Contents
The President's Corner The Annual Report
TANSTAAFL'S LAW Pythagoras and Freemasonry
Colonel Franklin Lane Wofford, U.S.A. In Memoriam
Happy Birthday Richard Saunders Henry Ford
Something To Think About Letter To The Editor
Christianity and American Freemasonry The Versatile Ben Franklin
Jerry Marsengill, FPS, Editor
401 Masonic Temple, 1011 Locust St.
Des Moines, IA 50309 (515) 244-2540
OFFICERS
Jerry Marsengill, FPS President
401 Masonic Temple, 1011 Locust St.
Des Moines, IA 50309 (515) 244-2540
John Mauk Hilliard, FPS. 1st Vice President
Lehman College
Bronx, New York 10468 (212) 960-8363
Wallace E. McLeod, FPS 2nd Vice President
Victoria College University of Toronto
73 Queen's Park Crescent
Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 1 K7
Allen E. Roberts, FPS. Executive Secretary
Drawer 70, 110 Quince Ave.
Highland Springs, VA 23075 (804) 737-4498
Henry G. Law, FPS Treasurer
2508 E. Riding Dr.
Wilmington, DE 19808 (302) 737-9083
Harold L. Davidson, MPS Librarian
The Philalethes Society 1903 10th St. W.
Billings, MT 59102 (406) 259-1552
LIVING PAST PRESIDENTS
Philalethes Society
William R. Denslow
Robert V. Osborne, FPS
Eugene S. Hopp, FPS
Dwight L. Smith, FPS
Robert L. Dillard Jr. FPS
Bruce H. Hunt, FPS
Allen E. Roberts, FPS
John R. Nocas, FPS
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY EMERITUS
Carl R. Greaten, FPS
S. Brent Morris, FPS
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CONTENTS
The President's Corner
The Annual Report
Tanstaafl's Law
"Pythagoras and Freemasonry'
The Sage Within"
Lost: A Past President
Librarian Needs Back Issues
Colonel Franklin Lane Wolford, U.S.A.
James Royal Case, FPS
Happy Birthday Richard Saunders
Henry Ford
Something To Think About
Full of Sound and Fury
The History Fund Is Growing
Christianity and American Freemasonry
The Versatile Ben Franklin
Through Masonic Windows
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THE COVER
Our cover this month shows the Knights of Temple Commandery No. 4 at the annual Easter Observance, Masonic Temple Building, Des Moines, lowa.
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by Jerry Marsengill, FPS
This is the first opportunity I have had a chance to write you as President of the Society: Now, there is a wasted line if ever I saw one. You know that without the necessity of my telling you.
That is what I want to write about. You won't be seeing a President's corner each month unless I have something to say. I see no use of filling up space with my driveling which could be better used by some much better writer.
This time I do have something to say. The magazine will make no great turnaround merely because I hold the office of President. We will continue to carry articles of general Masonic interest. Some of these will please most of the membership. Some of them will please no one. If we please or if we displease everyone I will start to worry.
If no one ever complains then we have a magazine which is so bland that no one will want to read it. On the other hand, if we run articles which no one likes it's time for us to take a good look at our editorial policy. We can't please everyone, nor do we intend to try. Some of the articles may be abrasive, some may be offensive to some people but we will continue to seek out and to print articles of interest. If they are controversial so much the better. We hope most of our selections please you. We also hope that they will stimulate your mind and cause you to think about some of the problems of our fraternity.
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by Allen Roberts, FPS
The Executive Board met in the Hotel Washington on February 12, 1988. There were present: John R. Nocas, President; Jerry Marsengill and John Mauk Hilliard, First and Second Vice Presidents; Allen E. Roberts, Executive Secretary; Henry G. Law, Treasurer; Bruce H. Hunt, Past President; and Wallace E. McLeod.
The election of the following officers for 1988-90 was certified:
President, Jerry Marsengill
First Vice President, John Mauk Hilliard
Second Vice President, Wallace E. McLeod
Executive Secretary, Allen E. Roberts
Treasurer, Henry G. Law
The President-elect made the following appointments:
Edward R. Schmidt, Chaplain
Harold L. Davidson, Librarian
Wallace McLeod, Chairman, Certificate of Literature Committee along with John Hillard and Mervin Hogan.
The duties of the Librarian were broadly outlined to include: the collection and distribution of back issues of The Philalethes; to provide photo copies of articles requested; and such other duties as may from time to time be considered appropriate. He will determine payments and charges for the services he renders.
It was reported that microfiched copies of the following magazines are now available:
The Philalethes, selling price $65
The Builder, selling price $89
The Master Mason, selling price $33
These may be ordered through the Executive Secretary. It was decided to see what the results are from the foregoing before considering other publications to make available.
Charters were granted for Michigan Chapter of Research and Hawaii Chapter of Research.
It was reaffirmed that every member of The Philalethes Society will receive a free copy of Seekers of Truth, the 60 year history of the Society. It was also determined that at least 500 extra copies will be printed to offer to new members after the initial mailing. It was also determined to offer multiple copies to Research Lodges, Macoy Publishing, and others at a pre-publication price.
It was determined to establish a "History Fund" for the Society to which donations, including memorial gifts and gifts in honor of individuals, will be accepted and encouraged.
The Board decided against offering a correspondence course at this time, mainly because those who have the ability to administer such a course do not have the time to do it. The issuing of dues cards along with the statement of dues owing has proven successful and will be continued. However, the cards will be in one-color in the future to hold down expenses.
The Workshop remains a success and will be continued under a new name - The Forum. This will continue to follow the Assembly and Feast. It was noted that the wine costs about $2.50 per person - the meal over $20. The Board, however, insists on serving wine for toasts and the cost of the meal will continue to be subsidized.
The election of the following as Fellows of The Philalethes Society was affirmed: Royal C. Scofield, Dr. Charles R. Glassmire, Richard H. Curtis, C. Clark Julius, and John E. Jack Kelly. Dr. Forrest D. Haggard, for his courage in supporting the principles of Freemasonry under adverse conditions, and for his dedication to the Craft and the Society, was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Robin L. Carr was awarded the Certificate of Literature for 1987.
The meeting was adjourned at 12:30 p.m., subject to the call of the President.
The registration for the Assembly and Feast was the largest ever; the number of tickets sold in the lobby was also greater. Unfortunately, several who waited until the registration had to close, had to be turned away. Union rules are such that a firm count must be given to the hotel by noon at the latest.
During the Assembly and Feast certificates were presented to the new Fellows, the medal to Forrest Haggard, and the Certificate of Literature to Robin Carr in absentia. Medallions were presented to Charles Snow Guthrie and J. Hampton Harley for their literary endeavors. It was noted that five Fellows had died during 1987, the most disastrous year suffered by the Society and Freemasonry. They were Alphonse Cerza, Ronald E. Heaton, Robert H. Gollmar, James R. Case, and Leslie L. Walker, Jr.
The Philalethes Society Lecturer was John E. Jack Kelly, FPS, who spoke of "TANSTAAFL'S Law" (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). His lecture will be published in full in The Philalethes.
The Workshop (Forum, from now on) was based on leadership. Many questions were submitted on cards and answered by a panel consisting of Allen E. Roberts, Jerry Marsengill, Wallace McLeod and Jack Kelly. For the Assembly and Feast 170 were registered this year; the Workshop brought in 92 others, most of them members of the Society. The comments on the registration cards ranged from "Good!" to "Excellent!!" Several claim the evening gets better each year.
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The 1988 Philalethes Lecture
by John E. (Jack) Kelly, FPS
I am deeply honored, and I must admit, almost astounded, to be standing here this evening, before this very august group. I have been a member of Philalethes for many years, and have always read with great admiration the learned, erudite papers delivered by the annual Philalethes Lecturer. I am neither learned nor erudite. As much as I admire men who can painstakingly research literally dozens of source documents, and develop scholarly theses, I have insufficient patience to be successful with this type of endeavor.
When Allen Roberts asked me for a subject title, I was in the midst of trying to survive as Grand Master, and in desperation, I told him: "TANSTAAFL'S Law." There was total silence at the other end of the phone, and fearing that I had lost him, I quickly added: "That's an acronym for 'There Ain't No Such Thing As a Free Lunch."' I heard him sort of sigh, as if to say, "Well, I asked him, didn't I? Then he said, "Don't pull any punches." And I reassured him that such is not my habit.
And so, this evening, I shall say little worthy of lasting, important record.. As I have said, I am not a Masonic scholar. I am a Masonic Activist! I am impatient, unreasonable, and almost unforgiving of those iminent Masons, who, like that old coyote sitting on the cactus, squall and holler about our terrible Masonic problems, and do absolutely nothing about them.
Almost every day I pick up a Masonic newsletter, bulletin, magazine, what-have-you, and read marvelous, well-thought-out, analyses of today's Freemasonry. About 98 percent of these fine articles have one common deficiency: their conclusions are couched in generalities, philosophical truisms, and platitudes, without getting down to what us common folk call the "nitty gritty."
Some of my Brethren do not appreciate my discussing the question "what can we do to turn Masonry around?" I sometimes embarrass them with questions like "when was the last time you talked, one on one, to a non-Mason about Masonry?"...or..."When was the last time a man asked you for a petition for the Degrees in Masonry?"...or... "When was the last time you attended a Masonic lodge - and pitched in to help on a major Lodge project?"...or..."Do all the people with whom you come in contact know that you are a Mason - proud of your Fraternity?"
I hasten to add: I asked myself the same questions, and I didn't like some of the answers. As busy as I was in Masonry, I wasn't being asked for petitions either! I simply wasn't visible to the right people. I usually wore a Scottish Rite pin, or a Shrine pin, or a difficult-to-read Past Master's pin, a Knight Templar Cross and Crown...none of which would be recognized by a non Mason. I began to realize something else...I almost never discussed Masonry in the presence of non-Masons in my Optimist Club, my Church, at my Country Club, or in other principally non-Masonic groups.
I began a study of the situation...if my Masonry was invisible, as active as I was, what about thousands of Brethren who weren't nearly as active?
