Despite a special prosecutor, 20 grand juries and untold dozens of subpoenas, no murder charges would ever be brought. Kidnapping was then considered a misdemeanour, so the jail sentences that eventually were handed down ranged from one month to two years. When all was said and done, the only indisputable facts were that Morgan had disappeared, and that his abductors had been Freemasons.
At which point, the floodgates of fake news opened and thousands of Masons were thrown off juries, forbidden to preach, barred from communion, denounced as members of a godless gang and made the scapegoats of any act of lawlessness, any murder anywhere. It is no coincidence that precisely the same kind of laws were passed against Freemasons in fascist Vichy France, 100 years later.
The moral of the story is that nothing changes.
On the second evening of the Republican convention, David McCormick, candidate for United States Senate from Pennsylvania, warned against “pro-criminal judges”. Trump lawyer Alina Habba implicated “sham indictments and baseless allegations”. Elise Stefanik, New York Republican Conference Chair, noted the “corrupt democratic prosecutors and judges” of the “Department of Injustice”.
In the wake of the Morgan Affair, the first incarnations of X and Truth Social sprung forth as hundreds of Anti-Masonic broadsheets popped up along the western frontier and the “burned-over” regions of New York State. For every owner of a set of chipped fonts understood the potential: here was an indisputable display of unholy wickedness practised by the privileged classes — the they people. Here was a real-life horror story — that hidden in their midst was an invisible coterie who smiled and shook hands at noon, but swore secret oaths at midnight, held bloodcurdling initiation ceremonies and guzzled diabolical libations from human skulls.
Hashtag Pizzagate.
It is perhaps regrettable that the language of the pundits and political operatives of the 1830s was not all that dissimilar from the rhetoric heard in Milwaukee when Senator Tim Scott observed, “On Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania, holding a rifle”. Masonic hands “reek with the blood of human victims offered in sacrifice to devils”, was the message of New Jersey’s Palladium of Liberty. Not to be outdone, The Middlebury Free Press presented a dialogue among the demons Belphegor and Beelzebub, in which Freemasonry featured as Satan’s “empire on earth”.
And just as MAGA appeared to explode out of nowhere, within a year of William Morgan’s disappearance, dozens of Anti-Masonic governors took over state houses. Scores of newly elected Anti-Masonic senators and congressmen made their way to Washington. At which point the Anti-Masons decided to nominate one of their own to the highest office in the land.
In the summer of 1832, stagecoach after stagecoach carried more than 100 delegates from 24 states from the steamboat landing in Fells Point to downtown Baltimore. And much like Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, those who organised the Anti-Masonic presidential nominating convention understood the value of making the spectacle as public as possible. For the first time, they invited the press to witness the decision making, going so far as to assign them seats.
The Anti-Masonic presidential nominee was William Wirt, who had served for a dozen years as United States Attorney General and been Thomas Jefferson’s personal lawyer and adviser, much as Kellyanne Conway is to Trump. Like Conway, Wirt was a gifted rhetorician and fabulist. In fits of grandiloquence arguing before the Supreme Court, he had conjured the sons of Atreus, the House of Priam and the fierce Achilles. And that was for a case about waterway rights between New York and New Jersey.
Wirt’s many detractors insulted his verbal genius by dismissing his ostentatious oratory as “whipped syllabub” (a great insult at the time), but advanced vocabulary brought him what money couldn’t, starting with two excellent marriages. The first came with ownership of a plantation near Charlottesville, dozens of slaves and family connection with Virginia’s aristocracy — men who would soon make good use of his high-flown language and penchant for hero worship.
The parallels with J.D. Vance’s career are uncanny. Wirt, an orphan, had humble beginnings. Like Vance, he became a famous writer and, eventually, a jewel in establishment’s crown. At which point he decided on his grandest project yet. He would create his own version of American history, one in which the slaveholders and whiskey manufacturers were epic heroes like those he had discovered in Homer and Virgil. And just as Marjorie Taylor Greene declared at the convention that Trump was the “founding father of the America First movement”, Wirt would also create a new founding father by writing the now classic biography of Patrick Henry — someone Wirt had never met, never seen and never heard speak.
No matter.
Wirt described Patrick Henry’s voice as a fountain, a river, the ocean itself. Much like Trump — described this past week as having the heart of a lion, the soul of a warrior and the man who would stand at the gates of hell to defend our great country — Patrick Henry was Samson, Demosthenes and Charles the Fifth wrapped into one. He was a noble savage, a miracle, a prodigy. He had cared nothing for education, but was the smartest man in the room. He had cared nothing for money, but riches flowed his way. And that was how Henry — the ignorant, rapacious, slaveholding drunk — came to inhabit the American imagination as a paragon of moral perfection. Wirt had not only created the hero but his rallying cry for the new nation: “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
Had he ever said such a thing? It’s doubtful.
John Tyler, tenth President of the United States, called Wirt’s biography “a great novel”. Jefferson kept the book in the fiction section of his library. John Adams read Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry and said: “If I could go back to the age of thirty-five, Mr. Wirt, I would endeavor to become your rival, — not in elegance of composition, but in a simple narration of facts.”
Thus the genealogy of fake news can be traced from Wirt’s biography to Kellyanne Conway’s interview on “Meet the Press” in January 2017, when she defended Trump’s erstwhile Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s lies about the number of people who had attended Trump’s first inauguration. At long last, Conway was able to articulate what Wirt and the Anti-Masons had discovered long ago: the power of alternative facts.
Wirt knew full well the they people of 1832 were harmless. He himself had been a Freemason — along with Franklin, Voltaire, George Washington and the great Andrew Jackson, who had been Masonic Grand Master of Tennessee. But that did not stop Wirt from standing before the Anti-Masonic convention and vowing that the cult was involved in a “wicked conspiracy against the laws of God and man, which ought to be put down”. Nor did it matter much that Donald Trump’s political idol — again, Andrew Jackson — would soon destroy Wirt and Henry Clay and every other political opponent in the electoral college landslide of 1832, which cemented Jackson’s second term. What mattered was that fear of the they people had reached the centre of American politics — those who had since time immemorial, to quote Tucker Carlson’s strange speech on the final night of the convention, delivered “a middle-finger in the face of every American”.
“Wirt knew full well the they people of 1832 were harmless — but that did not stop him from vowing that the cult was involved in a wicked conspiracy.”
As the echoes of Kid Rock’s off-kilter lip-synced rap faded in the stale arena air on that last night of the convention, so did every pretence of the peace-loving flower-child MAGA drag. “They plunder our nation,” Trump declared in his climactic address to the assembly. “They wipe out our people.” “They took over our country.” “They’re emptying out their insane asylums.” “They used Covid to cheat.” “They think we’re stupid.”
And on and on. Just after midnight the red, white and blue — and, of course, gold — balloons began to fall, and it was clear that soon it would be time for the conventioneers to return to the sticks and provinces to rally the masses. There were only a few hours left for the slots at the Potawatomi casino, at the most one last lazy afternoon to kayak down the Milwaukee River beerline and envision the rebirth of MAGAmerica while drinking Wisconsibly, as they say.
It had been a glorious four days in Brew City. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Joe Biden tested positive for Covid and had to go home.
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