Paul Rich  Hoover Institution, Stanford
University of the Americas–Puebla  rich@hoover.stanford.edu

Guillermo De Los Reyes
University of Pennsylvania

 
Precis: Starting with Miguel Hidalgo, the Catholic priest and Freemason who led the Mexican revolt against Spain in 1810,  many prominent Mexicans have been members of the so–called Royal Craft.  To what result is controversial. Mexico offers an  excellent opportunity for research by political scientists into Masonry’s effects on individuals and on society, especially in light of current interest in voluntary societies and their contributions to social capital. A version of this paper was presented at the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, September 3, 1999. Our investigation is one of a number generated by a program of research funded by CONACyT, the Mexican government research institution, at the University of the Americas–Puebla, into civil society, social capital and voluntary organizations — and their political consequences.  Another result of the CONACyT project is the current volume on civil society  of the Annals  of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (September 1999) edited by Professors Rich and De Los Reyes and on sale at the Sage booth in the APSA book exhibit.

  Discussion of  Freemasonry’s political role in Mexico in the general histories of the country is usually limited to brief mention of  the fact that Scottish Rite Masons and York Rite Masons fought each other in the 1820s and 1830s in the  aftermath of the revolt against Spain. Beyond that, references are limited, with no recent consideration by scholars of  the fraternity’s longterm effects on Mexico such as there has been of  its influence in the United States.

  The origins of  Masonry in Mexico as elsewhere are ambiguous and controversial. Jason Ripley gives a short explanation within a Mexican context in  Maximilian and  Juárez (1992):
 Freemasonry, though it made fictitious claims to have existed in biblical times, had in fact begun in Scotland at the end of the sixteenth century, and became well established in England twenty-nine years after the Revolution of 1688. Its religion was the deism of the Age of Enlightenment; the Freemasons believed in a Great Architect of the Universe who could be the God of any denomination of Christians or the Jehovah of the Jews. Under the British constitutional monarchy and the rule of the Whig aristocracy, it became a respectable organization, with royal dukes as Grand Masters. But in the autocratic Catholic states of Europe, where Freemasons were regarded as heretics by the Church and subversive by the state because of their broadminded deism, their English origin, and the secrecy of their proceedings, they were suppressed and driven underground.

 By the nineteenth century, the European organization of Freemasons, the Grand Orient, had taken a different path from the Freemasons in Britain...The Grand Orient established lodges with the same revolutionary sympathies in Central and South America. Gutiérrez [a conservative Spanish Mexican who helped to recruit Maximilian as Emperor] and his friends believed that the Freemasons and their secret society were responsible for the liberal revolutions in Mexico.

  Freemasonry was represented in some fashion in Mexico well before the Independence movement. The Mexican Inquisition hunted people with Masonic connections: in 1785 a Mexican, Manuel Zuralds, along with a Frenchman and an Italian, was tried for being a Mason. Masonry in Spanish possessions thn was regarded as a political threat: “Masonic meetings, of course, were held in secret, and, because the lodges were inviolable, all manner of cabal could be plotted behind closed doors with little fear of exposure.”   One Catholic author unhesitatingly blamed Masonry for the loss of the empire, while another found Masonry at the root of the Church’s difficulties in Spanish America in the nineteenth century: “The class now in power, which had been strongly affected by Freemasonry, was not yet ready for a rationalistic laicism — most of the constitutions still embodied Catholicism as the state religion — but was in favor of the main principles of the Enlightenment...”.

 The fraternity’s activities in Mexico  first become politically significant during the chaos of the 1820s, before and during Guadalupe Victoria’s presidency of the infant republic. The two principal political groups in the early days of the new nation were Masons who styled themselves as Yorquinos and Escoseses.   The celebrated Masonic historian Gould comments, “Soon the entire population of the country became divided into two factions, the Escoceses and the Yorkinos. The former were in favour of moderate measures, under a central government, or a constitutional monarchy. The latter were the advocates of republican institutions, and the expulsion of the “old” or native Spaniards. The Escoceses — originally the “Scots Masons” — numbered among their members all who, under the ancient régime, had titles of nobility; the Catholic clergy, without exception; many military officers; together with all the native Spaniards of every class.”