I looked at our various Masonic organizations...from our lodges to the York and Scottish Rite and Shrine...and I rediscovered what I already knew...only one - the Shrine - had any public visibility at all...and most people didn't even know they were Masons...in fact, many Shriners didn't seem to know they were Masons!
We went to work. Somehow, we had to get the attention of our membership. And in Texas, this isn't easy. It's a tremendous challenge, with some 960 lodges scattered to heck and gone across a State 850 miles wide and 800 miles long. Direct and personal communication from Grand Lodge to lodge level is difficult, particularly when we average less than two thirds of our lodges in attendance at Grand Lodge. For a number of years, Grand Masters have been trying to communicate with the lodges through a series of Conferences each year. The general practice has been to schedule 15 or 16 conferences in the major population areas, with Brethren in the rural communities coming to the cities. We struggled to make the Conferences interesting, but try as we might, we could never get two-thirds of our lodges represented at these meetings.
I decided to try a new approach. In 1987, we scheduled 40 conferences, paying attention only to strategic distance between conferences, not population. It worked. We lured 873 lodges to the Workshops, tallying 9,311 Brethren in attendance, over 2,000 more than ever before.
And we proved something else. Texas Brethren were dead tired of hearing glittering generalities and platitudinous ponderosities. They wanted specifics. They were simply not interested in listening to their leaders tell them: "Put more Masonry into Masons;" "You get out of Masonry what you put into it;" "It's not Masonry that needs changing, it's the Masons;" "Masonry hasn't lost its relevancy. Masons travel" I could go on and on. I'm as guilty as the next one. It's great to coin a phrase, and stand back and watch the pleasure on your Brother's countenance as it whistles in one ear and out the other. Oh, Masons will listen to these great maxims and catch-alls, but few will develop or take specific action to make them work unless we spell them out. Our Brethren are inherently lazy. They do not want to have to think. They want specifics. If we make a statement of philosophy or policy, we simply must follow up with detailed procedure on how to make it a part of the real world.
So we went to our Brethren with a host of specific suggestions to promote visibility and community relations and improved internal operations.
It was, in my young Grandson's words, "a show and tell" operation. And it worked. Let me recount the most astounding story of our program's success. Down on the Mexican border, on the Rio Grande, some 50 miles south-east of Laredo, lies the tiny town of Zapata. It's not much of a town, except as a winter haven for some of you winter visitors (we call 'em snowbirds). Zapata Lodge officers came to the Laredo Workshop, and got the "visibility" bug with which I was trying to contaminate them. They learned from the Workshop that they could join the State's "Adopt a Highway" litter control program. They did, and turned out 15 or 20 strong to clean highways. Two young school teachers observed this tremendous project in an area that was the eyesore of the century, became interested in this thing called Freemasonry and petitioned. This was the start. Eight months later, this little lodge of 60 members had raised 11 new Master Masons, and had four petitions working. And they're still going strong!
In the last year, we've gone a long way toward establishing visibility and community support as fundamental factors of every Masonic lodge's operation in Texas. We still have a ways to go. But we have given every lodge in the State something "to chew on," some specific, detailed blueprints they can use. I think it's working. But it proved conclusively to me, at least, that Texas Masonic leadership absolutely must meticulously obey TANSTAAFL's Law.
Okay, so much for the Blue Lodge. Let's go to my favorite subject: our appendant and affiliated bodies.
I guess my most frustrating pet peeve has to involve the Shrine.
First, I want the record to show that I have been a member and supporter of the Shrine for over 25 years, and, as a Grand Lodge Officer, I cooperated fully with Shrine activities. Like some of you, I attended the 1987 Imperial Session in Las Vegas, where 272 dissident Imperial Representatives voted to eliminate Masonic membership as a pre-requisite for the Shrine. Now, I am not sure how many of those 272 were serious and how many were simply registering a protest against some of their home Grand Lodge policies. But they did vote that way. Why? Because, they say, Blue Lodge Masonry is losing members to the point that we are endangering the ability of the Shrine to survive and to maintain the great crippled children’s and burns hospitals. Thus, they must find new sources for members.
I would like to ask each of those 272 Representatives (and the other 51 who abstained from voting) a few questions about their regular activities in their home area. Questions like I asked above, and then others, like "Assuming that you blame your membership problems on the Blue Lodges, how do you expect your Blue Lodge to grow if you - yes, you - don't participate in its growth?
"How do you expect your Blue Lodge to prosper if you support efforts of your Shrine Temple to compete with many major Blue Lodge events, and ignore the others?" (I haven't seen a member of my Divan at my Lodge's public installation in ten years).
"As a Shriner, do you care if your non-Masonic friend knows that you are a Mason, as long as he knows you are a Shriner? In other words, do you consider Masonic membership as a necessary evil, or as a privilege?"
I am sorry, my Brethren, but after I ask all these questions, I must come to the conclusion that these dissenters just don't care what happens to the Blue Lodge...they are apparently just looking for an easy way out.
Now, in defense of the Shrine, I could ask many of these same questions of the Commandery and the Scottish Rite and the other concordant bodies. If the primary answer to all of our challenges is an increase in the membership of the Blue Lodge, then the policies and practices of the Shrine, Commandery, Scottish Rite, you name it, must be aimed at enhancing this objective...not lip service, my Brethren, but detailed, specific plans and programs. These organizations take from the Blue Lodge...they have a responsibility to serve it.
I have already mentioned that simple little thing of wearing the square and compasses versus the scimitar and crescent or the cross and crown or the double eagle. Most people don't have the foggiest idea these pins are Masonic. But we go right on, shooting ourselves in the foot, wearing our beautiful little meaningless pins. I was so convinced that this is a major problem - identify - that in 1987 we geared up and sold over 35,000 Sesquicentennial square and compasses pins to Masons and their families across the State. I challenged every member of every concordant body, every man who claimed to be a Mason, to put away his special little pins for just one year. I wish I could say that I was totally successful, but I can't. But we did make tremendous progress. I can tell you for sure that we got a lot of people's attention, and I truly believe we've got something started, if we can maintain the momentum.
Here's another: all Blue Lodge public relations projects must receive maximum appendant and affiliated Body support, and these Bodies must encourage, exhort, and participate in their promotion. If your very life's blood is in that Blue Lodge, then doggone it, what are you waiting for?
And, on the subject of public relations, let's review the most successful public relations program going - the Shrine's. But have you noticed how little the average Shrine Temple does for its community? Oh, I will agree there are some notable exceptions. But, looking at the average community, consider the actual number of local citizens that are affected one way or another by assistance given to crippled and burned kids. Usually, the hospitals and the patients are a long way off, impersonal, remote. Now, somebody is going to accuse me of being opposed to our Hospitals and Burns Institutes. Not so! I simply believe that we must take off our rose-colored glasses, and begin looking at things realistically. Too many Shrine leaders tend to sit back on their "laurels" and let the crippled and burned child do all their talking for them.
My Shrine Temple...and most others I know anything about...ask a lot from my community...we ask the citizens to buy tickets to our Circuses; advertising in our Circus Programs; advertising in our Temple publication; money on street corners on Hospital Day...and on and on...but what do we give back on a purely local basis that the average John Q can relate to? Entertainment? Yes. Parades and public appearances...hospital visits by the clowns. Sounds good. But I don't think its good enough By comparison, the Knights of Columbus do infinitely more that can be measured, seen and appreciated by the average local citizen.
Texas Scottish Rite has essentially the same problem. We support with all our might our incredible Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Crippled Children. It's a wonderful place, and the citizens of the Dallas and North Texas area are well acquainted with it and support it. But, my kind American Brethren, that Hospital is 285 miles away from San Antonio, and the total number of people affected are not a good drop in the bucket in our town.
Let me illustrate what I'm trying to say. I've already tried to make my point that, as marvelous as they are, the Hospitals are of limited value for the actual promotion of Masonry in the local community. For contrast, let's talk about a national level Masonic project that is totally tailored to the local community. It's called the National Masonic Foundation for the Prevention of Drug and Alcohol Abuse Among Children. This tremendous project was proposed to and approved by the Conference of Grand Masters three or four years ago. And a few - very few - Grand Lodges have fully accepted and joined in the challenge. Here is a cause that every hamlet, village and city can adopt as its own! In every community in this country, drug and alcohol abuse are major concerns. Based on people affected, both direct and indirect, it is an astronomically greater problem than burns and orthopedics, and it is one that has grown - and is growing - all out of proportion.
Let me give you some comparative statistics: In 1986, the Shrine Hospitals and Burns Institutes had 98,000 names on their in - and - out patient rolls, with 19,400 applications approved, a total of 118,000 children involved. In that same year, the National Institute for Drug and Alcohol Abuse Information reported 6,800,000 high school students, ages 12 through 17, were current alcohol users, 3,000,000 of which were considered abusers. In the same age group, 2,660,000 children were current users of marijuana. One more: 58 percent of our high school students use illicit drugs before graduation. And a figure that has probable significance to our Burns Institutes: 53 percent of all burns deaths can be attributed to alcohol abuse.
I doubt that, of the 185-plus Shrine Temples in the United States, more than half a dozen even know the Masonic National Foundation exists. And, in all candor, I suspect that a great many Grand Lodges and Commanderies and Scottish Rite Bodies, you name it, have no official knowledge of it. But, can you imagine what a tremendous impact we could have on this tragic and frightening problem if all of the appendant Bodies and affiliated organizations would join in one big, major drive to adopt the Foundation and its objectives? Can you imagine what attention we could get in the average community if all of the local Masonic Bodies joined as one to fight this battle? Hello, Mr. TANSTAAFL!
I have been picking on the appendant and affiliated Bodies, but I assure you, I don't excuse the Grand Lodges and their constituent lodges for a moment.
Take our Texas Masonic Home and School for children, and our Home for Aged Masons, where our widows reside. We have 198,000 Texas Masons, and we care for 175 children and 70 widows under a $22 million endowment fund, while our Grand Lodge administrative system scrapes like mad to avoid deficit spending - no endowment, no trust - just cash flow. Now, I want it clearly recorded that I am proud that we take care of our own, but my Brethren, somewhere we get our priorities mixed - the impact of these two institutions on our local communities, even on our local lodges, is almost nil.
