Mr President:

Let’s discuss four slices of American history bearing on businessmen, their clubs, service to non-members and what critics found to dislike:

--(A) Creation in 1905 of the first service club and their evolution to 1945;

  --(B) Criticism in the 1920s and 30s of businessmen and their service clubs;

--(C) Service club founder Paul Harris’s positive memories of Wallingford, Vermont, inspiring his upbeat vision of service;

--(D) Critic Sinclair Lewis’s negative memories of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, shaping his image of businessmen’s service clubs as instruments of mediocrity and conformity.


When you hear “service clubs,” which ones come to mind? Probably the three largest: ROTARY (founded 1905),  KIWANIS (1915) or LIONS (1917).

There are nine other service club types, all much like ROTARY, founded in the USA between 1911 and 1921. Four of these were initially for men only, five for women.

The four smaller groups historically for men are

EXCHANGE, founded in 1911, SERTOMA (“SERvice TO  MAnkind”) (1912), OPTIMIST (1919) and CIVITAN (1920).

The five service clubs historically for women are

ALTRUSA (1917), QUOTA (1919), ZONTA (1919), SOROPTIMIST (1921), and PILOT (1921).

Today roughly 3 1/4 million adults worldwide belong to service clubs. [1]

In 1905 lawyer Paul Percy Harris and three businessmen clients began building the Rotary Club of Chicago. For two years their club grew rapidly, held biweekly meetings, dined, sang songs, heard members read papers about their businesses or professions and, above all, scratched one anothers’ commercial backs by trading member with member.

Predecessor clubs called “Boosters” had existed in the Midwest since the1890s. In a boosters club a member represented his firm’s “classification” and only one member might be in banking, lawyering,  curtain manufacturing or coal retailing. In boosters clubs members were powerfully encouraged to do business with one another. Classification dampened competition and promoted friendship.

Chicago Rotary had one officer called “statistician” who recorded which Rotarian did business with which. Rotary was non-political and non-religious. Its members owned, headed or were senior partners or executives of their establishments. University-educated professional men like Harris were in the minority in service clubs but disproportionately articulated goals and procedures. [2]

Even in 1905 - 1906 the Rotary Club emphasized non-booster characteristics. According to founder Paul Harris, the meetings of Chicago Rotary, compared to previous booster clubs,

    were far more intimate; far more friendly. All hampering and                             meaningless restraint was thrown off; dignified reserve was checked at the         door; the members were boys again. ... I preached the doctrine of carefree         friendship. ... I was freest of the free, gayest of the gay, my voice ... led in         song and laughter.  [3]

In booster clubs members made money through trading and networking. Chicago Rotarians were more idealistic.They also noticed one another as human beings, not just as sources of revenue. Rotarians wanted friends and offered personal support. Through 1906 they also learned about, admired and “boosted” one another’s broader work in trades and professions. Rotarians cared personally for “the welfare of the other fellow.” [4]   Paul Harris later argued that all this attention to members was service. But it was purely “internal” service.

In 1907 Harris crossed the Rubicon of Service. He persuaded 100 Rotarians to add a new goal: to reach beyond their club and join hands with strangers to lead a coalition providing the first public toilets in Chicago’s Loop business district. Henceforth, Rotarians and all service clubs never looked back.

A second seismic change followed fast. In 1910 The National Association of Rotary Clubs was created. At its Second National Convention in 1911  boosterism (mutual back scratching through trading) was removed as a constituent element of all 16 Rotary clubs. No longer did Rotary virtually coerce members to do business with one another. [5]

Thus by 1911 Rotary had reshaped the essence of service clubs (no more mandatory back scratching, but friendship and external service) just when the second and third types (Exchange and Sertoma) were being launched. Only six years after creation in one extra-friendly, inward looking booster club, service clubs no longer boosted. Conceptually and legally, Rotary and Service had reformed themselves away from self-seeking.

By 1921 all 12 types of service clubs for business and professional men and women were in place. The movement had grown strongly before the Great War and explosively afterwards in North and South America, Europe and the Far East. By 1945 Lions, Rotary and Kiwanis were formal consultants to the U.S. Delegation at the San Francisco Conference which wrote the United Nations Charter. And other Rotarians from several nations played leading roles at San Francisco.
___________


Let’s move into our second and longest topic: criticism by outsiders of business, service and businessmen’s service clubs. What irritated renowned writers about Kiwanis and its kindred?

