LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      In 2004 a best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown told readers that the freemasons were descended from the Knights Templar. It is a great story, and as the author makes clear, part of a work of fiction. Somehow these fictions pass into fact. In November of the same year, Disney Productions released a feature film, National Treasure, about how the founding fathers left behind secret buried treasure. They were prone to secrecy because they were freemasons. Another great story, this one partly true. Some of the founding fathers, like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were freemasons. Before 2004 was out, people would be asking why the freemasons liked to bury treasure. In the late 1990s a furor erupted in Britain with enemies of the freemasons claiming that masonic policemen released criminals if they belonged to the order. To counter this bad press, a devotee wrote a history of freemasonry in which he claimed that they were descended from a group of reformers in the seventeenth century who called themselves Rosicrucians.¹ No evidence was offered for that fictive story, but the author did at least cast a cold eye on the story about the freemasons and the Knights Templar. Separating masonic facts from masonic fictions can be difficult.

      As a historian who has written about eighteenth-century freemasonry, I get asked all the time—even by the company doing the film for Disney Productions—if the freemasons descended from the medieval Knights Templar, if the eye and triangle on the back of the American dollar bill was meant to be masonic, and not least, what are the secrets so guarded by the freemasons? This book attempts to answer some of those questions by looking at the first century of freemasonry, at its founding decades in eighteenth-century Europe. Reading about that history should dispel the notion about the Knights Templar as the origin of the masonic movement. But it should do more. Historical understanding asks readers to try to imagine what men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, General Lafayette, and Voltaire (admitted late in life), Mozart, and the German poet Goethe might have found appealing in their masonic lodges.

      FIGURE 1. Let us join him. This angel is knocking on the temple door for the secrets found in the anonymous “exposure,” the frontispiece to De Metselaar ontmomd [sic], of het rechte geheim der vryemetselaaren ontdekt … 1753 (Arnhem: Jacob Nyhoff). With permission from the masonic library, Prins Frederik Cultural Masonic Center, The Hague; copyright Grand East of the Netherlands.

      FIGURE 2. George Washington’s masonic apron. With permission of the Masonic Library and Museum of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

      I want to remove the veil from a secret society that turns out not to be very secret at all. I want to read the original European books and archives from the eighteenth century and see what thousands of men—among them, in the colonies, our founding fathers—and a few thousand women saw, what ideals the lodges sought to impart, what activities they promoted. I want to get closer to actual lives, but also to larger questions about the political implications of masonic membership. How did a private society dedicated to equality and fraternity cope with the pressures coming from a deeply hierarchical society, that was also increasingly dominated by market transactions, by wealth as distinct from birth. Those pressures mirror the tensions inherent in modern democracies, between the ideals of equality and the messy reality of status, wealth, privilege, and day-to-day inequality.

      Much of what this book reveals depends upon European sources. American freemasonry derived directly from its British counterpart (as imported by Benjamin Franklin), and going back to the source of it all makes the most sense. I am also trained as a European and not an American historian, and I have not walked the archival terrain in the American libraries of the East Coast, the way I have in Europe. For the American side of the story, a fuller account can be found in the superb book by Steven Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood.²

      Perhaps American readers of this book will also be drawn to it because civic life at present seems so relatively impoverished. We join fewer groups; the average rate of membership in civic organizations is about one-tenth as large today as it was thirty years ago.³ Voluntary associations that radically crossed class lines have largely disappeared, replaced by advocacy groups or professional associations.⁴ We may rightly marvel at a time when joining something like a lodge meant a commitment that could be life-long and that challenged assumptions about who could call

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