Drive into many towns in America and you’ll see familiar sight: a gold and blue circular sign that says, “Rotary International.”
While I’ve seen these for years, I confess I don’t know much about Rotary International. I have a vague sense that Rotary’s local clubs have been a mainstay of local town life, a place where primarily white and older men involved with local business get together, do good things, and network. They are as American as white bread, and, in popular culture, as interesting as white bread Wonder Bread not artisanal baguettes made from organic, stone-ground white flour.
Not surprisingly, Rotary International clubs were one of the many organizations and entities that defined mid-20th century America, a position illustrated by today’s #stampoftheday, an 8-cent stamp, issued on February 23, 1955 to mark the 50th anniversary of Rotary International’s founding. As then-Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield said at a gala banquet the night the stamp was issued, Rotary International is a “dynamic advocate of the free way of life and of the ‘good partner’ relationship among the nations of the world. Thus it adds strength to the world struggle against communism.”
That’s a far cry from the organization started in Chicago on February 23, 1905 when Paul P. Harris, a business attorney, invited two business acquaintances to meet him in the office of Gustave Loehr, a mining engineer and freemason. The group, which took its name from the idea that their meetings would rotate among their offices, initially focused on fellowship and friendship, And while it grew so fast that it couldn’t just meet in members’ offices, Harris and other leaders soon realized they needed a greater purpose. In 1907, the club initiated its first public service project, the construction of public toilets in downtown Chicago (a measure that was also good for business).
Harris wanted his ideas to spread and encouraged the growth of similar clubs in other cities. In August 1910, representatives of the nation’s 16 Rotary Clubs held a national convention in Chicago. And within a few years, chapters also had been formed in Canada, Ireland, and England. The guiding principals were encompassed in the club’s motto of “service above self,” which is printed on the stamp. (The other well-known Rotary motto is “One profits most who serves best.”).
Rotary has done much good in the world. Most notably, Rotary International was a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which has reduced polio cases by 99.9 percent since the first Rotary project to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979. As the Rotary website notes that, “Rotary members have contributed more than $2.1 billion and countless volunteer hours to protect nearly 3 billion children in 122 countries…[and] Rotary’s advocacy efforts have played a role in decisions by governments to contribute more than $10 billion to the effort.”
However, as historian S. Jonathan Wiesen noted in a 2009 article: “Despite its humanitarian credentials, Rotary has some blemishes on its record, including a history of racial and religious bias. Fifteen years after its founding, German Jewish immigrants were being shut out of Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs in large cities such as Minneapolis. While the organization in principle did not discriminate on the basis of religion or ethnicity, it took a long time before Jews were accepted into some clubs. Likewise, during the 1920s and well beyond, Rotarians welcomed ‘colored’ foreigners to their events but avoided association with African-Americans.”
Moreover, in 1976, Wolfgang Wick, a respected Austrian industrialist, who had been tapped to be Rotary International’s next president, had to step aside when it emerged that he not only had been a member of the Nazi SS in World War II but also had supported the Nazi Party in Austria before the German takeover of the country in 1938.
The withdrawal came after weeks of intense debate. Critics, Wiesen noted, contended the nomination was a moral abomination that violated the organization’s cherished “Four-Way Test,”:
— Is it the truth?
— Is it fair to all concerned?
— Will it build good will and better friendships?
— Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
According to Wiesen, one protestor argued, that one would not dream of appointing a member of the Mafia to the Rotary International presidency, so why choose a man who had “served a regime that .. consciously crushed the dignity of human beings and killed millions of people.” Not surprisingly, Wiesen added, antisemitic tropes appeared in some of the more impassioned defenses. The mayor of Tyler, Texas, who was Rotary district governor, for example, argued: “Are we not an organization of forgiveness??…?Christ forgave the Jews for what they did to Him. I forgive the Jews for what they did to my Lord. Can we not forgive a man for mistakes he made in his youth?”
Other disputes have followed. In May 1982, the Rotary Club in Birmingham, Alabama, whose more than 300 members included some of the state’s most powerful men, voted 120-to-90 to retain a rule restricting membership to white men. (This was later reversed.) It took a US Supreme Court ruling in 1987 to get all Rotary Clubs to admit women. And homosexuals were accepted into Rotary’s ranks only after complaints about bias in the 1990s.
Rotary has also been targeted by Islamic fundamentalists, noted Jonathan Schwartz in a 2006 article on Slate. Even some Saudi high-school textbooks, said “Rotary [is] among the destructive organizations that were most dangerous to Islam and the Muslims,'” he wrote, adding. “for Americans, of course, this seems slightly comic, Rotary clubs? Aren’t they like the Elks, except less edgy?”
It turns out that many early Rotarians also were Freemasons, a group has long been the target of conspiracy theories, including “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a famed anti-Semitic tract that “isn’t about a Jewish plot to control mankind-it’s about a Jewish-Masonic plot.” Moreover, Schwartz noted, “Masons were involved in the European efforts to control the Middle East, efforts that helped spur anti-Western Islamist sentiment.”
The specific animus for Rotarians combined with a more general anti-Western sentiment meant in 2006 Rotary had “no outposts in much of the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq.”. But, it was “quietly thriving in parts of the Islamic world,” with over 100 chapters in Indonesia, more than 80 chapters in Turkey, and 70 in Egypt.
There, he added, Rotary, which like other similar organizations has been losing members “is perceived just as it is here. As one youthful Cairo blogger reports: ‘They seem nice enough, but kind of boring.'”
Be well, stay safe, be fair to all concerned, fight for justice, and work for peace.