Darius Wilson, Confidence Schemes, and American Fraternalism 1869-1926
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many scholars, including Mark Carnes and Mary Ann Clawson, have noted that the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the ‘golden age of fraternity’ in the United States. These years, during which America transformed from a rural society with an economy based in agriculture to an urban nation funded by industrial manufacturing, were also a time of frauds, hucksters, and charlatans who exploited the country’s rapid changes as opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This paper examines the career of Darius Wilson, who founded the Royal Arcanum, assumed the title of ‘Grand Master of the Venerable Symbolic Grand Lodge Ancient Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry for the United States of America’, and claimed to have developed a cure for deafness. Between 1875 and 1915, Wilson was both hailed for providing insurance to poverty-stricken immigrants and decried as a fraud who foisted worthless fraternal, medical and financial certificates upon a credulous public. A resident of Boston, Massachusetts, Wilson was a member or Rochester, New York’s Yonnondio Lodge No. 163, F. & A.M., before he was expelled. Subsequently he was repeatedly arrested and tried for improperly selling masonic degrees. Wilson provides a case study for the exploration of issues of authority, legitimacy, and confidence within the American industrializing economy, and will provide new perspectives for understanding fraternalism at the birth of the twentieth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".