CONSPIRACY CLAIM #37

This claim is spread from two directions at once. Some proud Masons like to say that “all” the Founders were brethren, and some critics of Freemasonry take the same idea and turn it into a plot: the United States, they say, was designed in the lodge as the first step towards a “New World Order”, and the Founders signed their work in the Great Seal, the dollar bill and the streets of Washington, D.C. The grain of truth is real, so let us start with the numbers.

Were all the Founding Fathers Freemasons?

No. The standard study, Ronald E. Heaton’s research for the Masonic Service Association, found that of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, 9 were Freemasons (we profile the Masonic signers of the Declaration in our Famous Freemasons section), and of the 39 who signed the Constitution, 13 were. That is about one in six and one in three. Benjamin Franklin had been Grand Master of Pennsylvania as early as 1734, and George Washington was made a Mason in the lodge at Fredericksburg, Virginia. But John Adams was not a Mason: in 1798, thanking a Masonic lodge’s Grand Master, Josiah Bartlett, for a “respectfull and affectionate Address”, he wrote that “I never had the Felicity to be initiated.” The Masonic Service Association, the fraternity’s own educational body, is just as clear about the others: Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton “were not Freemasons, but the myths are still prevalent”, and research “has found no evidence that Thomas Jefferson or James Madison were Masons.” Monticello, the foundation that cares for Jefferson’s home and papers, agrees that “no references to Masonic membership have been found in Jefferson’s papers”. The man who wrote the Declaration, the man who drafted the Bill of Rights and the man behind the Treasury were not members of the club that is supposed to have designed the whole thing.

Freemasonry was a common social network for eighteenth-century gentlemen, in America as in Britain. An influential minority of the Founders belonged to it. What those men did, they did as citizens and statesmen, not on the orders of a lodge: there is no record of any Grand Lodge plan, resolution or request to create the United States. Freemasonry forbids the discussion of politics in its meetings, and its Charges tell every Mason never to be concerned in plots and conspiracies against the peace of the nation (see Claim #07).

So was the USA a Masonic project?

Washington himself was asked something very like this. In 1798 G. W. Snyder, a German-born preacher in Frederick, Maryland, sent him a copy of John Robison’s anti-Masonic book Proofs of a Conspiracy and worried that “some of the Lodges in the United States might have caught the Infection” of the Bavarian Illuminati. Washington replied that he rarely attended a lodge any more, and added: “I believe notwithstanding, that none of the Lodges in this Country are contaminated with the principles ascribed to the society of the Illuminati.” The most famous Mason of the Revolution did not see a plot, because there was not one.

The usual “proofs” do not hold up either. The motto on the Great Seal, Novus Ordo Seclorum, was taken from the Roman poet Virgil by Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, and means “a new order of the ages”: in Thomson’s words, “the beginning of the new American Era”. It does not say “New World Order”; that is a mistranslation. We look at the eye and pyramid in Claim #35.

Washington wanted to enslave everyone?

Some posts go further still, and claim that Washington and his Masonic brethren wanted to make slaves of the whole American public: the “new order”, they say, was a plan to put every citizen in chains. To put it plainly, this is total bollocks, and it is about as contradictory as an accusation can get. Washington presided over the convention that wrote the Constitution in 1787. When he took office as the first President, on 30 April 1789, he used his inaugural address to urge Congress to consider amendments, trusting that “a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen” would guide them. In the same speech he said that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government” were staked “on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” The amendments themselves were drafted and championed by James Madison, who introduced them on 8 June 1789. On 2 October 1789 President Washington sent the twelve amendments approved by Congress to the states, and ten of them were ratified by 15 December 1791. We know them as the Bill of Rights: freedom of religion, speech, the press and assembly in the First Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms in the Second.

So the claim asks us to believe that the President secretly plotting to enslave every citizen used his very first speech in office to ask Congress to consider amendments in “a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen”, and then sent out for ratification the amendments guaranteeing that same citizen’s right to worship, speak, publish, gather, petition and bear arms. A would-be slave master does not hand his future slaves a printing press and a musket. The idea is not merely wrong: it is bizarre, nonsensical and devoid of logic, and the argument that props it up is frankly imbecilic. It only survives in posts that never mention the Bill of Rights at all.

Honesty matters here, because there is a real moral failing in Washington’s story and it should be stated straight. Washington held people in slavery. When he died in 1799 there were 317 enslaved people at Mount Vernon, 124 of them owned by him. In his will he provided for the freedom of the people he owned, one of the few slave-owning Founders to do so; his valet William Lee was freed at once, and Martha Washington freed the others in 1801. That is real history, painful and worth knowing. But it is the history of a Virginia planter in a slaveholding society. It is not evidence of a secret Masonic plan to enslave the American people, and the same posts that say “he wanted everyone enslaved” have nothing to say about the rights he championed.

Where does this rhetoric come from?

Not from historians. Scholars of conspiracy theories and religious extremism, such as Michael Barkun and Chip Berlet, have traced the “New World Order” story to two American countercultures: the militant anti-government right, and the part of fundamentalist Christianity that reads world events as signs of the coming Antichrist. Much of the “Masonic Founders” material comes from that second camp: the same scholarship describes conspiracy theorists of the Christian right who see Freemasons, Masonic degrees and the monuments of the National Mall as tools of a plot to impose the New World Order. The televangelist Pat Robertson, a minister of the charismatic movement within evangelicalism and host of The 700 Club, wrote The New World Order (1991), which put the Freemasons and the Illuminati at the centre of a world plot and warned of “a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.” It became a New York Times bestseller, and Barkun called it the most influential work on the Illuminati in recent years. Jack Chick’s fundamentalist Baptist comic tracts accused Freemasons, among others, of murder and conspiracies, and his publisher says it has sold more than 750 million tracts, comics and other items; the writer and radio host Texe Marrs, who ran two fundamentalist Christian ministries, mixed Masonic conspiracy theories with antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

None of this speaks for Christians in general. Many Freemasons are devout Christians, the Southern Baptist Convention decided in 1993 that membership of a lodge was a matter of personal conscience, and some of the sharpest critics of this rhetoric are Christians themselves: in 1993 historian Bruce Barron rebuked Robertson’s book in the Christian Research Journal, and religious studies scholar Richard T. Hughes argues that “New World Order” rhetoric libels the Christian faith. It comes from a fringe of fear, not from any rational school of thought.

Conclusion: The USA was not a Masonic project, and the Founding Fathers were not all Freemasons: 9 of the 56 signers of the Declaration and 13 of the 39 signers of the Constitution were, and Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton were not, while no evidence has ever been found that Madison was. Those who were Masons acted as individuals, and no Grand Lodge planned the republic. Washington, the most famous Mason among them, publicly denied that American lodges harboured any plot. The claim that he and his brethren wanted to enslave the public collapses against the record: he urged Congress to protect “the characteristic rights of freemen”, and his administration sent the Bill of Rights, with its First and Second Amendments, to the states. Washington’s ownership of enslaved people is a real and serious part of his history; a Masonic plan to enslave everyone is not part of anybody’s.