At first, critics charged that service club members pretended to be altruistic helpers of the needy, while, In fact, they did service to distract the public from resenting their greedy pursuit of capitalistic profits.

Later, critics accepted businessmen volunteering in their off hours to help wider communities. What offended were the rowdy contents of service club meetings. Critics questioned not service club ideals but service club behavior. That included silly stunts and pranks, occasionally superficial programs and hyperbolic language by which the service clubs praised themselves to the public.

From 1905 to 1922 service clubs grew without making deadly enemies.  Clubs grew accustomed to being noticed and admired. 

Then came BABBITT, Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel. Lewis and other severe critics scourged service club practices and manners objectively open to satire. In 1905 Harris had carved a debatable personal signature deep into Rotary. For he demanded that meetings have an atmosphere of light-heartedness and frivolity. Insistence led to excesses: sometimes oafish behavior, ungainly and exaggerated bragging about club contributions to society, and inflated claims of spirituality, nobility and idealism. [6]

For these excesses, both vanishing boosters clubs and surging service clubs were skewered throughout the 1920s and 1930s by  H.L. Mencken (who simply quoted their talks and bulletins verbatim). Other snipers included Dorothy Parker, G.K. Chesterton, Clarence Darrow and George Bernard Shaw. But the biggest Big Bertha artillery pieces were fired between 1922 and 1935 by Sinclair Lewis in four novels: BABBITT, ELMER GANTRY, THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE and IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE.

BABBITT (1922)

Realtor George F. Babbitt was a leading member of a Boosters Club in the fictiitious midwestern city of Zenith.

In 1920 Babbitt was a modestly successful husband, father, realtor, Elk and Booster. A year later, seeking personal freedom, Babbitt fell apart, chased women, drank too much and showed sympathy for labor unions. Friends in the Presbyterian Church, the Boosters Club and other conformist groups demanded that he return to being the good old predictable Georgie.Or else watch his business fading to nothing. Babbitt saw the light and was welcomed back to normalcy as businessman, Republican and Booster.

Babbitt pursued real estate strictly to make money. But at Boosters Club meetings and other “orgies of commercial righteousness“ he would

    speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service  ... and a thing called                  Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a                         High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster.” (33)  [He                 argued that] ‘a real thinker, he sees that spiritual and, uh  dominating             movements like efficiency, and Rotarianism and  Prohibition, and Democracy     are what compose our deepest and truest wealth.’ (65)

    (A) decent man in Zenith ... should belong to one, preferably two or three, of     the inumerous 'lodges' and prosperity-boosting lunch clubs; to the Rotarians,     the Kiwanis, or the Boosters; ...

    It was the thing to do.
    It was good for business, since lodge-brothers frequently became                      customers. (155)

Sinclair Lewis presented business leaders as cynical, self-absorbed and hypocritical. They wasted no time on reading or the arts. Since many in the second and third echelons of American business expressed themselves through Rotary, then Rotarians were fair game for satire. After 1922 many Americans thought of all service clubs as populated by Babbitts.



A hypocritcal, selfish,swinish rat of an evangelical preacher. Reverend Elmer Gantry rose to become a Rotarian.

In 1920s Zenith, Sinclair Lewis wrote that

   "The Rotary Club was an assemblage of accountants, tailors, osteopaths, university-presidents, carpet-manufacturers, advertising men, millinery-dealers, ice-dealers, piano salesmen, laundrymen, and like leaders of public thought, who met weekly for the purposes of lunching together, listening to addresses by visiting actors and by lobbyists against the recognition of Russia, beholding vaudeville teams in eccentric dances, and indulging in passionate rhapsodies about Service and Business Ethics. They asserted that their one desire in their several callings was not to make money but only to serve and benefit a thing called the Public. They were as earnest about this as was the Reverend Elmer Gantry."

"He [Rev. Elmer Gantry] was extraordinarily at home among the Rotarians; ... and in making short speeches to the effect that

            'Jesus Christ would be a Rotarian if he lived today -- Lincoln would be a today -- William McKinley would be a Rotarian today. All these men preached the principles of Rotary: one for all and all for one; helpfulness towards one's community, and respect for God.'" (359f)



THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE (business supplies wholesaler Lowell T. Schmaltz) belonged to Kiwanis. The novel is in the form of six monologs by Kiwanian Schmalz in a variety of settings. Here are some sentiments of Lowell T. Schmalz.

