The Masons Meet Their Match

PETER: We’re back with BackStory, and I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, we’re looking at the history of conspiracy thinking in America. And we’re going to turn now to the story of a conspiracy that was so convincing, it launched a political party.

PETER: We’ll begin in a small New York town in 1826. A man named William Morgan had teamed up with local printer David Miller to publish a scandalous new book.

ED: Morgan had been part of the secret society of the Freemasons, and he planned to make money by publishing the order’s secrets. Problem was, Morgan had taken a vow of secrecy, and historian Ron Formisano says the Masons wanted to make sure he kept that vow.

RON FORMISANO: Local Masons tried to burn down David Miller’s building with his printing press, and they failed to do that. They arrested Morgan on a trumped up charge. And then he was spirited by a whole relay of stagecoaches well over 100 miles from the Genesee River area near Rochester, New York to Niagara Falls. And he was never seen again. He was presumed murdered, and he probably was.

PETER: Local papers began to report that Morgan had been abducted. But law enforcement, mostly made up of Masons, didn’t act. Angry citizens asked the governor to intervene. But he didn’t. He, too, was a Mason, and Mason-run newspapers just denied the story altogether.

RON FORMISANO: They pooh-poohed the story. They said, oh, no, this never happened. William Morgan’s living happily in Turkey, Smyrna, Turkey. For some reason, that was their favorite choice of where this fool had disappeared to.

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ED: Citizens organized committees across western New York to investigate the mysterious disappearance. Some suspects were arrested, but Masonic judges and juries just let them go or gave them light sentences.

Protesters were convinced that Morgan had been killed and the murder covered up by a Masonic conspiracy. And Ron Formisano says they probably weren’t far off.

RON FORMISANO: There are those who think history is a conspiracy, and they’re nuts. But there are conspiracies in history. And this was a conspiracy.

PETER: It was a conspiracy that hit a nerve in 1820s America.

RON FORMISANO: Start with the fact that Masonry was a secret fraternity. So in a republic, everything should be open. In a democracy, anything that’s secret is automatically suspect. And then one gets involved in breaking the law, and in the minds of many people, this just confirmed their worst fears. Now, some people then went on to imagine dark deeds and satanic rituals.

ED: To many Americans, it seemed like a conspiracy at the very heart of the US government. For decades, politicians at all levels tended to be part of the Masons, from founders like George Washington and Ben Franklin to the biggest politicians of the day, like Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay.

PETER: So there was only one thing to do– put non-Masons in power.

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PETER: Protesters formed a new political party called the Anti-Masons and took over politics in western New York.

ED: The party took up the mantle of progressive causes like abolition and spread to states across the North, like Pennsylvania and Vermont, both of which elected Anti-Mason governors.

PETER: But the Anti-Masons never dropped the old conspiracy story about William Morgan’s murder in 1826.

RON FORMISANO: You have an Anti-Masonic convention in Maine in 1834 repeating the narrative of eight years before as if it happened yesterday.

PETER: The Anti-Masons’ obsession with the William Morgan conspiracy might seem, well, a little irrational. Why keep harping on one mysterious disappearance from one small town for years? But Formisano says to understand the appeal of conspiracy thinking, you have to understand its roots.

RON FORMISANO: The interesting thing about conspiracy thinking is that at least one historian has described it as an outgrowth of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, that conspiracy thinking actually replaced magical thinking.

ED: In other words, bad things don’t happen because of the hand of God, bad things happen because of individuals making decisions. And in a way, that’s an empowering idea. If the root of political problems was not providential but bad people, conspiratorial people, well, other people could also fix those problems.

PETER: The Anti-Masons wanted to do just that– save American democracy by exposing Masonic corruption. Truth and the facts became their rallying cry.

RON FORMISANO: All we need to do is get the facts out there, in print, and we will make converts.

ED: And they did. They made so many converts that Masons had trouble recruiting. Masonic lodges closed throughout the country, which meant the threat of a conspiracy subsided.

PETER: By the 1840s, the Anti-Masons petered out. But these great reformers stuck around in other parties, becoming judges, senators, even president. Millard Fillmore got his start as an Anti-Mason. And so did Lincoln’s Secretary of State and political confidant, William Seward. So within a generation, the young men who jumped into politics to root out a conspiracy of insiders became the ultimate insiders.

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ED: Thanks to Ron Formisano for helping tell that story. He’s a professor of history at the University of Kentucky.