By Lisa Hix — Once, when I visited my brother, who lives in a small Texas town, he took me down a winding road to a turn-of-the-20th-century cemetery in a forest clearing. There, we found three tall tombstones in the shape of tree trunks, each stamped with an insignia reading “Woodmen of the World.” What were these strange things? When I got home, I dug into the mystery of these stone stumps, discovering the profoundly insecure time before Americans had Social Security, when anxieties about death and...

Decoding Secret Societies: What Are All Those Old Boys' Clubs Hiding?

By Lisa Hix — Their members use secret handshakes and coded language. In temples, they don ancient regalia, helmets, or masks. Thanks to their veils of secrecy and archaic symbols like the All-Seeing Eye, outsiders find fraternal orders endlessly fascinating. But what does it all mean? "Some of these groups are simply the big-boy versions of the little boy clubs," he says. "As a little boy, I lived in a small town in Oklahoma. There, my friends and I started a club. We had the secret handshake, the...