    “'(I am an) office-supply man! Yes sir, I'm proud of my profession, and as a matter of fact I have the honor of representing the office-supply category in our great Zenith Kiwanis Club!  Just take filing-cabinets alone!' (27f)

      '... what organizations are doing a greater good and providing more real happiness today than the service clubs, all of 'em, though I myself am a Kiwanian and I can't help feeling that maybe our own organization has got the edge on the other fellows -- we aren't as  darned snobbish as these Rotarians, and yet we aren't, you might say, as common as the Civitans and Lions and -- Yes sir! (88)

        'Why say, just this past year our Zenith Kiwanians gave the kids at an orphan asylum a dandy auto ride and free feed. And believe me: it was one fine ad for the Kiwanians because we took the kids out in trucks, and every truck had on it a great big red sign, 'Free Outing     for the Unfortunate Kiddies, provided Free by Zenith Kiwanis Club.’' (89)

Schmaltz spoke up for business in a great oration "The Basic and Fundamental Ideals of Christian American Citizenship" as follows.

     "'Mr. Chairman, reverend sirs, and friends and brothers of the Men's Club of the Pilgrim Congregational Church:

       '... there are two principles almost entirely developed by and peculiar to America of today, and these are Service and Practicalness!

        'Service is ... the poetry, the swell manners, the high adventure of business. ... you can do more than just sell the customer the goods he wants ... you can, in fact, tie him to you by that subtle form of  friendliness known as Service, so that, without its really costing you         much of anything, you can make him  feel that he's getting double value for his money.

     'That's Service -- and, like Virtue, it brings its reward. ... The grocery customer will often prefer a second-rate apple in a handsome wrapper to a first-rate one carelessly bundled in plain tissue paper.  ... That's Service!'

        'And remember that only a low and sordid commercialist would look on it as something which merely sells more goods -- though it certainly does that, too. But over and above that, it promotes friendliness, good fellowship, brotherhood, and thus makes for the millennial day when all the world shall be one happy Christian fellowship.

    'Rotarians and Kiwanians' have insisted on 'the religion of Service.' (251 - 262)




In 1935’s futuristic novel, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, Sinclair Lewis imagined a rapid, almost painless 1937 Fascist takeover of America.The revolution was made possible by Rotarian supporters and sympathizers. But the anti-fascist resistance was also fueled by Rotarians, led by newspaper editor Doremus Jessup

Chapter One is about a May 1936 Rotary Club evening meeting in the Hotel Wessex. The Fort Beulah, Vermont Rotary Club is holding its annual Ladies' Night Dinner.

    "The tables, arranged on three sides of a hollow square were bright with candles,                 cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurines of Mickey Mouse, brass         Rotary wheels and small silk American flags stuck in gilded hard-boiled eggs. On the wall     was a banner 'Service Before Self' ... (16)

A Delphic utterance by editor Jessup during the 1936 Presidential campaign is "This is revolution in terms of Rotary."  (83).

Later the fascists demonstrated the accuracy of Jessup's prediction, "This is revolution in terms of Rotary" by selecting "a ship's steering wheel"  to be the new symbol of the American Minute Men = Storm Troopers. This symbol seemed wondrously apt as suggesting "the Ship of State ... the wheels of American industry ... and particularly the wheel emblem of the Rotary Club."  (142).

Fascist anti-semitism reached even conservative hitherto Republican Fort Beulah, Vermont. Jewish maple sugar and dairy machinery agent, Harry Kindermann, was frozen out of contracts. Jessup's former yardman, Shad Ledue, now a fascist Gauleiter, had always called Kindermann "a fresh Kike." Proof: "He had laughed at the flag, the Church and even Rotary." (146).





Those passages just read from Sinclair Lewis give a taste of what critics were saying in the 1920s and 1930s.

We have glanced at  Paul Harris’s creation, service clubs, from 1905 until 1945. We have also seen them under fire between 1922 and 1935 in  novels by Sinclair Lewis. If Harris was the architect of service clubs, then Lewis was their building inspector.

Soroptimists and the other service clubs inspired passsionate enthusiasm. Attacks by Lewis, Mencken, Chesterton and others both displayed and generated anger. Whence those emotions? Was there something subconscious behind both the businesmen’s service and the critics’ satire? What lurked behind club constitutions and by-laws, behind convivial meals, speakers heard, projects undertaken?

