On the level

At the advent of the American Revolution, Masons were so common in the English-speaking world that it should come as no shock that a good percentage of our founding fathers—John Hancock, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, to name but a few—all belonged to the fraternity. Yet generations of historians, as well as generations of conspiracy seekers, have been intrigued with the possibility that the order's basic idealism—or covert intrigue, depending on one's view of Masonry—was inspiration for the direction our young country took.

Emily Peeso, curatorial registrar and event organizer of the Idaho Historical Museum Masonic exhibit, understands it as an unspecific relationship. "Those ideas of everybody being 'on the level' and being free from religion inside that structure, those were established in 1717," she said. "For their time, they were truly revolutionary, and they drew in like-minded people."

Others have detected more explicit, and sinister, agendas in play, far beyond the all-seeing Masonic eye that graces our dollar bill. Dan Brown, of The Da Vinci Code fame, is said to be capitalizing on the centuries of paranoia and will soon release a new novel about the Masons' influence on the U.S. government. He certainly won't be the first. It has even been suggested that the layout of the streets in Washington, D.C., are arcane Masonic signs and tributes to Lucifer himself. Persistent charges of occultism have dogged the Masons almost from their beginning.

In 1828, after an upstate New York Mason was allegedly kidnapped by brother Masons and thrown into the Niagara River to drown for exposing the order's secrets, a national political force arose with only one purpose, defined by the title they adopted—the "Anti-Masonic Party." John Quincy Adams (president from 1825 to 1829), not a member of that short-lived party but nevertheless an ally, was outspoken and ardent in his view that Freemasonry was "antithetical to the ideals of the United States."

Still, 14 U.S. presidents—most notably Washington, Monroe, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman and Ford—were tried-and-true Masons. (It had long been thought that the man who penned the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was a Mason, but no evidence has been found to confirm this.)

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