  As for the Yorkists, Gould comments, “The republican party, according to one set of writers, viewing with dismay the program of their opponents, resolved ‘to fight the devil with his own fire,’ and therefore organized a rival faction, on which they bestowed the name of Yorkinos, the members of which were supposed to be adherents of the York Rite.”
The Scottish-Yorkist Political ‘Wars’

  The changes in Masonic allegiances during the first decades of Mexican independence rivaled the permutations of Cromwellian England’s Vicar of Bray The Scottish Rite adherents, who began as liberals, end up as conservatives and centralists in political philosophy. The Yorkists, who were federalists and anti-centralists, were loosely identified as liberals. Significantly, as far as the oft-repeated allegations in Mexican literature that lodge membership was the basis for a secret ruling cabal, Masonic membership does not seem always to have meant Masonic brotherhood. For example, Nicolás Bravo, President of Mexico in 1842-1843 and 1846 and Scottish Rite leader, supported the Emperor Iturbide (1822-1823), supposedly a fellow Mason, but in 1823 helped overthrow him. He later revolted against another fellow-Mason President Anastasio Bustamante (1830-1832, 1837-1839, 1842), who had supported Iturbide and been vice president under President Vicente Guerrero (1829) before turning against him. Guerrero, head of the York Masons, was murdered with Bravo’s connivance.

  Little is done by historians of Mexico to explain the Masonic background of the Scottish and York protaganists. Moreover, the uninitiated are not aware that the term Scottish Rite as now used has a different meaning from that of earlier times, and applies to a system of degrees or initiations largely devised during the nineteenth century and currently thirty-three in number. (In England the rite is known as the Ancient and Accepted Rite.) Of course, as far as Britain and the United States are concerned, the present rituals are not those worked on candidates in Mexico in the very early nineteenth century.
  Most Mexican historians simply handle the problems of explaining Freemasonry by not explaining it, with the result that the Scottish-York fighting in the 1820s is part of all Mexican histories but understood by few. Adding to the confusion, the so-called Scottish Rite of Masonry which prevailed in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America and in Continental Europe experimented with an almost innumerable number of degrees (which we find can best be explained to the “profane” as plays in which the initiate is a major actor) before winnowing them to only thirty-three — becoming  in the interim so fiercely anti-clerical that trampling the Pope’s tiara became part of the ritual.

  The famous, if controversial, Albert Pike, alleged Ku Klux Klan leader, wrote:
 Eight hundred Degrees of one kind and another were invented:...These Rites resembled those old palaces and baronial castles, the different parts of which, built at different periods remote from one another, upon plans and according to tastes that greatly varied, formed a discordant and incongruous whole. Judaism and chivalry, superstition and philosophy, philanthropy and insane hatred and longing for vengeance, a pure morality and unjust and illegal revenge, were found strangely mated and standing hand in hand within the Temple of Peace and Concord; and the whole system was one grotesque commingling of incongruous things, of contrasts and contradictions, of shocking and fantastic extravagances, of parts repugnant to good taste, and fine conceptions overlaid and disfigured by absurdities engendered by ignorance, fanaticism, and a senseless mysticism.
 
   Many of the degrees of the period were openly sold by itinerant entrepreneurs. Prominent among these Masonic buccaners was Joseph de Glock-D’Obernay, who surfaced in Paris before 1819 asserting that he held exalted rank in New Mexico and Spain. He spent some time in England, where he annoyed the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge, the Duke of Sussex,  and then he went to Jamaica where he collected (and apparently kept) joining fees.  Paris at the time seems to have been a haven for New World and Mexican degree salesmen. There was a self-proclaimed representative of the Scottish Rite resident there in the 1830s “for various Spanish possessions in the New World” named Henri Dupont Franklin. He had kept a  “Golden Book”, a diary and record book that high-ranking members were required to keep.
  Also in Paris in the 1830s was a singular gentleman calling himself  the Count de Saint-Laurent, “a somewhat flamboyant South American” who supposedly (and dubiously) had commanded part of the Mexican navy and claimed that he was “Sovereign Grand Commander for the Supreme Council for New Spain, Mexico, etc.” He brandished Masonic documents signed by Frederick the Great of Prussia which he said he had obtained from a dead Viceroy of Mexico!

