Is the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum Connected to Masonry?
The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose is a testament to a curious fraternal relative of Freemasonry.
Cover Story
California Maosnry at 175: A State of Evolution
For 175 Years, California Masonry has left its mark on the state.
By Alexander Towney with Ian A. Stewart
I was just 19 years old when I was raised as a Master Mason, eager to learn all I could about a fraternity I’d become enchanted with. I’d already gotten to know several of the members of the lodge, some quite well, and enjoyed conversations with them about all sorts of things (but, ironically, typically not Masonry). At the same time, I kept waiting for the real part to begin. Perhaps it would happen after my initiation, I thought. Then, maybe after the second degree? The third? I started to wonder when all the secret knowledge I’d heard about would be revealed. Where were the dignitaries? When would I be admitted to the fraternity of my imagination?
The ceremony ended and I sat down at a table with men much older than me to eat a turkey sandwich. Then I went home.
Is that all? I wondered. For years, I’d been fascinated by Freemasonry and its promise of mystical, esoteric insights and connections to great and important men. This was a fraternity that had counted 15 U.S. presidents and 19 California governors among its ranks, plus no end of poets, artists, thinkers, revolutionaries, generals, and business leaders. Something had brought these great men into the Masonic lodge room, and it wasn’t the promise of a turkey sandwich. So what was it? And, I was beginning to ask, why did it seem to be missing now?
I wanted to understand more about the fraternity: What had turned it, at one point, into not just the largest but quite possibly the most influential membership organization in the country? (At its high-water mark, nearly one in 10 adult men in California were members.) And what had happened in the intervening years to take such a bite out of that? Masonry in the United States, and in California in particular, has been one of the greatest forces in shaping our history. It was Masons who both symbolically and often literally built the state’s first city halls and filled them with the leaders of those communities. Early California Masons like Peter Lassen, Kit Carson, and John C. Young explored its frontiers. Other historic figures, like William “Bull” Meek and Joshua Abraham Norton (better known as “Emperor Norton I”), lent it color. Mason architects including Timothy Pflueger and John C. Austin helped define our cities’ skylines. Statesmen like Earl Warren and Hiram Johnson wrote our laws. Tycoons like Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker laid the railroad tracks that helped the state grow. Artists including John Steinbeck, Clark Gable, and Burl Ives left indelible marks on the popular culture. At nearly every turn in California history, Masons weren’t just there—they were leading the way.
And that’s only the public face of Freemasonry. In so many private and invisible ways, California’s lodges have had a silent but profound influence on how the state evolved. The proliferation of specialized ethnic and linguistic lodges in the 19th and early 20th centuries (among them the French La Parfaite Union № 17, the Italian Speranza № 30, and the German-Jewish Fidelity № 120) provided a soft landing for immigrants of diverse backgrounds. Military lodges including Anacapa № 710 and San Diego № 35, and servicemen’s “compass clubs” offered vital connections to soldiers and diversions during conflicts abroad along with fellowship at home. And the acts of relief offered by lodges in the wake of disasters, from the cholera outbreak of 1850 to the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, not to mention floods, outbreaks, and war efforts around the country and abroad, have helped families rebuild—almost always with a minimum of public fanfare.
Where had all that gone? I wondered. And could it ever return?
The answer, of course, is no; history only moves in one direction. But the more I learned about Freemasonry in California, the more my view on that question shifted. In a million ways, the story isn’t simply one of its rise and fall; it’s a story of evolution. For 175 years, the fraternity has grown and shrunk and morphed to meet the needs of its members, all within the context of changes in the wider community. If Masonry is no longer the cultural behemoth it was in the early 20th century, perhaps it’s because that’s not what members need anymore. What it still offers, though, is no less important. On that night almost 20 years ago when I received my third degree, I couldn’t quite see it yet. That part takes time.
Above: The Red House, in Sacramento, the first meeting place of the Masons of California’s first Annual Communication in 1850.