On a different tack, how many Grand Lodges have been instrumental in the establishment of State level "councils of war" composed of the leaders of the Masonic and Masonic-affiliated Bodies, designed to direct available energies toward the solution of mutual concerns? It is my understanding that, in several Jurisdictions where such councils exist, the parochial attitudes of the principals still effectively prevent much progress. I am vividly reminded of the ancient story of the two jackasses, that, tied together, starved to death trying to pull in opposite directions toward the food that was available.
Here's another: In 1987, a committee of the Scottish Rite Supreme Council, Southern Jurisdiction, reported: "Organizations tend to lose their vitality as they age until they operate only through habit or routine." Most leaders with whom I am acquainted fully agree. Okay, if we agree, why in carnation don't we do something about it? Dwight Smith, for example, has been campaigning for one of the answers - a return to the festive board-for years. How many Grand Lodges and Lodges have taken this seriously, and physically, positively, caused things to happen? Oh, we preach...and preach...but what do we do? Remember TANSTAAFL?
Here's another: public relations. Many years ago, I spent several years in Air Force public relations, and I learned the meaning of the term the hard way. There are relatively few knowledgeable people in the field, but there are literally thousands of self-proclaimed experts. And since I became active in Masonry, I have learned that most of the (quote) experts (unquote) are Masons. Why in the world can't we - the major Masonic organizations of this country - admit that we are dummies in this field, and hire experts? We should have learned something from the excellent programs of the George Washington Masonic Memorial Association, the Grand Lodge of Florida, and more recently, the Grand Lodge of New York. But that foot keeps getting more powder burns.
And so I come to the end of the tirade, and with a great sigh of relief, I shall try to retire gracefully. And the best way I know is to blame it on somebody else. Let me illustrate:
Allen Roberts said it in the 1987 Winter Royal Arch Mason, and I will paraphrase his words (well, almost): "Leadership throughout American Freemasonry has a distinct aroma. It comes from those dead horses we continue to whip."
And a fellow named Thomas Starkweather has done a pretty good job of "needlework" lately. His latest, the report on the convention of Mason haters in the same Winter issue hit me: "Masons today are ashamed to be Masons. They can't quit because of fear of reprisal by their fellow Masons. So they do the next best thing. They hide their membership." I have serious doubts regarding the thesis, but I must agree whole-heartedly with the conclusion.
And Paul Fleming, in his Knight Templar Magazine series, "Crusade for Survival," said in June, 1987: "As a consequence of their [climb to leadership], some individuals appear to lose touch with their obligations to the body politic and their integrity as men and Masons. In their haste to lead, they fail to educate, train, and involve new members. Once they have attained their personal goals, they turn and with alarmed surprise find the ranks of those they thought were following to have grown even thinner. Unquote! And most will never understand it was they that failed.
In the same magazine of December, 1987, Fleming, in talking about the need for change, said: "Beginning means overcoming that element found in all men which fears and resists change, even if without that change he knows he will die!"
Walter Winchester, in RAM's Fall 1987 Issue: "Our Fraternity will not adjust. It is time for the black crepe. Unless!
Finally, on Page 371 of the same Royal Arch Mason, Ronald Beale said: "Can we adapt to the world in which we now live, or do we pick up our tents and silently steal away?" Well, I think I can safely guarantee, that with the Marsengills, the Roberts, the Anthonys, the Starkweathers, the Flemings, the Singers, the Beales, the Winchesters, yes, even the Kellys of the Masonic world, we may go out, but we shall go kicking and screaming all the way.
Everyone of those writers agrees that we must - we must - get back to Masonic basics! We all agree that young men need the maturing effect, the uplifting philosophy, the rock-solid foundation of purpose that Freemasonry offers. In my view, our greatest single challenge is to so reorient Freemasonry that we can prove to the young man of today that our Fraternity is not some outmoded, slow moving, old man's organization, living only in the past, but a viable, dynamic set of personal values and life goals, tuned to the needs of the individual as he builds his moral and ethical "house not made with hands," - his character. But, my Brethren, if we really believe this, we must develop blueprints at lodge level to accomplish the fact. To survive, it may not be necessary to directly recruit a man to Masonry. But neither can we any longer sit back and wait for him to get curious. We must create the environment for his curiosity, his interest, to develop - and not where we are, but where he lives!
Remember TANSTAAFL's Law. American Freemasonry has all of the manpower, the knowledge, and the resources to move into the 21st Century on the crest of a new wave of optimism and progress. But if it is to be, every American Masonic leader must work for the good of the whole, bury parochialism, and put into daily practice the absolute fact that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch!
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‘The Sage Within"'
by Rev 'd . W.H. Stomper, Jr., MPS
A legend of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras (c. 582-507 B.C.) has the sage address a young man on a pilgrimage for wisdom.
He welcomes the youth, but warns him his journey, while noble, is fraught with danger: "O neophyte, if you truly seek the knowledge of the ages, you must first learn to imagine and deliberate. The life that contemplates is nobler than the life that enjoys. But remember: Fear is the deadliest foe to knowledge. The coward fancies perils which may not exist, and dies a thousand deaths. The hero conquers first in his soul."
In this legend there is a great truth for Scottish Rite Masons.
Pythagoras, who may be understood as a metaphor for the whole of Masonic teaching, warns the initiate that the greatest challenge facing man is man himself. If man is to overcome adversity, and achieve success, he must first overcome his own most base instincts.
In other words, many men think too small. They do not allow time to imagine and deliberate. They do not contemplate. And, in a crisis, they can sometimes be overcome by their fear of what they think opposes them, as opposed to what and who their true enemies might be.
The teachings of the Scottish Rite degrees are designed to expand human awareness. The degrees are structured, not only to teach important lessons of morality, but also to symbolize the journey of the human mind into the depths of the human personality.
For this reason, Freemasonry constantly presents the guide, sage, or philosopher to assist the pilgrimage. The Senior Deacon in the Lodge is such a figure. Similarly, the guide is the Master of Ceremonies in Scottish Rite ritual.
In this sense, Masonic degrees predate the insights of modern depth psychology, notably the findings of the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Jung, who was influenced by his grandfather's Masonic experiences, believed that there does exist within each man's imagination important guides or sages. In his own life, such a figure was called Philemon. (1)
To Jung, Philemon was a being with an independent existence deep within himself. He was related to Jung's awareness of the biblical prophet Elijah, but in essence was non-religious. In Jung's imagination Philemon represented superior insight. He was able to "converse" with Philemon, and the image "told" him many "illuminating ideas". (2) Philemon was not a "comfortable" image for Jung because at times he forced Jung to subjugate his own ego and personality to Philemon in order for Philemon to teach him.
In an increasingly materialistic world, Masons are profoundly fortunate to have access to a tradition which enriches the symbolic significance of life. In the careful hearing, study, and performance of our rituals, we are afforded a priceless opportunity to experience the great philosophical teachings of the ages. These insights are not just good thoughts and ideas about living life. They are possibilities for Experiencing an encounter - a relationship - with the sage, guide, and philosopher within us.
One important reason that Masonry is so strongly committed to constitutional liberty, the separation of Church and State, and to free enterprise is that each of these crucial concepts is necessary in order for the individual to experience the greatest possible liberty to explore his inner being. With these liberties, and with the language or symbolism which Freemasonry affords its initiates, the Scottish Rite Mason is uniquely able to pursue a meaningful and free life.
In a period when Freemasonry faces a double challenge of membership decline and religious criticism, it is more important that ever for our members to feel the significance of the Masonic tradition in each of their own, particular lives. Our rituals and teachings pro vice us a priceless opportunity to do this. May we not be defeated by fear, but embrace the sage and "Pythagoras" within us.
Note: The legend of Pythagoras and the youth is a paraphrase of the charge to the initiate in the first rank of Page in the Order Knights of Pythias.
1. CG. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, ed., by Aniela Jaffe, New York: Vintage Books (Random House, Inc., and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), 1963, p. 182f., cf. Jung's grandfather and Freemasonry, p. 232.
2. Ibid., pp. 183-184.
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Lost: A Past President
We've lost Lee Edwin Wells, a Past President of The Philalethes Society. Will you help us find him?
Lee Edwin Wells was a freelance writer with several books, particularly westerns, to his credit. He was born in Indiana in 1907. In 1946 he resided in Canoga Park, California, and was a member of a Masonic Lodge there. After 1955 the Lodge lost track of him. We have been carrying him on our masthead as one of our living Past Presidents.
He served as President during the reformation of the Society in 1954-55. Prior to this he was Vice President. The manuscript of the 60 year history of The Philalethes Society, Seekers of Truth, is almost complete. Until we find Lee Wells we're going to have a void. Please help us, if you can.
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Librarian
Needs Back Issues
The Librarian of The Philalethes Society, Harold L. Davidson (1903 10th St. W., Billings, MT 59102) has received numerous requests for early issues of the Philalethes. He will gladly discuss shipment and price with those who no longer need them.
For those who would like photo copies of a particular article or item, let the Librarian know. He will furnish it at a nominal cost. If he doesn't have the issue in the library, he will have our micro lab make copies from our microfiche.
He is also endeavoring to build a library of books for members of the Society and others to use. He will gladly accept all donations. Help him to help you.
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Colonel Franklin Lane Wofford, U.S.A.
by Charles Snow Guthrie, FPS
At the Civil War Battle of Mill Springs on January 19, 1862, a strangely dressed colonel was leading the recently organized First Kentucky Cavalry (Union). As described by his regimental chaplain, Colonel Frank Lane Wolford "rode the framework of an ugly roan horse, wore an old red hat, homespun brown jeans coat, and his face had been undefiled by water or razor for some time." (1) Some have commented on his colloquial commands, which were no doubt effective if not in the expected military idiom.
Regardless of odd appearance, peculiar oral language, and a background of near-poverty, Wolford had a colorful life as teacher, lawyer, politician, army officer, state legislator and official, congressman, and Mason.
