose International
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view. Mark blatant advertising which would require a fundamental rewrite in order to become encyclopedic for speedy deletion, using {{db-spam}}. (December 2007) |
Moose International is a nonsectarian, nonprofit fraternal organization consisting of Loyal Order of Moose for men and Women of the Moose for women. Founded in 1888 in Louisville, Kentucky, it is made up of roughly 2,000 lodges and one and a half million members in the United States, Canada, Bermuda, and the United Kingdom. Moose International headquarters is approximately 38 miles west of Chicago at Mooseheart, Illinois.
Among its charities are Mooseheart, a 1,000 acre (4 km²) campus for needy families in the western suburbs of Chicago, Illinois and Moosehaven, a home for elderly members in Orange Park, Florida.
[edit] Member services
Moose lodges offer several benefits to members:
- a hub for social interaction
- inexpensive communal dinners.
- activities for families
- opportunities to play in sports leagues with other lodge members
[edit] Community Service
For 25 years the Moose had directed its efforts almost completely toward Mooseheart and Moosehaven; now, with discharged WWII Veterans driving Moose membership to nearly 800,000 members, Director General Giles set out to broaden the organization's horizons. In 1949 he conceived and instituted the Civic Affairs program (later renamed Community Service), which encourages humanitarian efforts at the local Lodge level as well as organization-wide projects such as the Moose Youth Awareness Program, in which teenagers go into elementary schools and preschools to talk to 4- to 9-year olds about nutrition, drug abuse prevention, and similar topics. The curricula for these Moose "KidsTalks" are created by the Moose Youth members, with advice from adult experts.
More than 1,400 teenagers gather at Moose Association Student Congresses around the U.S. and Canada annually to exchange ideas on how to deal with problems in their own communities.
[edit] History
Loyal Order of Moose was founded in the spring of 1888 by Dr. John Henry Wilson in his home in Louisville, Kentucky, as a social organization for men. Lodges were instituted in Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri, and the smaller Indiana towns of Crawfordsville and Frankfort by the early 1890s. Dr. Wilson himself became dissatisfied and quit the organization order well before 1900.
It was just the two remaining Indiana Lodges that kept Loyal Order of Moose from disappearing altogether, until the fall of 1906, when a government clerk named James J. Davis from Elwood, Indiana, was invited to enroll in the Crawfordsville Lodge. On his 33rd birthday, October 27, he became the 247th member of Loyal Order of the Moose. Davis changed the outlook of Loyal Order of Moose from a social group to one that provided protection for its members' families should the member die and leave behind a wife or child.
Loyal Order of Moose came to the United Kingdom in 1926 when it expanded into Great Britain and Southern Canada.
Davis, a native of Wales who had worked from boyhood as an iron puddler in the steel mills of Pennsylvania, had also been a labor organizer and immediately saw potential to build the tiny Moose fraternity into a force to provide protection and security for a largely working-class membership. At the time no government safety net existed to provide benefits to the wife and children of a wage earner who died or became disabled. Davis proposed to provide such protection at a bargain price; annual dues of $5 to $10.
In 1912 Loyal Order of Moose purchased the land for Mooseheart, and in 1922 purchased the land for Moosehaven.
In 1926, the Moose opened its first lodge in Europe, with the founding of the Grand Lodge of Great Britain at Tredegar in Wales, the birthplace of James J. Davis. The British Headquarters of Moose International are at Mooseheart in Winscombe, Somerset. There are over seventy lodges active throughout England and Wales.
In the early 1990s, the Moose organization decided to rethink the entire idea of what a fraternal facility and its programs need to be about in the 21st Century-de-emphasizing the organization's Social Quarters, and placing greater emphasis on programs designed to appeal to every segment of the members' families in facilities called Family Centers.
[edit] Mooseheart & Moosehaven
By 1912, the order had grown from 247 members in two Lodges to nearly 500,000 members in more than 1,000 Lodges. The Moose began a program of paying "sick benefits" to members too ill to work and made plans for a "Moose Institute," to be centrally located somewhere in the Midwest that would provide a home, schooling and vocational training to children of deceased Moose members.
[edit] Mooseheart
In 1913, the Moose broke ground for Mooseheart, a home for children outside Chicago, Illinois.
[edit] Moosehaven
By the 1920s, Davis and his Moose colleagues thought the fraternity should do more--this time for aged members who were having trouble making ends meet in retirement. (A limited number of elderly members had been invited to live at Mooseheart since 1915.)
They bought 26 acres of shoreline property just south of Jacksonville, Florida, and in the fall of 1922, Moosehaven, the "City of Contentment," was opened, with the arrival of its first 22 retired Moose residents. Moosehaven has since grown to a 63-acre community providing a comfortable home, a wide array of recreational activities and comprehensive health care to more than 400 residents.
As the Moose fraternity grew in visibility and influence, so did Jim Davis. President Warren Harding named him to his Cabinet as Secretary of Labor in 1921, and Davis continued in that post under Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover as well. In November 1930, Davis, a Republican, won election to the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, and he served there with distinction for the next 14 years. As both Labor Secretary and Senator, Davis was known as a conservative champion of labor, who fought hard for the rights of unions--but felt that the workingman should expect no "handouts" of any sort. In the Senate, it was Davis who spearheaded passage of landmark legislation to force building contractors to pay laborers "prevailing" union-level wages in any government construction work. The law bore his name: the Davis-Bacon Act.
[edit] Women of the Moose
Though the Women of the Moose (originally termed the Women of Mooseheart Legion) had received formal recognition as a Moose auxiliary in 1913, they at first had little structured program of their own beyond the Chapter level. That changed in 1921, when Davis met and hired a woman named Katherine Smith.