History of California Masonry
To understand the trends in California Freemasonry over the past 175 years, it’s important to start at the beginning. Here and throughout the country, Freemasonry’s social and historical import lies in its influence on the foundational structures of American society, its role in shaping civic and community engagement, and its reflection of changing values over time. Freemasonry has contributed to the development of American ideals of democracy, brotherhood, and philanthropy, while also adapting to and reflecting broader social and cultural shifts. In that way, its evolution from a widespread community pillar to today’s more introspective organization highlights broader trends in American life, including transformations in community involvement and the search for personal and spiritual growth.
But in April 1850, at the first official statewide convention of Masons in California, that was a long way away. To say that Masonry in California had humble beginnings is both true—in the sense that its numbers were minuscule and its physical presence practically negligible—and in important ways not true at all. Among the first cohort of Masons to incorporate as the Grand Lodge of California were a motley assortment of gold miners, sailors, fur trappers, and other hardy types. But they also included many of the figures who just months later would lead the young state to gain admission to the Union—a moment that had been sparked four years earlier by New York Mason John D. Sloat’s raising of the U.S. flag at Monterey. Consider: Nine of the 48 members of the first state constitutional convention, held in 1849, were Freemasons, including its president, Robert Semple. Among California’s first group of democratically elected politicians, Masons were practically ubiquitous: J.C. Kewen was the first attorney general. Serranus Clinton Hastings (namesake of the University of California law school) was the first chief justice. At least four members of the first state senate were Masons, as were nine members of the legislature—including Levi Stowell, who had carried the charter for what would become California № 1 from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. “With so many good Masons guiding the first legislative steps of the state, it is small wonder that [Assemblyman Elisha] McKinstry observed, 50 years later, that more sound organic government came out of the first California legislature than out of all of its subsequent legislatures combined,” wrote Masonic historian Leon Whitsell in 1950.
Masons from all over the country contributed to the formation of the Grand Lodge of California. Prior to 1850, Masonic charters from at least 15 states were brought into California with the aim of founding new lodges here, most of which never materialized. Others affiliated with various unrecognized jurisdictions (including, for instance, Davy Crocket № 7 of San Francisco, whose charter was issued by the Grand Lodge of Louisiana, then embroiled in a Masonic territorial dispute). That inevitably led to questions of Masonic legitimacy and, before long, to the need to establish a single governing body. So, on April 17, Masons from around Northern California assembled in the attic of the so-called Red House on J Street in Sacramento, one floor above what appears to have been a brothel, to hammer out the details.
The new Grand Lodge of California brought together three recognized lodges, now renamed California № 1, Western Star № 2, and Tehama № 3, and issued charters to two more, Jennings № 4 and Benicia № 5. Just two months later, it issued its first dispensation to a subordinate lodge, Sutter № 6.
Masonry grew quickly from there. Within three years, there were more than 500 men on the rolls of 18 lodges. By 1860, that number was up to 3,000. Among them were John Bigler and J. Neely Johnson of Tehama № 3, Milton S. Latham of Washington № 20, John G. Downey of Los Angeles № 42, Leland Stanford of Michigan City № 47, and Henry H. Haight of Pacific Lodge № 136—respectively, the state’s third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and 10th governors. Romualdo Pacheco, the state’s 12th governor and only Hispanic one, belonged to San Luis Obispo № 148. In fact, 10 of the first 20 governors of California were Masons, and 18 of 40 in the state’s entire history.
Above: Illustration of the Masonic Homes of California, opened in 1898 in Decoto, California, now known as Union City.
A Legacy of Masonic Relief
Those bold-faced names certaintly lent the fraternity credibility, but it was lodges’ reputation for charity and relief that established them as pillars of early California. When a deadly cholera outbreak spread from San Francisco to Sacramento in 1850, it was Masonic leaders like Albert Maver Winn and John D. Townsend, the state’s first licensed doctor, who helped establish a hospital at Sutter’s Fort. Famously, Jennings № 4 put itself out of business by incurring a staggering $14,000 in debt through the issuance of relief funds. At the time, the entire city of Sacramento contained just 69 Masons. They, in turn, raised $32,000 (the equivalent of $1.3 million today) in cholera aid. It’s impossible to know just how much early lodges dispensed in relief to their fellow members, but the amount was surely considerable, particularly among the rough-and-ready Gold Country lodges, where 70 of the state’s first 100 lodges were located. Tuolumne № 8, for instance, reportedly issued $4,500 in aid to non-affiliates in just two years, the equivalent of nearly a quarter-million dollars today.