Frank Wolford, as he was always called, was the oldest of six children of John and Mahala Lane Wolford. He was born on September 17, 1817, in Columbia, Adair County, Kentucky, into a family of German descent that reached Kentucky via Virginia. John Wolford was a teacher and surveyor who, in the absence of more formal educational facilities, taught his son Frank at home. The young man became a teacher at an early age, and then studied law under the guidance of Hiram Thomas, an eccentric Pennsylvanian who frequently visited the Wolfords. By this time they had moved to Rolling Fork Creek in adjoining Casey County, where the young Frank is said to have gathered pine knots to provoke light for his studies. In due time he was admitted to the bar and began the practice of law. (2)
Frank Wolford seems to have been a natural orator and would always practice that art. His penchant for making speeches would stand him in good stead as a country lawyer and politician. However, it would cause him serious trouble when as a colonel during the Civil War he made a speech which his more radical superiors did not like.
During the Mexican War, Wolford was made captain of a company raised in Casey County. He was not to serve as an officer in that conflict, however, because the quota of Kentuckians was filled before his company could be received into the service. Consequently Wolford served as a private in Captain B. Daugherty's company of Colonel William R. McKee's regiment of Kentucky. A Baptist layman, he sometimes officiated at burials as the regiment had no regular chaplain. At the Battle of Buena Vista (February 22-23, 1847, he helped, at considerable personal danger, to bring from the field his mortally-wounded Colonel McKee. Here, too, Wolford saw in action a youthful Jefferson Davis. (3) This is all the military experience he had had when he organized the First Kentucky in 1861.
When he returned from the war in 1847, Wolford was elected to the Kentucky legislature as the representative of Russell and Casey Counties. Little is known about his next few years. Apparently he was practicing law. On November 2, 1849, he married Miss Nancy Devers of Casey County. There is a tradition that he built their first home of logs which he carried on his shoulders. Four children were born to them, the youngest dying late in 1858. Nancy died in 1860. (4)
Wolford's Masonic initiation took place about 1852 or 1853 in Jonathan Lodge No. 78 in Liberty. The only available records of this now-deceased lodge are its annual returns to the Grand Lodge of Kentucky printed in the annual Proceedings of that body. In 1854 and 1859 he is listed as Junior Warden. No report appears for 1860, but in 1861 Wolford is listed as a past master. He appears thus through 1874, after which reports of Jonathan Lodge cease.
When the Civil War began, Union Brigadier-General William Nelson authorised Frank Wolford and William J. Landram to raise a regiment of cavalry in Kentucky. Accordingly, on July 17, 1861, Wolford made a speech at Mount Olive Church in eastern Casey County, "when all able-bodied men volunteered for service." (5)
Recruiting continued apace, with the troops to begin duty at Camp Dick Robinson in Garrard County on the first Tuesday after the August election. On that day recruits from thirteen Kentucky counties and a few from northern Tennessee assembled. Colonel Landram resigned and Wolford was appointed colonel in his place. Wolford was forty-five years of age at the time. Serving with him as lieutenant-colonel was Silas Adams of Casey County, who through the years would be Wolford's personal friend, although at times a political enemy. (6)
Most of the young men recruited were accustomed to wild riding, hunting, shooting, and life in the outdoors. Their services to the nation would be invaluable in the coming years. In fact, so badly needed were they in 1861 that they received only minimal training, as had Wolford twenty years before. Nevertheless the First Kentucky helped defeat a small Confederate force at Camp Wildcat in the Kentucky mountains on October 21. (7)
At the beginning of the war, the Confederates held a thinly-stretched line from Columbus on the Mississippi River, through northwest Tennessee and southern Kentucky to Bowling Green on the L and N Railroad and Barren River. Mill Springs on the upper Cumberland River and Cumberland Gap at the Kentucky Tennessee Virginia corner completed the positions they would attempt to hold in Kentucky. The First Kentucky took part in the Battle of Mill Springs, and here by the defeat and death of Confederate General Felix K. Zollicoffer (a Mason), helped initiate the action that would drive the main Confederate forces from the state. (8)
The next battle of consequence for Wolford was at Lebanon, Tennessee, on May 5, 1862. Here he was seriously wounded in a fight with the forces of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan, another Kentucky Mason. The Union Soldiers engaged the Confederates in a brief battle. During the melee, Wolford and some of his men rode unwittingly into Morgan's ranks and were captured. Wolford was wounded by the enemy, but was retaken by his own mend The wounds he received here would plague him the remainder of his life. He received a leave of thirty days after the battle.
Wolford and his men were among the hard-riding troops pursuing Morgan during his ill-fated raid of 1863 that ended with his capture in Ohio. When Morgan sensed that he would be captured, he attempted to surrender to Ohio militia Captain James Burbeck. The terms of the surrender were such that the officers and men would be allowed to keep their horses, the officers their side-arms, and all were to be paroled. Brigadier-General James M. Shackelford was Wolford and Burbeck's superior. Shackelford would not accept these terms, although Wolford urged him to do so. (10) Here we see emerging a side of Wolford's character that would show up prominently later when he would urge amnesty for the defeated Confederate soldiers at the end of the war.
After the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate States, Wolford and several other Union officers reportedly met in Lebanon, Kentucky, to consider what their personal reactions to this would be. Wolford was late arriving, and the others had signed a letter of resignation in protest before Wolford came. When he arrive, he opposed the resignations on the ground that it would be unfair to the men who had served under them, and the others rescinded their actions. (11)
However, Wolford was not permitted to serve his troops to the end of the war. On March 10, 1864, the citizens of Lexington and Fayette County presented him with a "splendid sword, sash, pistols, and spurs." In accepting these, Wolford made a speech that was responsible for his being arrested and dishonorably discharged from the army. In the speech he denounced the recently-announced policy of enrolling Negroes in the army. His opposition to this was based on the taking of citizens' property (the slaves) without compensation. He was arrested on a charge of speaking disrespectfully of the President. Three more arrests would follow further actions of Wolford in supporting George B. McClellan, the Democratic nominee for the presidency against Lincoln. (12)
Wolford, a Union Democrat, spoke at the "Union Democratic Convention" in Louisville on May 24. Supporting McClellan, Wolford became a presidential elector and would cast his vote for McClellan. He was again an elector in 1868 when the Kentucky Delegation voted for Horatio Seymour who was running against Ulysses S. Grant. (13)
On June 1, 1864, Governor Thomas Bramlette (a Mason) authorized Wolford to raise a regiment of six months' men to defend the citizens from the guerrillas who were ravaging many sections of the state. One of Wolford's arrests came on June 27 when he was about to muster the six months' men into service. He was sent to Washington in chains. Supposedly this was at the order of General Stephen T. Burbridge, to keep Wolford out of the presidential campaign. While in prison there, Wolford addressed a famous letter to President Lincoln upon the rights of citizens in matters of opinion. This letter was written in excellent standard English, (14) thus belying the belief that he was unable to use acceptable grammar and pronunciation.
Wolford's activities in favor of McClellan almost cost his life later in 1864. He barely escaped assassination and throughout the remainder of his life believed that only the intervention of Providence averted his murder at the direct order of General Stephen G. Burbridge, (15) who was in charge of military affairs in Kentucky.
The election came and went. McClellan carried Kentucky, but on November 21 Wolford was arrested again and sent to Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. From there he was to be sent into the Confederacy. However, through the influence of Governor Bramlete with President Lincoln, he was eventually released. (16)
Somehow during all this turmoil, Wolford had found time to court Miss Elizabeth Bailey of Casey County. They were married on April 6, 1865 (17) The war ended a few days later, and with it also ended the controversy over Wolford's role in the election. He was free to return to politics.
Later that year Wolford opposed Colonel Silas Adams, who had succeeded him as commander of the First Kentucky, in a race for the representative's seat in the state legislature from Russell and Casey Counties. Wolford had gone into the Democratic Party, while Adams was a Republican in a district in which Union sentiment was almost solid. Wolford ran on a platform of "universal, complete, and absolute amnesty" for the former Confederates. On the Saturday before the election, the two popular lawyers and orators closed the campaign in their county seat of Liberty. Adams asked Wolford if he would be willing to pardon Jeff Davis. In reply, Wolford made an emotion-laden statement about Davis's actions at Buena Vista during the Mexican War. The crowd, in an equally emotional response, carried him through the town on their shoulders, cheering as they went. Wolford won the election by six votes, and was reselected in 1867. (18)
Also in 1867 Governor John W. Stevenson appointed Wolford Adjutant General of the state of Kentucky. In this office he was successful in using the state militia to quell civil disturbances that still plagued the state in the aftermath of the war. (19)
In 1872, Wolford opposed Grant's reelection by several speeches. He always referred to the men who had served under him as his "boys". At one of these he caused a Republican speaker to abandon the campaign by "proving" by one of his boys that Grant had hanged Lee on an apple tree after the surrender. (20)
Meanwhile Wolford continued to practice law. In 1879 he moved to Columbia where he lived the remainder of his life. In 1882 he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination as Clerk of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky. Althrough he did not win this nomination, the legislature formed a new congressional district from which he was elected in 1882 and 1884. (21)
Many stories have been told of Wolford's uncouth appearance, his use of archaic oral language, and his carelessness with money. Despite his own moderate circumstances, Wolford was sympathetic and helpful to those less fortunate than himself. (22)
Death took the old warrior at 3:53 P.M. on August 2, 1895. (23) He suffered the consequences of the wound received in the Battle of Lebanon in 1862 and from another suffered elsewhere. According to a pension application filed in 1879, he stated that he suffered from "a permanent fall of the lower bowels," and from a wound which had never healed in his right knee. He also had bronchitis, contracted in the service. (24)
Wolford's funeral was conducted in the courthouse in Columbia on Sunday, August 5, 1895. The three speakers were Judge James Garnett of Columbia, 'former Governor Proctor Knott, and Colonel Silas Adams. All the Masonic lodges in the county and some from adjoining counties took part in the committal services at the grave in the Columbia Cemetery, overlooking a tributary of Green River. (25)
Columbia Lodge No. 96 adopted resolutions of respect which were spread on their minutes and published in the Masonic Home Journal and the Columbia Spectator. The local Bar Association also published resolutions honoring Colonel Wolford in the Spectator.
