Henry F. Bowers

[2] Making use of his political connections, Bowers was appointed as a special aide-de-camp to Iowa Governor John Henry Gear in 1878, a post accompanied with the honorary rank of lieutenant colonel.

[3] Bowers was an active Freemason from the decade of the 1870s and came to believe that the American republic was founded by Masons in opposition to the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church.

[4] Believing Catholicism and Americanism to be incompatible doctrines, Bowers sought to bolster the latter with the establishment a new political society bearing certain structural forms derived from the secret ritualistic lodges of Masonry.

[4] Working with a handful of like-minded friends in his office, on March 13, 1887, Bowers drew up a formal ritual and wrote a constitution for this new organization, to be called the "American Protective Association.

Historian Jo Ann Manfra argues that: in 1893, Henry Bowers lost personal control of the APA to a vastly expanded national membership that replaced him with Michigan's William Traynor as supreme president.