Early Masonic relief came in several forms. Most commonly, lodges simply lent money to those in distress. At other times, lodge funds were raised following disasters—particularly fire, which destroyed nearly every early Gold Country lodge at one point or another. That extended beyond California’s borders; Masons rallied enormous relief sums for their brothers in Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi in the 19th century in the wake of floods, fires, and pandemics there. Following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Grand Lodge of California sent $5,000 to Illinois. In 1896, when local Masonic relief boards reported distributing the equivalent of $750,000 in funds to indigent members, the Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of California stated that California Masons had raised one-third of all charity produced by U.S. Masons.
Most famous of all was the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco, which destroyed the Grand Lodge temple at Stockton and Post and displaced half the city’s inhabitants. California Masons, together with their brothers around the country, donated a stunning $315,000 to help feed, clothe, and shelter not just their own members and their families, but residents throughout the Bay Area.
That charitable instinct found a permanent outlet in the Masonic Widows and Orphans Home (now the Masonic Homes of California), opened in 1898 in what was then called Decoto, between Oakland and San Jose. Built at a cost of nearly $350,000—all of it raised by California Masons—it has stood for 125 years as a testament to that legacy of support, offering a safe, welcome, and dignified space for elderly Masons and their families. Perhaps more than any other aspect of the fraternity, that institution has evolved over the years into something very different but still vital: the Masonic Homes of California, now comprising two senior communities, plus a sister campus (Acacia Creek Retirement Community), the Masonic Center for Youth and Families, and Masonic Outreach Services, which now provides emergency funds, case management, and other community-based support for Masons and their family members.
Masonry's Rise and Fall
By the early 20th century, Freemasonry in California had an esteemed reputation throughout the state—and began to see its most significant period of growth. Overall membership nearly tripled from 53,179 at the outbreak of World War I to 142,422 in the early part of the Great Depression. That was followed by a slight downturn, but not a lengthy one. During the second World War, new affiliates flocked to California lodges, eager for the camaraderie and support the fraternity provided. (At its high, the fraternity counted some 12,000 servicemen on its membership rolls.) Even more, it was soliders returning home and looking to re-create the closeness they’d felt while serving abroad who swelled the membership—an additional 12,000 joined from 1944 to 1945. At that point, nearly 10 percent of the total membership were Entered Apprentice Masons, an all-time high.
That great rush into the fraternity—a phenomenon that was also experienced in other service organizations like the VFW, American Legion, and Elks Club—led to dramatic changes in the character of Freemasonry in California, along with a shift away from relief and ritual as the defining traits of Masonry and toward a more social and outwardly patriotic orientation. What today might be considered a quintessentially “good problem”—i.e., a nearly unlimited supply of eager new members—prompted serious head-scratching from the fraternity’s leadership. Chief among those dilemmas was the question of how to maintain the quality of Masonic education and the philosophical depth of its practices amid a rapidly expanding membership more concerned with social and reputational benefits than ancient wisdom. That concern, about the fraternity becoming a mere social club with diminished focus on its spiritual, educational, and philanthropic foundations, would remain top of mind for the next several decades.
It wasn’t a new anxiety. In 1918, Grand Master William Rhodes Hervey, a former Los Angeles County Superior Court judge and later a prominent banking executive, proclaimed at the Annual Communication:
The conception that the prosperity and greatness of a lodge is measured by its large membership and its wealth is erroneous. That lodge is prosperous and great which commands the affections of its members and displays spiritual rather than material wealth… A lodge abrogates some of its responsibilities and neglects its fairest opportunities when it devotes its entire time to the conferring of degrees and fails to unite its membership into an homogeneous spiritual and working whole… By failing to respond to the intellectual and spiritual demands of their members some of our lodges are losing the interest and active support of many of the best Masons of California and are in danger of becoming the patrons of the mediocre.
