MOOSEHEART MMGSIZINE
6
Conversations With Six Hundred Thousand
The Roosevelt Dam and long staple-cotton. It is literally true that in the neighborhood of Phoenix you see great stretches of land desolate and worthless, bearing only a few desert weeds; and twenty-five feet away, where the irrigating canal brings its precious flood, the land is producing a precious cotton crop, and reckoned at a thousand dollars an acre. The southwest is a natural field for the Order and its main principle of care for the orphan appeals to the large-hearted people of that region.
Pacific Coast and Hawaii
The Pacific Coast states are a greenhouse of Moosedom. From San Diego through Los Angeles and Bakersfield, San Joaquin, Oakland, Sacramento, Napa, Weed, Portland, Astoria, Tacoma, Bellingham, to Vancouver and Spokane, there is a garland of Moose lodges, besides a large number clustered near this main stem. San Francisco has the largest lodge and one of the best of. the numerous club houses.
Summer is no time to hold public meetings in Pacific Coast states, where people breakfast in the top of an orange tree, lunch off a peach orchard, take supper in a melon patch and spend the night rolling up and down the magnificent roads of that section with all the children on the back seat of the automobile. Nevertheless this part of the sixty lodges that stood in the receiving line furnished some large audiences and gave the travelers a delightful welcome.
MOOSEHEART is bringing up several children from the Coast, including exceptional youngsters who are likely to do great service for the Order. At that great distance one realises how strong is the pull of MOOSEHEART on the far away lodges; how much it does to unite the minds and efforts of the members. The time may come when MOOSEHEART will have to be subdivided and an assistant Mooseheart may be placed on the Pacific Coast; but nothing must ever be done to break that sense of direct personal heart-to-heart relation between the lodges and that throbbing center.
The Hawaiian Islands have gone through some tribulation because of the special race conditions which are now disturbing the political and social life of that beautiful group. Some lodges are likely to give_ up their charters; but there is an opportunity in Honolulu to* build up a strong and persistent body. It will be a liberal education for any Moose to visit those wonderful islands and he will not be allowed to come away without the local lodge lassoping him with “lei,” those wreaths of flowers which are a silent way of saying, “Come again.”
The Northwest
The Rocky Mountain states have long been the resort of Moose—the actual, big, lordly, wide-antlered creatures, and also their human representatives. In the three sister cities of Great Falls, Helena and Butte, Montana, the Moose are well established; and also in Billings, Miles City and other places in the eastern section of the state. In all the mining towns the population is subject to rapid shifts _ which break up the lodge sense of keeping in action. These immense northwestern states are sparse’y populated; and it takes more work to keep any order going, than in the more thickly settled parts of the Union. Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas all have Moose lodges and the Moose spirit.
Sixty Lessons
Every lodge visited in the spring and summer of 1920, has taught something about the makeup of the Order and the basis of success. The crying need everywhere is the same as in railroads and colleges, in mines and churches—the right kind of leaders. A poor Dictator, and still more a poor Secretary, puts a lodge on the down slide. The best lodges have the best men at the head, because a good lodge is not satisfied with anything else; and also because strong men build up strong groups. As in all large societies, a considerable number of members pay their dues ,and recognize no further responsibility. The thing that interests the lodges most, that arouses them, that makes them feel worth while, is MOOSEHEART. For the care of the children take men out of themselves and their own personal worries and ambitions. The wider the knowledge of MOOSEHEART goes the more ׳ the lodges wake up to the delight of giving aid and good will to something that does not come right back to them in an immediate benefit. MOOSEHEART is not only the center of the Order but its key and inspiration.
SIXTY LODGES
By PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART Harvard University----Mooseheart Governor
such hotels as the Farragut at Norfolk, the Jefferson at Richmond, the Savannah, and the Seminole at Jacksonville, the New St. Charles at New Orleans, Chisca at Memphis, the Eattle at Mobile, the beautiful O. Henry at Greensboro—and the San Carlos at Pensacola—the best hotel in the South, and that means one of the best in the world. No section of the United States has made better use of its prosperity.
The largest and wealthiest lodges in the South are at New Orleans and Mobile, both of which own large and well equipped club houses in the best part of the business city. As yet, however, few of the southern lodges have built their own homes. They are loyal, they are interested, they are hospitable to the widest limit. They are eager to keep up close connection with the Order. Some of the best organizers have been sent down there, and have built up some of the lodges surprisingly. The South, however, needs to keep closer to the heart of the Order. It is a long way from MOOSEHEART which few of the members have ever seen . The South likes to be aroused and it should have its desire.
Central South and Southwest
Across the mountains is a group of five states which are as much western as southern, but have been settled largely by southern people, and think of themselves as belonging to the South. These are West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri. Our line of march leaves out the first two states in which there are many Moose lodges. The centers of Moose influence in Tennessee are Nashville, Jackson and Memphis; in Arkansas, Little Rock and Hot Springs—all thriving and progressive places . Memphis has become a great city, with remarkable suburbs and one of the best people’s parks in the whole country.