Arguably, the emotion came from the childhood and youth of Paul Harris and Sinclair Lewis. Their imaginations reworked memories of the two  villages where they grew up. Harris romanticized Wallingford and upon Wallingford erected Rotary. Lewis brooded over spirit-quenching, leveling, conformist Sauk Centre,. He then displayed those negatives in the “Gopher Prairie” of his 1920 novel, MAIN STREET.

From those two clashing  “village visions,” I suggest, came both the forming and the reforming, the masking and unmasking of service clubs. Harris’s thesis was the village as pre-original-sin Eden. Lewis’s anti-thesis was the village as uncreative, conformist hell. Sinclair Lewis sensed that service clubs were dreadful small towns written even smaller. And from that clash of hot iron and cold water were forged the purified, reformed service clubs of our 21st Century.




Paul Harris was born in Racine, Wisconsin in 1868. His father could not hold a job. So in 1871, when Paul was three, he and his older brother were sent to grow up with his father’s parents in Wallingford, Vermont. The home was orderly and warmed by Christian ideals.The village of 1,000 was wonderful.

After university, Harris deliberately divided five years between odd jobs and roaming the world.  At age 28 in 1896 he settled into a private law partnership in Chicago. He sampled religions, joined clubs, made acquaintances but few friends. He was lonely. 

One day in 1900 he strolled with lawyer friend Bob Frank around suburban Rogers Park. Bob and his neighbors called one another by first names. They smiled. Staff In the shops were helpful and courteous, unlike in frosty Chicago. Here business was done in a friendly, mutually helpful way.

Suddenly this reminded Harris of something dear: Wallingford, Vermont!

The contrast was overwhelming. Wallingford was friendly, peaceful, cooperative. Chicago was cutthroat, amoral, hyper-competititve. In Wallingford no one lacked for friends. In Chicago the way business was done made friendships unlikely. Small wonder that Paul Harris named his 1948 autobiography: MY ROAD TO ROTARY: THE STORY OF A BOY, A VERMONT COMMUNITY, AND ROTARY. [8]



Harry Sinclair Lewis was born In 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota,17 years after Paul Harris. Orphaned at six, he loved his new stepmother and by her was introduced to Minnesota’s literary and civic clubs for women. After his 1906 degree at Yale, Lewis rarely returned to Sauk Centre. Growing up, he had been an ungainly misfit, unpopular loner, a reader and dreamer He was depressed by his town’s culture barrenness, absence of intellect and visual ugliness. In his 1920 novel MAIN STREET, Lewis re-created in “Gopher Prairie” soul-stifling aspects of his village as they appeared to his heroine, Carol Kennicott. In 1930 Sinclair Lewis  became America’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. [9]

A socialist, Sinclair Lewis, despised the cutthroat, competitive aspects of American big business capitalism, which he saw shoving aside the earlier nimble individualism of the Minnesota frontier. He hated business and he saw service clubs as the hypocritical voice of business.



Service clubs in the 21st Century are that 19th Century Vermont village which Paul Harris reconstructed in Chicago. Service clubs are also Sinclair Lewis’s Minnesota town purfied of viruses. Service clubs improved  both from within but also after attacks from without.

Over time, emotions cooled, breaches narrowed. Lewis, Chesterton and others were invited to write for the ROTARIAN and other service club journals and were increasingly in demand as speakers. Paul Harris said that Rotary was better for the attacks of Lewis and others. And when Lewis died a lonely death in Rome in 1951, the Rotarian editorialized that Rotary had lost a friend. [10]

Now it is time for our discussion.

11/26/2005





--Owen ARNOLD. THE GOLDEN STRAND: AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF THE ROTARY CLUB OF CHICAGO. Chicago. Quadrangle Books. 1966.

--Louis BROWNLOW, et al. ROTARY?: A UNIVERSITY GROUP LOOKS AT THE ROTARY CLUB OF CHICAGO. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1934.

--Jeffrey A. CHARLES. SERVICE CLUBS IN AMERICAN SOCIETY: ROTARY, KIWANIS, AND LIONS. Urbana. University of Illinois Press. 1993.

-- David C. FORWARD. A CENTURY OF SERVICE: THE STORY OF ROTARY INTERNATIONAL. Evanston. Rotary International. 2003,

--Paul P. HARRIS. MY ROAD TO ROTARY: THE STORY OF A BOY, A VERMONT COMMUNITY, AND ROTARY. Chicago. A. Kroch and Son. 1948.

