When Your Lodge Was Better Than Your Health Insurance

In 1934, one of the ugliest years of the Great Depression, millions of Americans were living one emergency away from ruin. Savings were gone. Wages had collapsed. Jobs were scarce. A hospital stay was not just a medical problem. It was an economic catastrophe waiting to happen. Ruth Papon of Olathe, Kansas, got sick anyway. She went into the Security Benefit Association hospital in Topeka for what records called a "4-in-1 major operation." She survived the surgery, went home, then came back with a severe case of pneumonia. She survived that too. Months later, she wrote about the doctors and nurses with obvious gratitude. They had saved her life, she said, and the hospital had a "homey" feeling that other hospitals lacked. That detail matters. Ruth Papon was not rich. She was not unusually lucky. She had something millions of other Americans also had in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: membership in a fraternal society. And for a long stretch of American history, that