Here as in many other places the leaders of the Moose are hand in glove with the business organizations of the cities, Besides the Chambers of Commerce there are the Rotary, ICiwanis, Lions and other organiations of business men, with sections in numerous cities. ־ At Tulsa, Oklahoma, there are six such clubs which meet on successive week-days at the_ same hour and at the same hotel, so that there is a weekly full-hand of good fellowship and speakers meetings. Through these organizations, the gospel of MOOSEHEART could be brought home beyond the boundaries of the lodge. The Moose are strong in St. Louis and have a very live lodge in Kansas City, which has just furnished the Order with up-and-coming Supreme Dictator Brown for this year.
The most characteristic p’a.ce in Arkansas is Hot Springs, which is very much like a French or Bohemian watering-places, with its row of handsome bath buildings and its delightful outdoor life for everybody. Hot Springs is the only place in the country that makes one long to have an attack of rheumatism so as to have a good excuse for going back there. And heartier, friendlier Moose than the Hot Springcters do not exist on the face of the earth. In this part of the country, the Moose are strong in the large cities. They need now to address themselves to the task of building themselves up in the numerous small and prosperous cities.
No part of the United States has in late years had a more permanent growth than the four great southwestern states of Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, states which are going through the same process of rapid growth and increasing wealth that the similar northwestern experienced twenty years earlier. The Moose have deep roots in all these states end you find leaders in the cities and states among the’r members and officers.
It is a great mistake to think of Oklahoma and Texas as oil states. The oil gushes out in a particular district and—though the sellers of oil stock are not aware of it—ebbs away again, to rise in a new district. The corn and wheat and cotton and fruit and oats and buckwhe״t and garden truck come every year and leave a deposit of wealth over the whole country.
In these states are to he found some strong lodges of the Moose, particularly at Tulsa, Dallas, El Paso, Douglas, Blsbee, Tucson and Phoenix. Bisbee has a model lodge—a hard-headed, thrifty lot who possess a large local fund and are intensely interested in the work of the Order. Down there you get among the mines, and there are several strong lodges composed chiefly of miners.
Two new comers to Arizona have united to make the central part of that state a garden of wealth.
Sixty lodges! That is a small number out of the sixteen hundred that combine to make Moosedom. Sixty lodges is only a beginning. When you have visited sixty lodges you are just
ge.tting into the habit which seizes on each r.ew head of the Order, and sends him flying over the country. However, it is not necessary to eat sixteen hundred meals in order to find out how many kinds of dinners can be cooked, or to bite every one of sixteen hundred apples in order to make sure that the tree is in good bearing. Have you ever seen them casting steel in one of the great Bessemer or open-hearth plants, and taking out every “blow” a little crucible of molten metal which is a sample of the whole bilin’? When you have gone through sixty lodges in nearly forty states, you know something about all the lodges that ever were or ever will be.
Rounding Up
A long string is necessary to connect even sixty lodges which shall be so widely distributed, in so many different kinds of. communities, that they will make up a fair set of examples of the lodge qualities of the Loyal Order of Moose. It is near twenty thousand miles from Boston to Florida and Louisiana and North Carolina and Oklahoma and Missouri and Texas and California and Hawaii and Oregon and Washington and the Rocky Mountain states and Minnesota and Manitoba—gradually closing in on MOOSEHEART.
Drummers otnerwise (.׳־commercial tourists”), laugh at such little journeys; but commercial tourists have not the sense of going to new places, seeing new people, shaking up new lodges. To the Moose traveler, the best town is always the one that shows the best spirit and go and life and energy. . Those are in general the towns in which the Moose most flourish, because they are a do-something people.
Of course no sensible Moose insists that Mooseless places are dull and declining places. Only a few years ago every city and town in the United States was Mooseless. Yet not a lodge in the Union has reached its maximum in the place where it is established. The list of sixty lodges leaves out a great number of lively go-ahead people. It includes some towns where the Order has lost ground. Once in a while the line of march passes over a shell hole where once there was a lodge.
Moose lodges are like crange groves which multiply their golden fruit, but some of them are in a frost belt and along comes a bad winter and gives them a wilting. The only lodges that never change their number of members are the dead and gone lodges. A MOOSEHEART Governor off on a tour of exploration, can however, see enough lodges and lodge members and learn enough about the condition of the places and the states to find out how far the Moose are a go-ahead, wideawake lot who help to make the communities in which they live, better and brighter.
The South
New England and the Middle States are the great field of the Moose Order because of their numerous large and small cities. Everybody knows that the Philadelphia Lodge is the biggest and cockiest in the Order, and can he depended to do something-unexpected every fifteen minutes. Most northern and western people know much less about the southern Atlantic and Gulf States in which the Order has of late years made much progress.
Out of the many Southern lodges, the most outstanding are the string on the great routes of travel from north to south, especially Norfolk, Richmond, Jacksonville, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, Montgomery, Atlanta, Spartanburg, Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Asheville.
The first thing that strikes the traveler down in that part of the world is the prosperity of the region. This is due primarily to the high price of cotton for the past two years, but still more to the enterprise and p־ab!ic spirit cf the southern people, who are investing their profits in the up-building of the whole country-side.
They have put large sums into improved transportation; new railroad stations, such as that at Jacksonville; new hard roads which bind the country together and raise the price of land; new country buildings ,as for instance, the city hall at Memphis; new private residences, as in the suburbs of Atlanta; new college buildings, like that of the girls’ college near Montgomery. They have built