When the 19th Amendment had granted women the right to vote in 1920, Smith, (from Indianapolis,) reasoned correctly, that women in politics would be a "growth market." She quit her secretarial job to go to work in Warren Harding's successful Presidential campaign--and, still in her 20s, she was rewarded with an appointment as Director of Public Employment in Washington. Labor Secretary Davis was her boss, and he immediately recognized her talent and drive. It took him five years to convince her to quit her government job and go to work for him running the Women of the Moose. A stereotypical "women's program" held no interest for her, Smith argued. "So get out there and make a program," Davis retorted. She did exactly that, as the organization's first Grand Chancellor, for the next 38 years until her retirement in 1964, at which point the Women of the Moose boasted 250,000 members. (It has since grown to more than 540,000, in approximately 1,600 Chapters.)
[edit] Directors General
[edit] Malcolm R. Giles, Director General, 1947 - 1953
As Davis committed more time and energy to his Washington duties in the 1920s and beyond, he had less time to run the Moose fraternity. In 1927 the day-to-day management of the Order's business was assumed at Mooseheart by Malcolm R. Giles, in the office of Supreme Secretary. Giles, an accountant by training who had worked full-time for the Moose since 1915, set out to implement a reorganization of the fraternity's finances, and in 1934 modernized its recruitment apparatus into a formal Membership Enrollment Department, under the direction of Paul P. Schmitz.
Davis' health was uncertain as he left the Senate in early 1945, and he settled into an elder statesman's role with the Moose. He collapsed on the podium while addressing the Moose convention in August 1947, and died that November. Giles continued to run the organization's business as he had for 20 years; in 1949, the Supreme Council granted him the title of Director General.
[edit] J. Jack Stoehr, Director General, 1953
In September, 1953, on an interim basis, Stoehr replaced Malcolm Giles, who had died of a heart attack. Previously, Stoehr had directed the region including Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
For a permanent successor, the Order turned to Schmitz, the Membership Director of 19 years who had overseen the growth of the fraternity 240,000 members in the Great Depression to nearly 900,000 by the early 1950s.
[edit] Paul P. Schmitz, Director General, 1953 - 1974
Schmitz, an Aurora, Ill., native, led the Moose for nearly 21 years, longer than anyone except Davis. During his tenure, both the Mooseheart and Moosehaven physical plants received substantial modernization, and he guided the Moose smoothly through the tumultuous 1960s into the 1970s with continued steady membership growth, to more than 1 million men (in more than 2,000 Lodges) and 300,000 women before he retired in April 1974.
[edit] Herbert W. Heilman, Director General, 1974 - 1984
Mr. Schmitz turned over the Director General's office to Herbert W. Heilman--the first time a Mooseheart graduate (Class of 1934) had risen to lead the organization that had raised him at its Child City. Heilman, a teacher and athletic coach, had been hired by Giles in 1948 to run the fraternity's sports program, then had worked for 17 years as Membership Enrollment Director under Schmitz. Heilman's tenure saw men's and women's combined Moose membership rise to nearly 1.8 million before his retirement in January 1984.
[edit] Paul J. O'Hollaren, Director General, 1984 - 1994, 1999
When Paul J. O'Hollaren, a lawyer and insurance executive from Portland, Oregon, became the Supreme Council's choice to succeed Heilman, it was the first time since Davis that a non-employee had assumed the Director General's chair. O'Hollaren had of course, been an active Moose for a quarter-century: charter Governor of his Lodge, President of the Oregon Moose Association, Chief Justice of the Supreme Forum, and, in 1978-79, Supreme Governor.
Director General O'Hollaren's decade in office saw a full computerization and modernization of the fraternity's business operations; the change of its corporate name to Moose International; the observance of the organization's Centennial in 1988, a completely updated redesign of the fraternity's ceremonial degree regalia (away from headgear and robes to distinctive color-coded blazers and neckties); a rebuilding of Mooseheart's utilities infrastructure, and the start of a long-range construction program to completely renovate or build new residential space for every Mooseheart student and Moosehaven resident.
[edit] Frank A. Sarnecki, Director General, 1994 - 1999
O'Hollaren retired in February 1994; his successor, Director General Frank A. Sarnecki, continued the pattern of coming to Mooseheart from the Moose "volunteer corps." Sarnecki, a real estate and insurance executive from New Jersey, served as Secretary of the Perth Amboy Lodge for 12 years in the 1960s and '70s; he rose to become Supreme Governor in 1988-89.
In his first years in office, Sarnecki guided the fraternity into four changes: a fully equitable relationship between its men's and women's components in use of Lodge facilities; a drive to transform those facilities into "Moose Family Centers"; an extension of Moosehaven eligibility to all Moose men and women, and an expansion of Mooseheart admissions to accept applications from all children in need--a move that ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey called "a dynamic demonstration of civilized man's better self."
[edit] Donald H. Ross, 1999 - 2006
After 5 years in office, Director General Sarnecki resigned in April 1999 to return to business and family interests in New Jersey. Paul J. O'Hollaren stepped in as Director General on an interim basis from mid-April to mid-June. On June 15th, 1999, Donald H. Ross , who had served 16 years as Supreme Secretary, was appointed by the Supreme Council to become the organization's eighth Director General. Two months shy of his 50th birthday as he took office, he became the fraternity's youngest chief executive in more than 75 years. He resigned in mid-March, 2006.
[edit] William B. Airey
On March 14, 2006, the Moose International Supreme Council, its corporate board of directors, asked William B. Airey to serve on an interim basis as Director General, following the resignation of Donald Ross. At a meeting in Chicago on March 27, 2006, the Council made the appointment permanent, formally naming Airey, who had led Moose membership-promotion efforts since 1988, as the fraternity’s ninth Director General.
[edit] References
David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