At Colonel Wolford's grave, facing east, there stands a weather-beaten, sixfoot marble shaft with this inscription:
While The Earth
Remaineth
(Emblem of reaping hook
and sheaf of wheat)
Seedtime and
Harvest
Shall Not Cease
Frank L. Wolford
Sept. 2, 1817
Aug. 2, 1895
His record is on High
So ended the career of a Mason who preferred dishonor to compromise of his beliefs; who fought a good fight for his country; and who finally reaped from his friends, neighbors, and brother Masons the honor due him for a wellspent life.
Notes
1. E. Tarrant, The Wild Riders of the First Kentucky Cavalry (Louisville: A Committee of the Regiment, 1894. Rept. Lexington: The Henry Clay Press, 1969), 61.
2. Tarrant, 20; Frank Wolford File, Adair County Public Library. Cited below as Wolford File.
3. Tarrant, 20.
4. Wolford File, Tarrant, 20.
5. Gladys C. Thomas, Casey County, Kentucky, 1806-1983, 110: Tarrant, 18.
6. Terrant, 9-15, 392; Thomas, 118.
7. Lewis and Richard H. Collins, History of Kentucky, (Frankfort, Ky.: Kentucky Historical Society, 1966, I, 96; Tarrant, 30, 32.
8. Collins, I, 99; Tarrant, 57-65.
9. Basil W. Duke, A History of Morgan's Cavalry, ed. Cecil Fletcher Holland (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1960. Rept., Millwood, N.J.: Kraus Reprints, 1981), 86-87; Tarrant, 83-90.
10. Duke, 453-58; Collins, I, 156.
11. "Col. Frank Wolford," (Glasgo, Ky.) Semi-Weekly News, Dec 31, 1897, 1.
12. Collins, 132, 133.
13. Ibid., 133, 371.
14. Savoyard (Edwin I. Newman), "Wolford's First Surrender," The Courier-Journal, August 3, 1895, 1, 10.
15. Savoyard, 10; Collins, 141, 144.
16. Ibid., 148, 149, 371.
17. Wolford File.
18. "Savoyard," 1.
19. Collins, 182.
20. William O. Bradley, Stories and Speeches of William O. Bradley (Lexington, Ky.: Transylvania Press, 1916, 12-13.)
21. Savoyard, 10; Wolford File.
22. Hambleton Tapp, "Incidents in the Life of Colonel Frank Wolford . . .," Filson Club History Quarterly, 10 (1936), 82-99. Rept. in A Kentucky Sampler, ed. Lowell H. Harrison and Nelson L. Dawson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977), 241-59. Also see Judge Rollin Hurt, "Some Great Lawyers of Kentucky," Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Kentucky State Bar Association, 1921 (Louisville: Kentucky State Bar Association, 1921), 124-47.,
23. "Fought His Last Battle," Columbia Spectator, Aug. 8, 1895. Clipping in Filson Club Library.
24. Wolford File.
25. "Fought His Last Battle."
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James Royal Case, FPS
November 28, 1894 - November 26, 1987
by Allen E. Roberts, FPS
Rare, indeed, does a man leave behind a legacy that will live forever. Rare is the man who becomes a legend in his life-time. Rare is the man whom his peers continually honor while he is living among them. James Royal Case was one of these unique individuals.
Jim was born in Connecticut, and in Connecticut he received the education that would take him to higher learning in New York City (where he earned his Masters degree), Chicago, back to New York, into World War I and World War II (and retire as a Colonel), and back to his beloved Connecticut. Throughout his long and fruitful life he was a teacher, not only earning his livelihood as one, but using his knowledge to enrich the lives of countless other men and women.
Brother Case could boast (which he never did) of being one of the few of the Mayflower descendants; that he belonged to Epsilon Sigma Phi and Phi Mu Delta; that he served in both World Wars; that he was a member of many civic and national associations; that he was one of the most highly decorated and honored Freemasons in the country.
Brother Case loved deeply: his wife Bess whom he married in 1918, his children, Grace, Maurice, Julie May, and J. Richard; his vocation; his research in genealogy; his Masonic research; his writing on numerous subjects; his fellowman: his Freemasonry.
Much can (and perhaps should) be written on each of these subjects, but it is his Freemasonry with which we are concerned here. A large-sized volume would be required to cover this topic fully. In brief: In 1916 James Case became a Master Mason in Uriel Lodge No. 24, Connecticut, the beginning of a long and fruitful Masonic career. He was active in Virginia Freemasonry while stationed at Fort Eustis. He participated in all branches of the Craft and was Grand Historian in Connecticut of the Grand Lodge, Grand Chapter and Grand Commandery. He received the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite, NMJ. He was awarded Masonic medals from several jurisdictions and appendant bodies. One of these, the Medal of Excellence of the Masonic Research Lodge of Connecticut became, the James Royal Case Medal of Excellence. He was an Honorary Member of American Union Lodge No. 1 of Ohio, an honor granted him because of his writings about Freemasonry during the Revolutionary period.
Jim was a Fellow of The Philalethes Society and wrote extensively for its magazine. He had earned its first Certificate of Literature in 1958. He was a constant contributor to the Knight Templar magazine. Many items from this magazine were compiled by the Missouri Research Lodge into The Case Collection: Biographies of Masonic Notables in two volumes. He was Deputy Grand Abbot of the Society of Blue Friars and a member of the Council of the Nine Muses of the Allied Masonic Degrees. He was a Past Grand Chancellor of Grand College of Rites. He was an original member of the Masonic Brotherhood of the Blue Forget-Me-Not.
Brother Case was with his daughter, Julie and her family, to celebrate Thanksgiving and his 93rd birthday when the aneurysm he knew he had claimed him for the Celestial Lodge Above.
Through the literature, friends, loved ones and character exemplified by James Royal Case, he will continue to live where freedom exists.
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Happy Birthday Richard Saunders
by Jack Sodom, MPS
January 17, 1706 is a date to remember. Why? On this date we commemorate the birthday of our late Grand Master Richard Saunders. This month 18 brothers celebrate their Masonic birthdays. Brethren, you are in excellent company because Saunders was one of the foremost Masons in World History. This all-around Capricornian is probably best remembered for his role in separating the American colonies from England and in helping to frame the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. He had made a small fortune and is regarded as the harbinger of American entrepreneurship. The 10th son of 17 children of a candlemaker he ended his formal education at the age of 10.
Many of us are interested in knowing in what sign of the zodiac we were born and what the stars have to reveal for us. To some of us, astrology is an alluring old superstition. Whether or not you put any credence in astrology, it is fascinating to note, that Richard Saunders' horoscope correlated well with his character, personality, and destiny. The below characteristics are symbolic of the Capricornian in general, and Saunders in particular:
They are people who direct and organize their lives and perform with indefatigable energy
They reach their goals with the surefootedness and determination of the goat
They are eager to learn and benefit from the experiences of others
They are prudent and test each step before trusting themselves in a new venture
Capricornians are fond of the opposite sex and are inclined to be capricious in emotional matters
The above astrological assumptions represent not only the typical Capricornian, but describe several personality traits that made Benjamin Franklin, pseudonym Richard Saunders, a Freemason par excellence.
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by C. Clark Julius, FPS
Born in 1863, during the American Civil War, Henry Ford grew up on a farm in Michigan. In the eyes of his parents he was a lazy boy. His brothers and sister were good workers, but Henry shirked his chores. As an adult, he would say, "My earliest recollection is that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place."
Milking cows and slaughtering chickens disgusted him. All his life he hated dairy products and poultry. "Milk is a mess," he said. "Chicken is fit only for hawks."
He hated horses, too. At age nine he was tossed by a mare named Jennie. His foot caught in the stirrup and he was dragged a long way over rocks and saplings. He never trusted a horse again.
His parents, were stern Presbyterians who did their best to instill a work ethic in their children. Henry's mother told him, "Life will give you many unpleasant tasks to do. Your duty will be disagreeable and painful-but you must do it. You may have pity on others, but you must not pity yourself." Henry did not believe her.
He was a quiet, bashful, inarticulate boy who spent a lot of time by himself, hiding out in wild corners of the farm to avoid work. He did a lot of thinking, and his ideas were rebellious.
He refused to go to church. "I was never especially religious," he once wrote. "I went to Sunday School sometimes but I never thought it amounted to much. I think I saved a lot of valuable time by staying away from church."
He got into a lot of mischief, stealing watermelons, playing pranks, and tinkering with other people's belongings. He broke his sister's mechanical toys by taking them apart. He whittled his mother's knitting needles into tiny screwdrivers. He stole his father's pocket watch and disassembled it.
In school he rigged an elaborate device that caused the sharp end of a pin to rise from a hole Henry had drilled in a bench where a classmate sat. This gadget was triggered by a long string that led to Henry's desk on the far side of the room. Back on the farm, he rigged another device that was activated by a long rope. It caused a bucket of water to be emptied on the heads of the hired men, as they smoked their pipes in the shade of a tree.
One summer afternoon in 1876, Henry was riding to market with his father when their wagon suddenly confronted a steam-powered roadroller. The huge machine belched smoke as it lumbered up the road at its top speed of two miles per hour. Although Henry was usually shy of strangers, he jumped off the wagon-box, ran to the steamroller, leaped aboard, and began shouting questions at the driver. Amused by Henry's enthusiasm, the driver stopped his machine and showed Henry the chain drive that made the rear axle turn.
From that day forward, Henry was determined to become a mechanic. He said, "I wanted to take all the hard work off the backs of men and lay it onto steel and motors."
In school, Henry talked some boys into helping him build a steam turbine. "Henry had a knack for getting other people to do all the work," one of the participants in this experiment recalled. The turbine was built mainly of wooden parts. During a test in the schoolyard it exploded, cutting Henry's lip, knocking a classmate out cold, and setting fire to the schoolyard fence, which burned to the ground.
When Henry was thirteen years old, his mother died in childbirth. The family's grief eventually leveled off into a gloom that persisted for years. Henry felt happy only when he was tinkering or dreaming about machines. The rest of the time, he felt miserable. At age fifteen, he decided to move to Detroit to look for work as a mechanic.