The interwar and post-WWII periods were pivotal for California Freemasonry, where the challenge was to accommodate growing demand for social engagement while retaining the values and practices that had long been fundamental to the Masonic tradition.
Freemasonry’s journey through the middle of the 20th century underscored the ongoing tension between tradition and adaptation, and the challenges of preserving a rich heritage while remaining relevant in a rapidly changing world.
Above: Cornerstone laying ceremony and groundbreaking for the California Masonic Memorial Temple in San Francisco, the home of the Masons of California and the Grand Lodge of California.
Masonry as a Growing Force
All that was beneath the surface. From the outside, the period represented a clear high point for California Freemasonry. The fraternity benefitted enormously from a seemingly never-ending well of members returning from war, boosted by the suburbanization of American culture and the civic zeal of those Californians. It was during this period that the fraternity turned Public Schools Week, first introduced in 1919 by Grand Master Charles Adams as a show of support for the state’s struggling educational system, into a show of force. In 1956, 1.1 million people attended Public Schools Week events, most either hosted or run by the Masons of California. A decade later, the fraternity purchased ad space on 100 billboards and 1,000 city buses to highlight Public Schools Week.
The fraternity’s reach also extended into other organizations. The Masonic youth orders—the Order of DeMolay for boys, plus Job’s Daughters and the Order of the Rainbow for Girls—were established between 1919 and 1921, and they found their footing in California in the subsequent decades. The Shriners, which had organized its first California meetings in the late 19th century, opened its first charitable hospital in San Francisco in 1923, and its first in Southern California in 1952. The Scottish Rite, the largest of these auxiliary groups, also launched in the state in the late 19th century but expanded rapidly alongside the wider fraternity—into Santa Barbara in 1931, Bakersfield in 1945, and San Bernardino in 1956. In 1961, the impressive, Millard Sheets–designed Scottish Rite Cathedral on Wilshire Boulevard was opened to serve a membership of nearly 11,000, making Los Angeles the largest valley (or local body) in what was then the second-largest Scottish Rite orient (state) of the Southern jurisdiction.
There was also the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of California, primarily serving Black Masons who, while never excluded by rule from the Grand Lodge of California, found the same cold welcome there as in so many other parts of American society of the time. That group traced its roots in California to 1855, but saw its most significant rise in membership between 1941 and 1951, when it grew from 1,790 to 6,109 members and chartered 38 new lodges.
At the same time, California Freemasonry’s most celebrated son reached his professional zenith: Earl Warren, a member of Sequoia № 349 who’d served as the state’s grand master in 1935–36, was elected state governor in 1942. For several decades, Warren was a fixture in state and national politics, including on the U.S. Supreme Court, serving from 1953 until 1969. As chief justice, Warren was behind several of the most important decisions in American legal history, including Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, and others that helped uphold the Civil Rights Act. Frequently in his legal writing, Warren relied on philosophical concepts and language that echoed his experience in Freemasonry.
A Turning Point for California Masonry
That period of growth ultimately petered out, however, and by the middle of the 1960s, membership had peaked. In 1966, the Grand Lodge reported an overall loss for the first time since the Great Depression—the first of what has been more than 60 consecutive years of contraction. As the postwar boom of applicants dwindled, the fraternity was left with an aging membership and rosters viewed as artificially swollen with “paper members.”
The subsequent decades saw continued challenges, with the 1970s and 1980s marked by significant losses in membership and a public turn away from social organizations. Writings from these years underscore growing concern over the fraternity’s graying demographic, looming financial difficulties, and diminishing interest from the public in Masonic values and education. Yearly reports show that at the highest levels, the debate between increasing membership and maintaining Masonic standards continued to rage. Leadership focused on new strategies to attract and retain members, including streamlining meetings and lowering certain standards related to the memorization of the degrees.
However, more than any single Masonic policy or recruitment strategy, there were larger societal forces at play. During the 1966 Annual Communication, the grand secretary reported on a 10-year study of suspensions for nonpayment of dues. The Grand Lodge found that 12,987 members had been suspended, more than the number of initiations over two years. At the 1980 Annual Communication, another milestone: The grand secretary noted the largest membership loss in a single year, at 4,147, a trend exacerbated by both suspensions and deaths, many affecting the very members who’d rallied to the fraternity in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1988, when Hawaii broke away to form its own grand lodge, the California fraternity posted a membership loss of more than 8,000. Even discounting Hawaiian Masons, more than 6,000 California Masons left the rolls, making it the biggest year-over-year loss in fraternity history.
