Fraternal Organization

Your great-grandpa might have belonged to a bunch of these. Groups like the masons, the Shriners, the Elks, or The Ancient, Honorable and Aromatic Order of Fighting Gorillas. These basically provided gramp-gramp a place to play poker, to complain about his job and his family, and to watch film strips showing girls playing beach volleyball naked.

Some of these groups also provided financial functions, especially insurance. At a time when there weren’t a lot of government benefits, and companies basically threw injured workers out with the trash (we’re going way back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries here), these fraternal organizations provided services not unlike those now performed by the modern welfare state.

The groups collected dues and used that money to pay out what we might recognize as unemployment and workers’ comp benefits, if someone in the order fell on hard times. They also often offered life insurance.