Anti-Clericalism

          As the misfortunes of Masons at the hands of Mexican Inquisition might seem to indicate, in Mexico it is impossible to discuss Freemasonry without discussing anti-clericalism. But Mexico is not the only country where Masonry and particularly the Scottish Rite has been the subject of an ecumenical religious wrath, opposed by Protestants as well as Catholics.  A nineteenth-century American clergyman wrote:
 ...this Scottish Rite had its origin in the brains and breasts of an apostate Presbyterian, renegade tyrants, Jews who retained nothing of Judaism but its hatred of Christ, associated with Jesuits, conspiring against the liberties of Europe, and for the overthrow of the Government of France! And its first home in this country was the city of Nullification, Secession, and Rebellion; in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1801, where thirteen Jews and three Protestants: Mitchall, Dalcho and Provost, who had received it from France, falsely pretended to found it on constitutions given by Frederick the Great. If Satan had picked the time, the inventors, and home of this Rite he would have doubtless chosen the same.

 The same critic (J.Blanchard, then president of the evangelical hotbed, Wheaton College, and an energetic opponent of the Masons) claimed the Rite had political designs on a Southern Empire which would include Mexico. This was to be  led by the political maverick Aaron Burr, who in 1805-1806 was involved in mysterious negotiations in the Mississippi Territory. Burr, accused of planning a slave empire south and west of the Mississippi River which would have included Mexico and Central America, was tried for treason. Part of his correspondence that was used against him was written in Masonic cipher.

        Burr’s membership in a Masonic lodge, and the fact that some associates were Masons, along with the use of  the cipher,  was enough to convince conspiracy theory enthusiasts that there was a Masonic scheme for the creation of a new country led by Burr and carved out of the United States and Mexico:
 ...a devil’s government with a devil’s gospel; and in the subterranean lodges sprung from it, in the strong words of Lamartine, the “Catacombs of a new worship,” which worship was that of a naked woman, a Goddess of Reason in the Champ de Mars...

Heroes, Of a Sort

         Masonic scholars will be aware that the highly-politicized Masonic fratricide in the early days of Mexican independence involved such important personalities as Joel Poinsett, the American Minister to Mexico who assisted the Yorkists, and General Santa Anna — who assisted only himself, and did not spare his American brethren at the Alamo. This early period is a colorful story that deserves much more attention than can be given here, but it is not the end of involvement of Masonry in Mexican history. The Scottish and York saga was followed by another distinct era in Mexican Masonic history, that of the presidency of Benito Juárez (1855-1872).

 Juárez was Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge which had been established in 1825. His Masonic allegance is usually mentioned in connection with his anticlericalism. His National Grand Lodge seems to have died with him in 1872: “It probably suffered a quiet decline and disappearance, partly because of the death of Juárez and partly because of the revolutionary change by the rise of state Grand lodges and the federal Gran Dieta...”.

     Today the Masonic membership of Mexican presidents, and Masonry’s semi-legendary status as guardian of the republic,  are promoted  by Mexican lodges. The notion, which lodges constantly press, of  Masonry as the font of patriotism, resembles the self-assumed patriotic function of  lodges in the United States. For Juárez, one only needs to read Washington. A cursory look at contemporary Masonic publications shows that in Mexico as well as in the United States, Masons make much of those founding fathers who were members.

  In the two countries, Masonry has contributed to the fabrication of a motherland patriotic epic. The growth of  legends about Juárez is such an instance of  mytholization, but he is not the only Mexican ‘founding father’ to be so enshrined:
 ...what people say about Juárez they often say about other historical personalities and about Mexico itself...Study of this myth, as well as any other, can have value as a means to identify and understand the attitudes, values, and aspirations of Mexicans. Indeed, it and other myths deserve the closest examination, for they both shape and reflect attitudes and can have long-range consequences.

         The Juárez era was followed by the long presidency and dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1880, 1884-1911). Mexican and Masonic folklore has suggested he benefited as a young man from his membership in the Craft. The story is often told that,  when he was on a ship going to Veracruz in 1870, he confided his identity to Alexander K.Coney, a member of Loge la  Parafite Union  No.17 of San Francisco and the vessel’s pursar. Díaz confided to Coney that there was a fifty-thousand dollar price put on his head by Juárez, but Coney kept the secret when the ship was searched by Mexican soldiers.

        These events have been treated sceptically by serious scholars.  They are suggestive of the cherry-tree myths which grew up around Washington and of the war hero stories about Kennedy: the enhancement of the leader by tales which illustrate to his early heroism and daring, and to his selection by fate. The story about Díaz has generally been depreciated. For example, the prosopographer and biographer William Denslow scornfully calls it “unverified”.