--Basil LEWIS.  PAUL HARRIS IN BRITAIN. Hessle, East Yorkshire, England. 2003.

--Jo NUGENT et. al.  PAUL HARRIS AND HIS SUCCESSORS: PROFILES IN LEADERSHIP. Evanston. Rotary International. 1997.

--James P. WALSH. THE FIRST ROTARIAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PAUL PERCY HARRIS, FOUNDER OF ROTARY. Shoreham by Sea, West Sussex, England 1979.




--Frederick Lewis ALLEN.  ONLY YESTERDAY: AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF THE 1920’S.  New York. Harper & Row. 1931.  HarperCollins Perennial Classics. 2000.

--Anthony Channell HILFER.  THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE 1915 - 1930. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 1969.

----Sinclair LEWIS.  BABBITT. New York. Harcourt, Brace. 1922. Quotations are from Mineola, NY, Dover Thrift Edition (paper), 2003.

--Sinclair LEWIS.  ELMER GANTRY. New York. Harcourt, Brace. 1927.

--Sinclair LEWIS.  IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE.  1935. Quotations are from 1993 Signet Classic Edition (paper). New York. Penguin.

--Sinclair LEWIS.  THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen. New York. Harcourt, Brace. 1928.

--Sinclair LEWIS.  MAIN STREET. New York. Harcourt, Brace. 1920. Quotations are from Mineola, NY, Dover Thrift edition (paper), 1999.

--Sinclair Lewis. THE MAN FROM MAIN STREET: A SINCLAIR LEWIS READER: SELECTED ESSAYS AND OTHER WRITINGS 1904 - 1950. New York. Random House. 1953. Giant Cardinal edition, 1963.

--Richard R. LINGEMAN.  SINCLAIR LEWIS: REBEL FROM MAIN STREET. New York. Random House. 2002.

--Marion Elizabeth RODGERS. MENCKEN: THE AMERICAN ICONOCLAST. New York. Oxford University Press. 2005.

--Mark SCHORER.  SINCLAIR LEWIS: AN AMERICAN LIFE. New York. McGraw-Hill. 1961


*****************************************************************




[1]  The 12 Service Club Types. Statistics on membership are taken from the latest found on the club web pages (November 17, 2005). For details see APPENDIX.

Totals: Big Three......2,830,000
Four Smaller Men’s...   240,000
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
    subtotal            3,070,000

Five Women’s clubs      162,672

Grand Total:               3,232,672
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-  [11/17/2005 TPK]

These and other club spin-offs of Rotary are treated in WALSH [1979], Ch. 19, 130 - 135.

[2] For Rotary as Boosters Club: Brownlow et al. [1934], 3 - 4 and Walsh [1979] 81. Boosters Clubs were a small part of a broader concept of “boosterism,” often associated with promoting one’s town as a magnet for outside direct investment. For this see Charles [1993], 58 - 63 and elsewhere. For the ethically dubious aspects of early Rotary as a booster club, see Arnold [1966] 27 - 30. For the disproportionate influence in service clubs of nationally oriented professionals, especially lawyers, see Charles [1993] 41, 50, 97. For the transplanting of the first Exchange Club in 1911 from the earlier Detroit Boosters’ Club see the web site http://www.nationalexchangeclub.com/discover/history.htm

[3] On levity at Rotary meetings see Harris [1948] 232, 237, 231.

[4]  Harris [1948] 233 argues that early Rotary was an "internal" service club.

(5) On the flight from trading with members: Charles [1993], 172, n. 18]. Arnold [1966] , 25f.

(6)  From a third and not initially controversial element of the clubs, congenial sociability, grew certain bizarre and outlanding behaviors which Lewis, Mencken and others found crude, common and offensive. From the very beginning Parul Harris deliberately injected a hefty dollop of radical silliness into club meetings and their entertaining (as well as informative) weekly or biweekly programs. That silliness lingered for decades in American Rotary and other service clubs. But never were the stunts, gags and tricks so vital to more staid and proper service clubs in England or Germany.  Is it possible to imagine the Nobel Prize winning novelist Thomas Mann being inducted into a German Rotary Club wearing diapers? Or a high-ranking British counter-intelligence officer entering a London Rotary cub in handcuffs?) See Brownlow et al. [1934] 51f; Charles [1993] 90 -92.

