Secrecy, enlightenment and the Masons

"I'm not cut out for fraternities and secret societies," wrote Robert Zaller recently in BSR. "But give the Masons their due: they gave us The Magic Flute." (Click here.)

In an open democracy where everyone voluntarily reveals their deepest darkest secrets on Facebook or Twitter, it's difficult indeed to see any use for secret societies— especially a mystical male-only brotherhood like the Freemasons. Yet as I discovered while writing a biography of the late Pony Express superintendent Joseph Alfred Slade— who was lynched in Montana by vigilantes led by Masons— the Masons have endured precisely because, every few centuries, secrecy comes in handy.

The first Masons organized themselves, somewhere back in the mists of the 14th Century, to cope with a genuine external threat. Although most medieval Europeans rarely strayed far from their native villages, masons traveled great distances to work on the few structures built of stone: castles, cathedrals, abbeys, churches and a few major bridges.

World's first unions

These masons were no itinerant tramps but highly skilled artisans, who carved the intricate facades on a building's face. Their services were so prized that sometimes, in the middle of a cathedral or castle project, English masons were enticed to leave the job for more rewarding work on another structure elsewhere in England, or in France or Germany.

The bishops and deans who employed them tried— not unreasonably— to impose contracts that would prevent masons from quitting a job until their work was finished. Kings deployed their powers of impressment to force masons to work for them. Private trade guilds— the medieval equivalent of corporations— conscripted English masons and other workers for major construction projects, with Parliament's blessing.

But these "freemasons"— so called because they worked in the softer, chalky freestone— understandably balked at conditions that would force them to work far from their homes, indefinitely and against their will. They responded by banding together into what may have been the world's first trade unions— and because such unions were illegal, their meetings had to be conducted secretly. That is, secrecy was a necessary response to a repressive society that prevented masons from selling their labor freely and openly.

Questioning the Trinity

Over the next two centuries these early union members developed a system of code words, signals and rituals that enabled freemasons to recognize each other. Whether such a system was ever necessary is debatable: In England, France and central Europe, everyone already knew who was a freestone mason. Nevertheless, secrecy remained an essential element of freemasonry long after it had outlived its apparent usefulness.

By 1700 the Freemasons had evolved from an illegal trade union into an intellectual society dedicated to exploring taboo notions about religion and government. No one really knows how this change came about, but surely the Freemasons' secret ceremonial character was essential to such gatherings: As late as 1697 an 18-year-old Scottish divinity student named Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in Edinburgh for openly ridiculing the Bible. But in privacy among one's trusted peers, a man might question the Trinity, the Resurrection or the divine right of kings.

As the Enlightenment flourished in the 18th Century, Freemasonry found especially fertile soil in America, where Masonic lodges were established in Boston and Philadelphia as early as 1730. The new nation's father, George Washington, became a Mason, and so did the nation's most enlightened citizen, Benjamin Franklin. So did John Hancock, James Madison, James Monroe, Paul Revere, John Paul Jones and the Marquis de La Fayette.

(So, for that matter, did Benedict Arnold and numerous Tories: Freemasonry transcended not only religious lines but political lines as well.)

Papal condemnation

In this new incarnation, the Freemasons theoretically embraced men of all religious backgrounds, as long as they believed in God. But in practice Roman Catholics had long been excluded from membership— not by the Masons, but by a succession of Papal Bulls that forbade Catholics to join, on pain of excommunication.

The first of these Bulls, issued by Clement XII in 1738, attacked the secretive nature of Freemasonry: "If such people were not doing evil," the Pope reasoned, "they would never have so much hatred of the light."

Clement's logic was valid but also disingenuous. Most human institutions, including his own, recognized that humans cannot function without some degree of secrecy or privacy— between priest and penitent, say, or husband and wife, or lawyer and client, or among business partners maneuvering against a competitor.

Clement himself, like all popes before and after him, was elected by secret ballot. Without secrecy and private symbols (most notably the sign of the cross), the early Christians in the Roman catacombs couldn't have survived to establish the Church in the first place. And surely the Freemasons— first as an illegal trade union, then as a society of freethinkers in a reactionary world— had good reason to utilize secrecy as well.

Social network

Yet by the 19th Century, the world had changed in an important way. America's 13 colonies had established the modern world's first democracy. The Constitution provided tools with which citizens could achieve their ends through elections, legislation, courts and the power of free communication.

In such a land, secret societies like the Freemasons seemed subversive— and indeed, in the 1820s and 1830s, American Freemasons suffered a backlash that went so far as to take the form of a political party: the Anti-Masons. Freemasonry "is wrong— essentially wrong," wrote the former President John Quincy Adams in 1832, "a seed of evil, which can never produce any good."

Yet Freemasonry survived by evolving once again, this time into a social network for business and civic leaders eager to latch onto a noble heritage.

In a free and open society where theoretically anybody could do or be anything, secrecy enhanced the mystique of an organization that seemingly had little else to offer. To a small-town merchant, lawyer or doctor striving to establish respectable credentials, it was no small thing to share membership in an exclusive secret brotherhood with the likes of Andrew Jackson, DeWitt Clinton, Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the Union General George C. McClellan and Admiral David Farragut. A 500-year tradition of secret ceremony fed on itself and ultimately became an end in itself.

Vigilantes in Montana

A new use for Masonic secrecy arose in Montana in 1863, when a gold strike attracted some 10,000 prospectors to Alder Gulch within a matter of weeks. Although the miners quickly elected sheriffs and judges and created rudimentary courts, the gulch seemed plagued by robberies and murders, and nobody knew whom to trust. (Even the sheriff was suspected of belonging to a bandit gang.)

Amid the sense of fear and helplessness that pervaded the Alder Gulch's mining camps, a courageous group of Masons secretly organized a Vigilance Committee, dedicated to tracking down and hanging all members of the presumed bandit gang.

If an emergency existed in Alder Gulch, the Masonic traditions of trust and secrecy were essential to dealing with it quickly and effectively. And indeed these famous "Vigilantes of Montana" did indeed track down and hang two dozen supposed "road agents" within less than two months.

Feeding paranoia

Unfortunately, secrecy made it impossible to discover, then or later, whether an emergency really did exist— and, if it did, who was to blame. That was the paradox about secret conspiracies: They required the conspirators to know the whole truth of a given situation, which was impossible to ascertain in secrecy.

So instead of cultivating understanding and insight among the Vigilantes, secrecy reinforced their paranoia and the ignorance of certainty: A man who swore absolute loyalty to his trusted colleagues invariably grew suspicious of the world beyond them. In the short run, secrecy was an effective tool; in the long run, it was lethal to the truth and consequently to justice.

Ultimately the Vigilantes of Montana lynched a genuine Western hero, Jack Slade, for the misdemeanor of being drunk, disorderly and disrespectful toward their committee. They also lynched an unproven petty thief as well as a harmless drunk whose "crime" was to have written a letter complaining about his mistreatment by the Vigilantes.

Defying a judge

By the spring of 1870 (when Vigilantes seized two prisoners from a Helena jail by force and hanged them in defiance of a territorial judge) the total number of Vigilante executions had risen to 57— this in response to an initial threat that, upon subsequent investigation, had involved a grand total of eight murders.

Of course it's unfair for an observer who wasn't in Montana in the 1860s to sit in judgment of those who were there. Who is to say that conditions in a pre-feudal wilderness like Alder Gulch— a place without peacekeepers, formal courts, newspapers or the telegraph— were significantly different from the oppressive conditions that gave rise to the first Freemasons in 14th-Century England? For that matter, who is to say that the Masons' secret rituals might not be needed again, sometime in the future?♦


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