In Book IX of Homer’s ODYSSEY the hero and his men visited the land of the drug-dazzled lotus eaters and then the island of the Cyclops. Those one-eyed giants inhabited a land which produced food with virtually no input from the unsociable giants themselves. Incomprehensible to the Greeks was how violent and lawless the Cyclops were. An adult male lived alone and shunned all other social contact. His haunts were high mountains and hollow caves and no Cyclops cared for his neighbor. 

Greeks were not like that. They believed that people needed to live in groups in order to become real people. And so believe most of us today.

Into some groups we are born, such as our nation or our family. We do not exercise free choice when first we join such groups. They are not purely “voluntary associations.”  But even when our wider world is largely something we do not choose, we nonetheless do enjoy some  wiggle room. Thus, an American citizen is free to vote or not to vote, to be a Republican or a Libertarian.  A member of the National Education Association is not compelled to join NEA Asheville branch’s bowling team.  And so on.

Private voluntary associations (PVAs) are formed in order to achieve certain goals. Sometimes a PVA’s initial goals become fully achieved and the organization’s reason to exist is therefore no more. That happened when the March of Dimes organization saw infantile paralysis eliminated in the United States. When an organization achieves a defining goal, it can either dissolve itself or change its aim: e.g., drop the original goal or broaden it. The March of Dimes stayed in business with a broader goal. It now tackles childhood diseases across the board. What do they do with their original names?

Normally, PVAs hang on fiercely to their founder’s goals while from time to time adding fresh aims. Core, defining characteristics do not often change except under extreme outside pressure. Oddly enough, however, no matter how much an organization itself changes, its members are loath to change its name. The ethical question then arises: does honesty require  a radically different body to change its original name? If an organization turns itself inside out and upside down, should it not also give up its original name? How often today do Americans speak, for instance, of “colored people?” But the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People” (NAACP) proudly retains its name. This is also true of organizations for “Negro Women” and “Traditionally Negro Colleges.” Except when embedded in the names of the organizations, many such group-denominating words are no longer in common usage.

Take service clubs as examples of unchanged names masking radical  transformations.

All 12 service club types were founded in the United States between 1905 and 1921. They closely resembled one another. They were created by  founders who simply added new goals to an earlier kind of businessmen’s group called “the booster club.” Dating from the 1890s, booster clubs in Chicago, Detroit and elsewhere congenially brought together every week men active in different businesses in order to do business more intensively with one another.  What was unique about the way business was done in booster clubs was their non-competitive friendliness.  Members did business with one another in a relaxed social setting at lunch or dinner meetings. Membership was also “classified.” That is, the club admitted only one banker to offer another member his business. Only one tailor. Only one lawyer. For hard earned experience had suggested that if a member had to choose between two or more competing bankers, the losing purveyor would not remain as friendly as he ought to be. Hold that thought: in their essence, service clubs began as booster clubs with additional goals. They were created primarily to facilitate business deals among members.

The first service club type, Rotary, began in Chicago in 1905.  It was described this way by one of its four founding members, Sylvester Schiele a coal  merchant: 

“...it’s going to be a sort of booster organization, and yet we are not going to call ourselves boosters, but the idea is that each one of us is going to have some thought for the welfare of the other fellow.” 

And another founder, merchant tailor Hiram Shorey, expressed the  essence of the Rotary Club of Chicago  this way: “Their idea of my making a lot of new friends who presumably would be working overtime to get people to come and have their clothes made at my place struck me as a pretty good proposition.” 

What made Rotary a new and different kind of booster club was the intention of its founder, lawyer Paul Harris, 

(1) that a new form of friendship and camaraderie should develop from these business transactions and 

(2) that members should try to help one another out in more personal matters as well.

In 1907 the Rotary Club of Chicago added external service as a third new goal. Later service club types began with the same three elements: booster club plus personal concern for other members plus service to non-members. But by the 1930s Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis and other service clubs were repudiating their booster origins at flank speed. Nowadays all service clubs frown on or forbid members’ doing business with members during club meetings. 

Why did they drop doing business with one another--their original core purpose? It was because of unceasing public charges of hypocrisy 
(“you cannot within one organization ethically or with logical consistency combine self-seeking business deals with selfless service to others,”  the argument went). So said widely read writers: H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw.

All service clubs reluctantly repudiated their booster essence:  to urge  members to do business with other members. The change from booster to non-booster club was so transforming that, to avoid deception, some observers suggest that all service clubs should also have changed their names. They have not. Nor have other groups changed names after similar convulsive changes.

Organizations change profoundly. Their names rarely do.  Kiwanians and the U.S. Marines might conceivably begin living like Homer’s isolationist Cyclops. But they would not change their names.

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for Asheville TRIBUNE