His father advised against Henry's plan. Farmers were prosperous at that time, because the price of food was high but mechanics were poor because immigration from Europe was creating a surplus of machinists, driving wages down. "There's no future in machinery," the senior Ford advised.
But Henry was not interested in a practical, profitable career. He wanted piece of mind, and he knew that working in a machine shop would make him feel good. He moved to Detroit and found work in one of the many machine shops in the grimy part of town near the docks.
When he learned that his wages could not cover the cost of room and board, Henry found a second, part-time job at night, repairing watches for a jeweler. Almost from his first evening on the job, Henry demonstrated an intuitive understanding of clockwork mechanisms. Within weeks he could repair watches faster than the jeweler, who had spent a lifetime learning his trade.
Paid by the watch at the jeweler's, Henry was soon making money at a brisk rate there. On an hourly basis, his pay was six times higher at the jewelry shop than at the machine shop. Another boy might have quit the machine shop to work full-time at the jeweler's, but not Henry. He continued to work twelve-hour days at the machine shop, for fun. Then he would fix watches for an hour or two, to pay the rent.
During the next six years, Henry worked briefly at every machine shop in Detroit. His foremen later recalled, "He was not much of a worker." Instead of concentrating on his assigned tasks, Henry liked to wander around the shop, watching other men work and learning how they ran the various machines. As soon as Henry felt that he understood all the machinery in one shop, he would quit and go to work at another shop, with different machines. He was giving himself an education. "Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer," he said.
Although he never advanced past the level of journeyman machinist, Henry soon became brilliant at fixing broken machinery. If a drill press or lathe refused to work properly, Henry always figured out the problem faster than anyone else. He was the smartest, laziest man in any shop. Despite his brilliance as a repairman, Henry's favorite mechanical activity was building brand-new gadgets of his own design. He had no training as an engineer, and could not design on paper. He therefore designed by tinkering. He thought with his hands, experimenting, intuiting.
Every Sunday he tinkered with a new project. A friend later recalled how Henry and he started building a steam engine one Sunday. "We never did get the engine finished. Henry always had another idea...We started an eight-day clock that didn't go. We never put the clock together either. Then Henry wanted to build a boat. We had to have lumber. My mother gave us the money. We bought boards (but) we never put it in the water. Every Sunday we started something and never finished it."
Henry did not care if he finished a mechanical project, because his purpose in tinkering was purely intellectual. Once he knew why his project was a failure, he was perfectly satisfied.
By the time he turned twenty-one, Henry was still quite poor. He was skinny, nervous, and shy. When introduced to any girl, he turned bright red and lost his voice. He read newspapers, technical journals, and oddities like a treatise on the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation.
Henry decided that reincarnation explained his intuitive brilliance as a repairman. He felt that he had been a clockmaker in previous lives, and therefore had centuries of on-the job experience.
Most people liked Henry, but found him a little peculiar. He was a cleanliving man: no tobacco, no alcohol, no women. On the other hand, he sometimes talked like a low-life sinner, saying, "Hard work is a waste of time" and "Church is a waste of time." When somebody was annoyed by one of Henry's unconventional opinions, and tried to challenge it, Henry just shrugged and walked away. He could not explain or defend his opinions. He was an intuitive, illogical person, not an intellectual.
He was a good dancer, but was too terrified of girls to ask one to date. The only girls he accompanied to dances were his two female cousins who lived in Detroit.
In the winter of 1884 Henry escorted his cousins to a square dance. Opposite Henry in one quadrille there suddenly appeared Miss Clara Jane Bryant, aged eighteen. She was plump and round-faced, with kind eyes. Although she was hardly the best-looking girl at the dance, she bore a strong resemblance to Henry's late mother. He took one look at Clara and fell obsessively in love.
Henry worked up enough courage to introduce himself before another partner whirled Clara away. Henry spent the rest of the evening watching from a distance as Clara danced with others.
Clara was the sort of girl who gets to dance with all the boys. She was neither homely nor intimidatingly beautiful. She was friendly, and too soft-hearted to risk hurting a boy's feelings by turning down an invitation to dance. No matter who asked her for a waltz, she always obliged. And she was a good dancer.
Watching Clara's endless stream of partners, Henry decided that she was "extremely popular" and therefore certain to reject him. Human nature baffled Henry. He had trouble figuring out what made men tick, and women seemed as mysterious to him as creatures from another planet.
For the nest year Henry adored Clara from afar, never speaking a word to her. But Clara's existence gave him his first ambition: he wanted to marry her.
He acquired a second ambition in that same year of 1885, when newspapers reported that Karl Benz of Germany had invented a horseless carriage powered by an internal combustion engine. Henry immediately wanted to build his own horseless carriage. His brain, already glowing with visions of Clara, began to burn with dreams of gasoline, too.
In December of 1885, when Henry was twenty-two and Clara was nineteen, he finally gathered the courage to approach her at a dance. To his astonishment, she agreed to be his partner in a waltz.
After that, there was no stopping Henry. He asked Clara to accompany him to a minstrel show at the Whitney Opera House in Detroit. She agreed, and Henry went on his first date. As he drove her home in a borrowed sleigh, Henry asked her to marry him. She suggested that they get to know each other better, first.
It took Henry six weeks of determined effort to convince Clara to accept his proposal. He took her out two or three times a weekend, visited her on weekdays, and also wrote lots of letters full of misspelled original poetry. The tone of these letters was not flirtatious, but worshipful.
Clara had never met anyone quite like Henry. Some of their dates involved visits to steam engines. The two of them spent a lot of time discussing machinery and ideas. One of Henry's unconventional opinions was, "Women are smarter than men."
Clara's mother thought that Henry was a nice boy, but not much of a bread winner. When Clara accepted Henry's offer of marriage, Mrs. Bryant insisted that the wedding be postponed until Henry had established himself in some sort of business.
Henry's father was also worried about his son's future. To give Henry a push in the right direction, Mr. Ford offered Henry forty acres and a team of oxen.
Henry had recently begun experiments with gasoline engines, so he was reluctant to leave Detroit and its machine shops. To build a gas engine without machine shop tools was hardly possible. On the other hand, Henry needed a better income in order to marry Clara.
Accepting his father's offer, Henry moved back to the farm and began clearing trees from his forty acres. Sweating in knee-deep snow, Henry swung his axe day after day, working with fervor that astonished his father. Then Henry bought a circular saw, rented a 12 horsepower steam engine, and built himself a little sawmill. He sawed his trees into lumber and sold the wood to shipyards in Detroit.
After his own forty acres had been denuded of trees, Henry bought standing timber from neighboring farmers to feed his mill. Although he never did a lick of farming, Henry was soon prosperous enough to marry Clara. They moved into a little cabin right after the wedding, but within a year, Henry was using his own lumber to erect a new house for Clara. He and she designed and built it themselves; a pretty bungalow with plenty of Victorian gingerbread. Clara loved the place; it looked like a wedding cake.
Within three years of starting his business, Henry was making money hand over fist. He salted most of it away in the bank, but when Clara suggested that an organ for the parlor might be nice, he ran right out and bought her a brand-new one.
With her devoted husband and her new house in the country, Clara was blissfully happy for the first four years of her marriage. But one day, everything changed. Clara was sitting in her parlor, practicing at her organ, while Henry browsed through a technical journal. Suddenly, Henry jumped to his feet shouting, "I have to build a horseless carriage! I know I can do it!" He was so excited that he grabbed Clara's sheet music and began scribbling on it, sketching valves and a camshaft. "See? I can do it!" he said.
That was the end of the lumber business and the dream house in the country. To build his engine, Henry would have to live in Detroit with its machine shops. He also wanted to learn about electricity, by getting a job with the Edison Illuminating Company.
Within a month Clara found herself living in a shabby apartment with a view of docks in Detroit. Clara's reaction to the move was summed up by Henry's sister: "It almost broke her heart."
Once Clara got used to the realization that Henry's devotion to her was weaker than his infatuation with internal combustion, life in Detroit was not too intolerable. Henry started working as low-grade mechanic for Detroit Edison, but rose rapidly through the ranks. The Edison Company used a variety of steam engines to generate electric power, and those engines were always breaking down. Because Henry could fix them faster than anyone else, he was promoted to foreman within months of joining the company. By 1892, when he was twenty-nine years old, Henry was chief engineer of Detroit Edison, making a comfortable income, and had moved Clara into a comfortable rowhouse in a quiet neighborhood. In that same year, Charles Duryea of Massachusetts built the first gas-powered automobile in America.
Henry had an office at the main generating station of Detroit Edison. He converted his office into a workshop, where some Edison employees found themselves working on Henry's gas engines instead of on the company steam engines. One day, the head of the company discovered jugs of gasoline stored near the boiler room. If gasoline vapors drifted into the fireboxes of the steam engines, the whole generating station would be blown sky-high. After gingerly removing the jugs, Henry's boss ordered him to conduct his private experiments elsewhere. So Henry moved his workshop to a brick shed in his backyard.
In the winter of 1893, Clara gave birth to her first and only child, a boy. He was named Edsel. Six weeks after the baby's birth, Clara was working feverishly in her kitchen to prepare a big Christmas dinner. Edsel was napping. Suddenly, Henry rushed into the kitchen carrying his first four-cycle gas engine. In his excitement he failed to notice Clara's annoyance as he thumped the engine down on the counter, among her pots and pans, where she was trying to prepare food.
"Men!" said Clara. "This one will work!" said Henry. He wired the engine to a light fixture, grounded it on the sink, and shoved an oil can full of gasoline into Clara's hand. He told her to slowly dribble the gas into a hole atop the engine. Silently praying that nothing would blow up, she obeyed.
Henry gave the flywheel a spin. Every light in the house began flickering, then the engine roared. The whole kitchen shook as flames shot from the engine's exhaust. When the deafening racket finally ceased, Edsel was howling in terror, and the kitchen was fogged with poisonous fumes. Chuckling with happiness, Henry picked up the engine, fondled it, and scurried back to his workshop.
Because Henry was not a trained engineer, his automotive project moved ahead very slowly. Although he made rough sketches of his ideas, Henry's real creative work took place at the workbench. He would machine a part, try it out, then discard it and build an improved part. His easygoing pace made this time-consuming method even slower.