Alongside the drop in membership came the closing of many lodges. Long Beach, for instance, once boasted 15 Masonic blue lodges. Consolidations reduced that number to just three by 1990.
That trend extended beyond Freemasonry to all sorts of service and fraternal organizations. Groups like the Rotary and Elks all experienced precipitous membership declines over the same period, at precisely the moment when they have expected a demographic swell of baby boomers. Instead, interest in social organizations—from churches to civic groups to fraternal orders—seemed to vanish almost overnight.
Above: Members of Panamericana Lodge No. 513 form a chain of union. Panamericana No. 513 is one of California’s spanish-speaking Masonic lodges.
Masonry in the 21st Century
That might have been the end of Freemasonry in California, but of course it wasn’t. If anything, the 21st century has marked a second turning point. While membership has flattened out in recent years, the internal emphasis of the fraternity has shifted from simply boosting membership to enhancing the membership experience.
While lodge consolidations remain a reality, the Grand Lodge also began chartering new lodges, often with a charitable, esoteric, or cultural focus. These include three Spanish-language lodges, plus others organized by Filipino and Armenian members. In fact, one in eight California lodges today were chartered in just the past 10 years. Even in older, historic lodges, many groups have shifted toward a “traditional observance” model, where the ritual is made a particular point of emphasis. (Recognizing that trend, the Grand Lodge began holding an annual statewide ritual competition in 2005.)
Masonic education has also emerged as a priority: A Grand Lodge–sponsored Institute for Masonic Studies helped usher in the International Conference on Freemasonry, an annual academic gathering that launched in 2011, as well as the California Masonic Symposium and the endowment of a chair in the history department at UCLA to support graduate-level research. During the 2020 COVID shutdown, the Grand Lodge hosted a series of 20 educational lectures over Zoom that attracted more than 10,000 attendees.
In other ways, too, the fraternity has evolved into a more professional organization. The California Masonic Foundation, launched in 1969 with an endowment generated by the sale of the Masonic student clubhouses at UC Berkeley and UCLA, has grown into a capable force for good, helping Masons fulfill their philanthropic obligations both to fellow members and to children’s education. Centralized annual leadership retreats were introduced in the early 2000s and are now open to all current or aspiring lodge officers. And in 2015, the World Conference of Grand Lodges was hosted jointly in San Francisco by three California Masonic bodies, reflecting a new spirit of fraternal cooperation in the state.
Above: A wall of portraits shows past masters of the Masonic lodges at the Sunset Masonic Temple in Los Angeles.
It’s often said that Freemasonry is a personal journey of discovery and evolution. The same is true for the larger fraternity.
Freemasonry in California has always been in a state of adaptation, from the Gold Rush era onward. For 175 years, the only constant has been change. Well, almost.
As I look back on my own experience in Masonry, my thoughts return to my third degree. Taking the obligations, I recited the same words that generations of Freemasons before me had spoken. I bound myself to a brotherhood transcending time and space.
That wasn’t necessarily clear to me then. But as I’ve progressed through my journey—joining new lodges, meeting new members, continuing my own research—I’ve come to a profound appreciation for that unbroken chain of union.
Freemasonry in California today looks almost nothing like it did 100, 50, or even 25 years ago. It will certainly look different on its bicentennial, in 2050. But it has always— and will always—offer something significant to its membership, whatever form that takes. It will always stand for truth, relief, and brotherly love. Those values stand forever, outside time.
Photography by:
Panamericana Lodge photo by Matthew Reamer
Wall of portraits image by Tom Story
All others courtesy of the Henry Wilson Coil Museum & Library of Freemasonry.
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After the L.A. Fires, a Massive Masonic Relief Effort
As the Los Angeles fires upended countless lives, California Masons rallied into action to offer Masonic relief, supplies, and support.