[7]  Two visions of the American village warred for decades, and not just between Paul Harris and Sinclair Lewis. For a masterly review of the facts and the stakes, see Anthony C. Hilfer, THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE 1915 - 1930 [1969]. Sinclair Lewis is treated extensively: 3, 29, 31, 32, 36 - 37, 74, 132, 158-179, 189-192, 194, 200, 202, 213, 221, 222, 224-30, 238 -239, 246 - 253 passim. Paul Harris is not mentioned.

[8] For Paul Harris in general see James P. Walsh's biography, THE FIRST ROTARIAN; THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PAUL PERCY HARRIS, FOUNDER OF ROTARY [1979]. Also Harris's three autobiographies, especially MY ROAD TO ROTARY: THE STORY OF A BOY, A VERMONT COMMUNITY AND ROTARY [1948].  Brownlow et. al [1934] show earliest Rotary as dedicated to friendship and profits. Jeffrey Charles, SERVICE CLUBS IN AMERICAN SOCIETY: ROTARY, KIWANIS, AND LIONS (1993) is masterly in relating Paul Harris and service clubs to larger trends and tensions in American society.

[9] It is true that Sinclair Lewis, from time to time, said kind things about Sauk Centre, Minnesota. But it is the minutely documented thesis of his principal biographer, Mark Schorer [1961] that Lewis grew up miserable there. Lewis's attention to Rotary is noted by Brownlow et al. [1934], Arnold [1966], and especially biographer Schorer [1961] 401, 409, 434, 522 and 807.

[10] Something like peace was slowly made between the service clubs and their most effective critics. For the 1934 surprise visit by THE ROTARIAN E Leland Case to Sinclair Lewis in Vermont, see  Forward [2003] 110f,  concluding, "Eventually, Case persuaded Lewis, Darrow, Mencken, and Shaw to write for THE ROTARIAN, and no one ever heard a sarcastic remark about Rotary from any of them again."  After he died in 1951, Sinclair Lewis was "eulogized in THE ROTARIAN as, really, one of themselves who had made Rotary better." (Schorer [1961]  807.

11/26/2005


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=



Statistics on total adult membership of  The 12 Service Club Types. are taken from the latest found on the club web pages (November 17, 2005).  They are presented alphabetically below in the following clusters:



--ROTARY (founded 1905),  http://www.rotary.org/  "Approximately 1.2 million Rotarians belong to more than 31,000 Rotary clubs located in 167  countries."

--KIWANIS (1915) ... http://www.kiwanis.org/  "There are more than 8,400 Kiwanis clubs with nearly 280,000 members in 96 nations and geographic areas."

--LIONS (1917)  ... http://www.lionsclubs.org/  "Nearly 1.35 million Lions members in 194 countries and geographic areas."




--EXCHANGE, (1911)  ... http://www.nationalexchangeclub.com/
"Exchange is made up of nearly 1,000 clubs with more than 30,000 members across the United States and Puerto Rico."

--SERTOMA ("SERvice TO  MAnkind) (1912) ... http://www.sertoma.org/ "20,000-plus members in more than 650 clubs"

--OPTIMIST (1919) ...  http://www.optimist.org/  "There are 105,000 individual Members who belong to more than 3,200 autonomous Clubs."

--CIVITAN (1920) ....  http://www.civitaninternational.com/  "Civitan has grown to over 40,000 members in 24 countries, including youth and college programs."




--ALTRUSA (1917) ... http://www.altrusa.com/  402 clubs.  10,672 members.

--QUOTA (1919) ... http://www.quota.org/   "Quota International is a global organization with service clubs in 14 countries."  7,000+ members.

--ZONTA (1919) ... http://www.zonta.org/  "Currently, Zonta has 33,000 members in more than 1,250 Zonta Clubs in 67 countries and geographic areas."

--SOROPTIMIST (1921) ...  http://www.soroptimist.org/. ca.100,000 members In 120+ countries. For women only.

--PILOT (1921)  ...  http://www.pilotinternational.org/  500+ clubs. 12,000+ adult members.

Totals: Big Three......2,830,000
Four Smaller Men's...   240,000
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
    subtotal            3,070,000

Five Women's clubs      162,672

Grand Total:               3,232,672
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-  [11/17/2005 TPK]

These and other spin-offs of Rotary are treated in WALSH [1979], Ch. 19,  pp. 130 - 135.

TPK 11/26/2005

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