After Henry had started building his gas engines, a Detroit engineer named Charles King was inspired to try his own hand at making a horseless carriage. King completed his project much faster than Henry, putting an auto on the road in 1894. Henry's auto was not assembled until 1896, two years later.
By the time Henry finally made his first car, plenty of other Americans had not only built autos, but were manufacturing them as a business. Among these entrepreneurs were Mr. Duryea, Mr. Studebaker, Mr. Nach, Mr. Willys, and Mr. Olds.
Although Henry sold his first auto and began building a second, he gave no thought to starting a real automaking business. He continued to tinker in his backyard, and it took him a full year to build his second car. Charles King was the first man to found an automobile-manufacturing business in Detroit, hiring mechanics to build multiple copies of his original design. A competing business was founded by Ransom E. Olds, who moved to Detroit in 1899.
Some local investors thought that it was a waste of expertise for Henry to build custom cars, when King and Olds were doing a booming business. The investors persuaded Henry to quit his job at Edison to take over their Detroit Motor Company in 1899. But Henry, even with a staff of mechanics to help him, continued to work at his usual leisurely pace. After a year as president of the new company, he had produced only two cars. In disgust, the investors fired him.
Henry seemed relieved to be fired. He now devoted himself to the production of custom race cars. It became his ambition to break the world's speed record for internal combustion machines: seventy miles per hour, set by a Benz. Henry figured that the keys to speed were light weight and efficient combustion. He became particularly fascinated.
Henry's horseless carriage did not generate much excitement, because automobiles were old news when his hit the road. It had a two-cylinder engine, bicycle wheels, a belt-drive transmission, no brakes, and no muffler. According to Detroit newspapers, it made "a noise like gunpowder" and terrified the horses of teamsters. Some teamsters tried to make a citizen's arrest of Henry for "disturbing the peace" with his auto, but the charges were dismissed.
The civil authorities of Detroit liked automobiles. The city was full of machine shops, bicycle shops, and carriage shops. Automaking could employ a lot of mechanics. It might prove a profitable sideline for bicycle-makers like the Dodge brothers, and for carriage-makers like the Cadillac Carriage Company.
Although autos were too expensive and unreliable to be practical, they were already selling well as a rich man's toy. John Wannamaker sold imported models in the toy department of his exclusive store. A German Benz cost $10,000 and came loaded with nickleplated accessories and twenty coats of lacquer. It was reputed to be so complicated and temperamental that an owner had to hire a full-time mechanic to keep it running. This added immensely to the prestige of owning a Benz, and they sold briskly among the sons of tycoons.
The result of these experiments was a flame-red race car called the "999," propelled by the first internal combustion engine ever to develop more than one hundred horsepower. No road in the world was smooth enough for the "999," so Henry took it for a test drive on the frozen surface of Lake Michigan. It went ninety miles per hour.
The next day, newspapers around the world ran headlines reading, "Henry Ford, the Fastest Man Alive." Henry's sudden fame excited new interest among investors, who wanted to cash in on his celebrity.
Henry was a bit reluctant to go into business again; he was afraid that it might be no fun. On the other hand, he felt an urge to prove that the automobile could be more reliable, inexpensive, and practical than the horse.
In 1904, when he was forty-one years old, Henry finally founded the Ford Motor Company. Various Detroit businessmen put up all the money, but Henry insisted that they give him a majority of the stock. That meant that Henry could run the company exactly as he pleased, and could never be replaced as chief executive.
From the start, Henry gave his backers fits. He was not your typical businessman. Talk about profits bored him silly. He preferred to talk about his new interest in vegetarianism. "Your body is a machine," he told the stockholders. "To run efficiently, it must be fueled with pure foods."
Instead of reporting to work in the morning, Henry went jogging. He ran several miles a day, pausing only to pick and eat dandelions along the road. As his interest in vegetarianism deepened, he began living almost entirely on wild salad greens - weeds - that he gathered himself.
When he finally arrived at work, Henry spent as little time as possible in his office. He seemed to be happiest when a machine broke down, giving him an excuse to join the mechanics in some greasy repair job. Worst of all, from the investors" point of view, Henry did not care about making money. "I already have more money than I know what to do with," he claimed.
At first, Henry concentrated on engineering rather than economics. His original standard design, the ancestor of the Model T. was a real hot-rod in 1904, with a four-cylinder engine that developed 20 horsepower. (By comparison, the early Cadillacs had one-cylinder engines that could barely crank out four horsepower.) Thanks to Henry's racing experience, his engines boasted the world's most efficient combustion; Fords did not spout black smoke like all the other cars. Racing had also taught Henry to make his autos light, yet rugged. The Ford weighted a mere 700 pounds. (The 1904 Benz weighted 3000 pounds.)
On a flat surface, such as a racetrack for horses, a Ford could hit forty-five miles per hour. Only a handful of extremely expensive machines, like the Benz, were faster. On the rutted roads where most driving was done, a Ford could beat anything on wheels, because its solid design could cope with the bumps.
As a final virtue, the Ford was more reliable than any other car, thanks to its smooth-running engine and general ruggedness. By 1908, when Henry perfected his design and dubbed it the Model T. it was the most advanced auto design in the world.
To the horrors of his backers, Henry decided that this marvel of high-performance engineering should be sold cheap. The original 1904 Ford carried a price tag of less than fifteen hundred dollars. To prove that cars could replace the horse, Henry had to make them affordable.
Demand for Ford autos was tremendous. In 1904, a total of 1700 orders for new cars poured into Ford Motor Company headquarters; yet a team of mechanics could not assemble a car in less than a week. The investors urged Henry to raise his prices. Instead, he began wondering how to speed up production.
Henry began thinking of the Ford Motor Company as a machine. The purpose of the machine was to spit out autos as fast as possible. Money was merely the fuel that made the business machine go. The stockholders and workers were interchangeable parts whose function was to serve the machine as efficiently as possible, making it whirr faster and faster.
Once Henry began thinking of the company as a machine, he discovered that business could be a lot of fun. He tinkered with his company, moving men and machinery around to make them more efficient.
In 1904 the Ford Motor Company was organized like a big machine shop. All the drill presses were in one spot, all the lathes were in another spot. The mechanics were organized into teams. Some teams just built engines, while other teams built the rest of the car. Each team had a work station at which it assembled a complete engine or complete car.
Henry's first innovation was to scatter the machines, putting one machine of each type near every work station. This saved a lot of running around. Next, the teams were disbanded and replaced with more specialized "gangs" that moved from one work station to another. There was an "axle gang," an "engine installation gang," a "fender gang," and so on. By specializing, the men learned to work faster. Soon there were multiple "parts departments" full of men who specialized in one very simple task.
Henry began wandering around his factory with big wads of cash in his pockets, to instantly reward any mechanic who came up with a good idea to speed production. The Ford Motor Company became an inventor's paradise as every worker tried to replace himself with a machine. Machines were invented to tighten bolts, to position a part. The assembly line first appeared in the parts departments, after they became so crowded with specialized machines that the men had trouble moving around. Putting the work on a conveyor belt solved that problem by allowing the men to stand in one place, while the work came to them.
In 1913 Henry decided to put the autos themselves on a conveyor belt. Chutes from the parts departments carried parts to the main assembly line, where they were attached to the moving autos. The Highland Park assembly plant, completed in 1913, could make a car a minute.
Henry's mania for speed and efficiency happened to cut labor costs, increasing the profit margin. But Henry decided that big profits were inefficient, so he began cutting the price of his cars. In 1908, the year the Model T name was introduced, he slashed the price of a touring car to $850. He eventually knocked the price down to $290.
Meanwhile, the assembly line became so efficient that skilled mechanics were no longer needed to assemble cars. The original workers of the Ford Motor Company were promoted to managerial positions as they invented machinery to replace themselves. Their places were taken by unskilled laborers, mostly recent immigrants from Europe who spoke little English.
The monotony of repetitive, robotlike work on the assembly line caused severe morale problems. In the Highland Park plant, absenteeism rose to twenty percent. On some days, an entire parts department was shut down because nobody had showed up for work there.
The stockholders were as unhappy as the workers, because Henry paid them no dividends. The value of the stock rose astronomically, but the stockholders could not realize a penny without selling their shares. Henry plowed all his profits into new machinery and expanded production.
In 1914, all the major stockholders were convinced that Henry had gone crazy when he announced that he would raise the wages of every Ford worker to five dollars a day - the best wage in American industry. At the same time, Henry announced another dramatic reduction in the price of the Model T. The stockholders sued to force Henry to cease these "acts of charity."
Hauled into a court of law, Henry tried to explain that he was not at all interested in charity. The purpose of the pay hike was to make the workers more efficient, by encouraging them to show up for work. The price cut was intended to stimulate demand.
Although Henry's reasoning seems plain enough today, almost nobody knew what he was talking about in 1914. The inarticulate way that Henry expressed his ideas made them sound murkier than they were.
Under cross-examination by a hostile lawyer, Henry was asked, "What is the purpose of business?"
Without hesitation Henry replied, "To make things efficiently and have fun." The lawyer looked incredulous. "What about profit?" he demanded. Henry shrugged. "Make things efficient," he said, "and the money will take care of itself."
The stockholders won their case. The judge ordered Henry to pay a special dividend as compensation for his mismanagement of the Ford Motor Company. Annoyed, Henry walked off the job and moved to California. He announced that he would start a new company in California to make a better car than the Model T, at half the price. The value of stock in the Ford Motor Company plunged, and the investors panicked. They agreed to sell-out to Henry, cheap. After he owned all the stock, Henry went back to Detroit and resumed his former policies of raising wages and cutting prices. In the process, he became one of the richest men alive.
He also created a lot of controversy and confusion. Henry's economic policies were clearly revolutionary, but what kind of revolution did they portend? When he talked about his ideas, Henry sounded radical. He said things like, "The trouble with this country is too many capitalists and financiers.'' What he meant was that productivity was more important than the buying and selling on Wall Street, but he could not express his ideas in a rational, coherent way.
The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial headlined, "Ford Is An Anarchist." The New York Times called him "an enlightened capitalist." Labor leaders called him "a socialist."