           We have had the opportunity in the archives of the Grand Lodge of California to confirm that the incident actually occurred. Loge la Parafite Union was established in 1851 and had a large number of members from Mexico, Latin America, and elsewhere overseas. Its rituals differed from other California lodges and frequently it received visitors from exotic places, including Tahiti. Its official history and its manuscript records substantiate the story about Díaz and the courage of Coney:

  There is one among them we hope will soon occupy the Oriental Chair of that Lodge — the protector and saver of the life of a Brother Master Mason, who was a fugitive and the price of fifty thousand dollars offered for his head. That once fugitive, persecuted and hunted even to the very verge of death, is now at the head of all true Masonry in his country, which has been made free indeed through his instrumentality — our Most Worshipful and Illustrious Bro.Porfirio Diaz, 33º, Grand Master of Masons and the President of the Mexican Republic to-day — and the Brother who shielded him in his darkest hour is Illus. Bro.Alexander K. Coney, 32º, Senior Warden of Loge La Parfaite Union, No.17, and Consul-General of Mexico at San Francisco...Haut le Calice! A la hauterur du front. Vive le Loge La Parfaite Union! A moi, pur la batterie! Acclamation!

  In respects, this account of Díaz’s life being saved by a rother Mason so he could become  Mexico’s president has resemblances to the interesting account by Bro.Eben Gould in Transactions (Vol. XX, 1991) of the escape by John W.Tompson from a British warship during the War of 1812. Elements are the same: a story with aspects of  folklore which needs to be verified and which turns out to be true, a rescue thanks to brother Masons who put their Masonic vows ahead of other consideration, a fruitful life following the escape.

  Díaz in the 1880s assumed grand mastership of the Grand Lodge. This was the same period in which he was systematically consolidating his political base.
 Such was the totemistic power of  the presidency of  Juárez, that Díaz, who had fallen out with him, felt compelled to invoke his shade and imitate him. After the death of his old friend and foe, he seized Masonic leadership in Mexico and kept it until his fall from power in 1911. He did nothing to tarnish the reputation of  his predecessor, instead enthusiastically glorifying Juárez’s contributions at every opportunity.

 Díaz’s  supporters were thus free to invoke the spirit of Juárez and claim to be the guardians of his republican tradition.
  Freemasonry clearly was used to buttress Díaz’s assertions of political legitimacy. This was in the face of the Church, which condemned the Masons as the embodiment of secularizing modernity. Pope Leo XIII singled out the fraternity in his encyclical Humanum genus (20 April 1884) as the Invida  Diaboli, and asked the world episcopate to uproot this “wicked pestilence” (impuram luem),  as did Pope Leo XIII’s bitter letter Annum ingressin sumus (19 March 1902). (However, Leo’s outrage was born of a greater fear, it: “...was not just the fanatic hatred of  individual Freemasons and the animosity of the whole organization toward the Catholic Church. Reconciliation of the modern world with tradition was no longer in anyone’s power.”
  In the éxpose Barbarous  Mexico (1910), John Kenneth Turner wrote, “Díaz is the head of the Masons in Mexico, yet he nominates every new bishop and archbishop the country gets. Church marriages are not recognized as legal, yet Díaz has favored the church so far as to refuse to enact a divorce law, so that today there is no such thing as divorce or re-marrige during the life of both parties in Mexico. Constantly is Díaz trying to fool the people as to his own motives.”

  As far as Mexican Masonry itself is concerned, we feel that Díaz may have played a part not unlike that of the dictatorial Duke of Sussex in England, who gathered up most of the Masonic grand titles there after the union of the Ancients and the Moderns in the early nineteenth century and who has been accused of  deciding which rites and which rituals would lie dormant and which would be promoted. As far as Mexican politics are concerned, the question is that while Díaz became dictator of Mexico, he also became  dictator of  Mexican Masonry —  but was it at least a touch of vice versa?

  In summary, Freemasonry played an extremely important part in Mexican political history in the nineteenth-century. (It has continued to do so, but that is another story.) However, attention to the political realities has seldom intruded on the stories told by both friends and foes of the order. Those unfamiliar with the supposedly Royal Craft are seldom successful in explaining the role of the Scottish and York Masons, although every Mexican schoolchild learns about the politial confrontation between the two groups. Those without a knowledge of Masonic history have difficulty in  understanding why the major figures in Mexican politics have been preoccupied with Masonry. Those with a knowledge have often been highly partisan. To understand Mexican history it is essential to have an appreciation of the role of Masonry, but an enormous amount of research lies ahead before Freemasonry can be given its rightful place in studies of the Mexican regimes from the time of Iturbide to now.