The Elks Magazine
The Elks Magazine is the official membership publication of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the United States of America, published ten times a year for the members of one of America's oldest fraternal organisations. First issued in June 1922, it has linked the Order's national leadership with hundreds of thousands of members in nearly 2,000 local lodges for more than a century. Its editorial office is at 425 West Diversey Parkway in Chicago, Illinois, in the headquarters crowned by the Elks National Veterans Memorial. Each issue mixes news of the lodges and the Order's charitable work — veterans' service, youth programmes, scholarships, and drug awareness — with general-interest features on history, health, travel, nature, and American life.
The Order Behind the Magazine: Founded in 1868
The magazine's story begins with the Order itself. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was established in New York City on February 16, 1868, by the English-born actor Charles Algernon Sidney Vivian and a circle of theatrical entertainers who had gathered informally as the Jolly Corks. The death of a fellow performer, leaving his family destitute, convinced the group that fellowship needed a more enduring, benevolent form. The new Order took the elk — a large, strong, graceful native American animal — as its emblem, and built itself on four cardinal principles: Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love, and Fidelity. Membership, by invitation and open to American citizens over 21 who affirm a belief in God, spread rapidly beyond the theatre; by 1890 there were 173 lodges across the United States, and Grand Lodge government was chartered from New York.
First Issue in June 1922
The Elks Magazine began in 1922, with its inaugural issue dated June of that year — more than half a century after the Order's founding, when a national membership publication became the practical way to hold a far-flung fraternity together. The cover of the first issue used a painting by Frank X. Leyendecker, an image the magazine proudly reprised a century later. Regional editions appear to have begun around 1950. The magazine is published under the direction of the Grand Lodge by the Elks National Memorial and Publication Commission. In June 2022 the magazine marked its centenary, entering its 101st volume, with the staff inviting members to celebrate the first hundred years of the magazine's service to the Order at the Grand Lodge Convention in Atlanta.
Published Ten Times a Year for All Members
The Elks Magazine is published ten times a year and goes to all members of the Order, in print or, at the member's choice, in an online edition. The online edition offers earlier availability, an archive of recent back issues, and bonus material such as crossword and sudoku puzzles and extra sidebars and multimedia links to feature articles; members who opt in to the digital edition discontinue their physical copy. A 2018 market listing described the magazine as published for some 1.2 million members; the Order as a whole reported more than 750,000 members as of June 2020. Either way, the magazine ranks among the larger membership publications in the United States, with a guaranteed audience that commercial magazines would envy: every Elk, in every lodge, receiving the same national journal.
Chicago: Diversey Parkway and the National Memorial
The magazine is edited from Chicago, at 425 West Diversey Parkway, the Order's headquarters address and the site of the Elks National Veterans Memorial, which commemorates members who served in the First World War. Submissions for fraternal news and general-interest articles are directed to that office. The Chicago base reflects the Order's national maturity: founded in New York, governed through its Grand Lodge, and administered from a monumental headquarters in the Midwest. In its early years the magazine was known for high production values, with sophisticated cover art by leading illustrators of the day — including, in a later issue, a cover by Norman Rockwell — a standard that made the young membership journal a showcase of American magazine illustration.
News of the Lodges: Elks Care, Elks Share
The magazine's signature department is its news of the lodges, the rolling chronicle of what local Elks are doing in their communities under the Order's enduring slogan, Elks Care — Elks Share. Lodge reports record scholarships presented, veterans honoured, food drives and blood drives held, Scout troops and youth teams sponsored, and families helped after fires and disasters. For the national organisation, these pages perform vital work: they make a federation of nearly 2,000 semi-autonomous lodges visible to itself, spread good ideas from lodge to lodge, and document the Order's claim that its members spend tens of millions of dollars and countless volunteer hours annually on benevolent, educational, and patriotic community programmes. The message from the Grand Exalted Ruler and reports of that officer's travels open each issue, tying the local reports to national leadership.
Veterans, Youth and the Order's Charitable Programmes
Much of the magazine's feature and departmental coverage follows the Order's established charitable commitments. The Elks National Veterans Service Commission, a regular presence in the magazine, organises Elks service to patients in veterans' hospitals and to veterans in need — a commitment rooted in the Order's wartime record, from bond drives and a Win the War Week in 1942 to recruiting support for the Army Air Corps. Youth programmes receive sustained attention: Elks National Foundation scholarships, among the most generous fraternal scholarship programmes in the country; the national Hoop Shoot free-throw contest, which has involved more than three million children; Scouting sponsorships and athletic teams; and the Elks Drug Awareness Program, which educates young people on the risks of drug use and honours law-enforcement officers combating trafficking. Health columns and foundation reports round out this service core.
General-Interest Features for Members
Alongside fraternal news, The Elks Magazine has always carried general-interest journalism for its broad membership. Its writers' guidelines invite completed articles of roughly 1,200 to 2,000 words on science, technology, nature, Americana, sports, history, health, retirement, personal finance, leisure-time activities, and seasonal topics — while excluding poetry and religious and political articles. Travel features, historical stories, and health guidance give members reading that serves them beyond lodge life, and in its earlier decades the magazine published short stories by prominent American authors as well. This blend — part association journal, part general magazine — explains the title's longevity: an Elk receives both the record of the Order and a respectable monthly read in a single publication.
An Archive of Fraternal America
The magazine's back run is a significant historical archive. The Elks website holds most issues from 1922 to 1986, and the Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania maintains a serial record of the title, noting its 1922 start, its regional editions, and its continuing publication. Historians value the run for what it preserves: a century of fraternal culture, patriotic observance including the Order's cherished Flag Day tradition, veterans' welfare work, and small-town civic life as reported by the lodges themselves. The famous Elks greeting Hello Bill!, coined at the national reunion in Minneapolis in 1897, the royal purple and white colours of the Order, and the anthem Auld Lang Syne all belong to the world the magazine documented and helped unify.
The Order the Magazine Serves Today
The contemporary Order that The Elks Magazine serves is a nonpolitical, nonsectarian, strictly American fraternity, in its own description, devoted to charity and patriotism in local communities. Its national foundation channels millions in scholarships and community grants; its lodges remain fixtures of small cities and towns, with halls that host everything from veterans' dinners to youth contests. The magazine mirrors that structure faithfully: national officers and commissions report, foundations account for their stewardship, and lodges share their news. Published ten times a year in print and online, it remains the connective tissue between a Grand Lodge in Chicago and members whose Elks experience is overwhelmingly local — the same function for which it was created in 1922.
The Elks Magazine Today
Today The Elks Magazine continues as the official publication of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, published ten times a year from Chicago, Illinois, and available to members in print and online at elks.org. More than a century after its first issue in June 1922, and more than 150 years after the Order's founding in New York in 1868, the magazine still chronicles lodge news, veterans' service, youth and scholarship programmes, and the general interests of its members. For historians it is an archive of American fraternal life; for Elks it is something simpler and more important — the regular proof, arriving ten times a year, that their local lodge belongs to a national brotherhood that cares and shares.
