During last night’s vote to reopen the U.S. government, one of the House of Representatives’ stenographers took control of the microphone and began denouncing the U.S. Constitution and its writers because of their Freemasonic ties. No one seems to know her motivation for making the pronouncements at that time, although stress certainly seems a plausible explanation.
What interested me about the episode is how seems to demonstrate the long-lasting belief that the Founders were participants in a Freemasonic conspiracy. This thinking helped to spawn the first third party in U.S. politics, the Anti-Masonic party, and has been the foundation of a number of conspiracy theories about the actual origins and objectives of the U.S. government that continue to find believers even today.
I’ll be talking about this outburst in class today, where we will be finishing up a discussion about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I also expect that I’ll find it useful as an illustration when I teach the conspiracy theories course in the spring semester.
Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics 
As a Freemason myself, I can assure you that any group of men who can’t even decide whether we want to have baked beans or potato salad with our fried chicken prior to our meetings, is completely incapable of conspiring to take over the world and destroy humanity. 🙂
Put that in your mission statement–problem solved!
If you go togoogle you will find hundreds of Antimasonic sites. I bought Charles Finney’s attack on Masonry with a new introduction telling of recent Masonic murders. A lot of these sites are still very evangelic inspired. The more the world changes, the more it stayes the same. Weed and other Antimasonic editors would have loved the web. Herb Ershkowitz
Thanks for commenting, Herb. I hope to see you again at SHEAR.
The growth of Antimasonic rhetoric into its current iteration continues to amaze me. It’s one thing to not want to associate with Masonry for personal reasons; it’s quite another to make the leap to a secret global conspiracy bent on destroying humanity.