In fact, he was a mechanic. His only ideology was, "If it works, it's good." He was convinced that the whole universe was a machine, and that human beings were a superior type of robot. He said, "God is an invention." "Your body is a machine." One reason why Henry was such a thorough mechanist was that he could not fathom human nature. His greatest weaknesses were his failure to notice people's emotions, and his tendency to misinterpret their motives. This blind spot eventually hurt the Ford Motor Company, and led Henry into personal disasters.
In labor relations, Henry tinkered with his workers the way a mechanic adjusts a carburetor, turning the screws this way and that in an effort to find the most efficient setting. He formed a task force called the "Sociology Department of the Ford Motor Company" to make sure that all his employees were living efficiently. The task force hired a hundred spies to lurk outside the homes of workers. Any employee who was caught keeping a mistress, smoking cigarettes, buying expensive furniture, or otherwise "wasting money" suffered a pay cut until he reformed.
When efficiency seemed to call for a mass layoff, Henry did not hesitate to throw thousands of men out of work. He also experimented with across-the-board pay cuts, to see how that would affect productivity. By 1937, the Ford Motor Company had the worst labor relations in the automotive industry, and pitched battles between workers and "plant security" men were fought on the factory floor.
A shallow understanding of people also wrecked Henry's efforts to launch a political career, and caused him to espouse a number of crackpot political theories.
When World War I broke out in Europe, Henry had a hunch that some secret conspiracy was to blame. "It's the capitalists who started this war," he announced. "They did it to make a profit."
In 1915, while the United States was still officially neutral, Henry decided to personally end the war by going to Germany and explaining to the Kaiser that he had been duped into fighting by "international capitalists." Henry chartered a "peace ship" and set sail for Norway with a delegation of pacifists and vegetarians.
The delegates spent the whole passage arguing violently among themselves, while Henry hid out in the engine room to avoid their debates. By the time the "peace ship" reached Europe, Henry had changed his mind. "Maybe it's not the capitalists." he told reporters. "Maybe it's the Jews." Then he canceled his itinerary and retreated back to Detroit.
It apparently never occurred to Henry that mass emotion might be an important cause of war. Conspiracy theories appealed to him because they were simple and mechanistic. They allowed him to ignore patriotism, anger, fear, pride, and other messy complexities. Henry's difficulties with his son, Edsel, began in 1920. Henry was planning to run for President of the United States, so he launched a newspaper which he mailed free to everybody who bought a Ford automobile. The first issue was full of articles about an "international Jewish conspiracy" to start wars.
Edsel was horrified by the articles and accused his father of being unreasonable and vicious. Henry became furious with Edsel. He went ahead and printed a whole series of anti-Semitic articles, plus a book called The International Jew that bore his name as author. (It was ghostwritten.)
Henry eventually changed his mind, published a retraction, apologized to the Jewish people, and began donating money to synagogues. But by that time, he and Edsel were no longer friendly. Their relationship became a strange blend of love, hate, silence, and suspicion.
Henry got the notion that Edsel was "too soft." He decided that the best way to toughen Edsel would be to provoke him into a fistfight. "I want him to punch me," Henry told his bodyguard. Henry began wandering into Edsel's office at Ford Motor Company, to tear up the papers on Edsel's desk and to make insulting remarks about Edsel's wife. But Edsel never did throw a punch at his father. Instead, he developed stomach ulcers and began drinking too much.
As Henry grew older and wealthier, he became increasingly sour, cynical, and nasty. His plan to become U.S. President was derailed when he failed to win election to the U.S. Senate. His domination of the automobile market was ended after General Motors built competing assembly lines and more modern cars. During the Depression, Henry began to feel like a failure, and let Edsel take control of auto design.
Edsel saved the company from bankruptcy by building flashy new cars like the Lincoln Continental, the Model A, and the Ford V-8. Henry hated the Lincoln and the V-8, although they were profitable. "I don't care for an engine that has more cylinders than a cow has teats," he said.
Although he let Edsel build the cars, Henry got upset when Edsel allowed union organizers to distribute leaflets to the workers in the late 1930's. Then Henry forbade Edsel to have anything to do with labor relations, and put a hoodlum named Harry Bennett in charge of that department.
The result was riots and murders. The bodies of United Auto Workers officials began turning up in alleys with bullet holes in their skulls. Union snipers took potshots at Bennett. One day Bennett's daughter was shot as she opened the front door of her father's house. The labor troubles made Edsel and Henry angrier than ever at each other. At first, Clara Ford refused to take sides between her son and her husband. "I love you both," was all she would say.
Finally, in 1941, Edsel secretly negotiated a "peace treaty" with the U.A.W., offering the union almost everything it wanted, including the first closed-shop, dues-checkoff contract in the history of the industry. He handed the contract to his mother and said, "Make him sign this."
Clara took the contract to Henry and told him to sign it, otherwise she would leave him. "I can't take any more bloodshed," she said. Henry signed. It was his final defeat. He spent the remainder of his life in a mansion in the country, in the center of a private nature preserve, where he took long hikes, built birdhouses, and carried a pistol to protect himself from "government agents who are trying to assassinate me." His eccentricity had evolved into pure madness by the time he died in 1947, lonely and miserable in his cold, mechanical universe.
When Henry Ford invented the assembly line method of mass production, he became one of history's great revolutionaries. Ford used his method to produce the world's first cheap, reliable automobile, the Model T. By putting America on wheels, he created our modern landscape of freeways, suburbs, and shopping malls. More importantly, the assembly line method allowed other manufacturers to boost production and cut costs. As a result, our planet now contains an abundance of refrigerators, televisions, computers, submachine guns. and other complex gadgets.
In 1915 he chartered a ship at his own expense to conduct a party to Europe with the object of organizing a conference of peacemakers to influence the belligerent governments to end the war. He returned home after reaching Christiania, Norway, but other members of his party proceeded to Stockholm, Copenhagen and through Germany to The Hague. In 1918 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate. He was raised in Palestine Lodge No. 357, Detroit, Mich. on Nov. 28, 1894. The degree team was composed of men in overalls with whom he worked at the Edison company. He continued a staunch member of his lodge for almost 53 years. On March 7, 1935 he was made a life member of his lodge and presented with a testimonial plaque commemorating his 75th birthday. Ford made many visitations to lodges near his summer home at Traverse City and his winter residence in Georgia. He also made several visits to Zion Lodge which his brother-in-law, William R. Bryant, served as master in 1932. On Nov. 21, 1928 he was made an honorary member of Zion Lodge No. 1 (Michigan's oldest lodge). When he received the 33d AASR (NJ) in Sept., 1940, he stated: "Masonry is the best balance wheel the United States has, for Masons know what to teach their children." Henry's only son, Edsel, was not a Mason, but two of his grandsons, Benson and William q.v. are. The third grandson, Henry II, became a Roman Catholic. d. April 7, 1947.
Sources:
"Henry Ford is an ignorant anarchist." - Editorial in the Chicago Tribune, 1919
"Henry Ford is the Inspiration of our Nazi movement." - Adolf Hitler, 1937
"The assembly line makes communism Inevitable." - Lenin
Henry's Wonderful Model T; Floyd Clymer, Bonanza Books, New York, 1955
Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist; Carol Gelderman, Dial Press, New York, 1981
Henry Ford and the Jews, Albert Lee, Stein & Day, New York, L(*)
Ford; Allan Nevins, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1962
Young Henry Ford; Sidney Olson, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1963
Henry Ford Viewed by His Contemporaries; John B. Rae (editor), Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs New Jersey, 1969
10,000 Famous Freemasons by William R. Denslow
Henry Ford by Richard Sheppard, Susquehanna Magazine
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by Tom Starkweather
(This is the third in a series describing a reunion of three men who have been separated for more than 20 years because of their vocations. The three had grown up in a small Midwestern town in the 1940's and had traveled to the East at the same time before their careers had taken them to different parts of the country and their communication was Iimited to letters and telephone calls. Meeting in Omaha their conversation had eventually taken them to the future of the Fraternity and this is where we pick up in this installment of the dialog).
Jack: Despite your earlier denial, Bob, I believe you are really against any change in the Order as we know it today.
Bob: Well, again, I take issue. I know that most Masons would like to believe that the eternal truths and beautiful allegories have been handed down through the centuries without change or modification. Basically they are right, I suppose, as the differences between jurisdictions and the refinements through the years have been relatively minor in Masonry's lessons. The same can not be said for the ritual, the costumes, the lodge room decor. However, as a student of Freemasonry I realize better than most that the history of the Fraternity has been one of change...from operative to speculative...from a strong deist influence in the 1700's to a more formal and doctrinaire monotheism in the last 150 years...from meeting in structures being built for others to taverns or available halls and finally in its own edifices, and so on. But these changes come from within. Today the changes being discussed and sometimes implemented are results of outside criticism. If our detractors find fault with the Bible or other Holy Book being on the altar or claim a Masonic funeral is a religious act there are Masonic leaders willing to take those charges seriously and entertain thoughts of changing them in the hope that Masonry will then be acceptable to our enemies. And, again, the Grand Lodges don't discuss such issues with each other and search for a common solution. Although the Grand Masters periodically meet they don't undertake serious discussion on any topic. Why I believe I am correct when I say that all of the Grand Lodges still don't financially support the Masonic Service Bureau or the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria; and if we can't achieve unity on something as simple and clearcut as those two activities then maybe I am daydreaming that the Grand Lodges could join together to fight the most serious threat that Freemasonry may have ever faced.
Jack: I give up - you've convinced me you're not against change.
Dick: That was quite a speech. As you both know I have lived in a dozen cities in the past 23 years. And I travel constantly. A common complaint I hear is that the local news media is anti-Masonic. When I was in Des Moines last week they were complaining they couldn't get the newspaper to carry an article on the new SGIG. It's the same in many metropolitan areas, especially the larger ones.
Jack: I've heard the gripe but it's bullcorn in my opinion. Editors whether newspaper, radio, magazine, or television are selling a product and usually in competition with others. If they know there's an interest out there, they'll carry the item. Small town editors are generally aware of their public and the Masonic interest and that's why you generally don't hear any whimpering in those communities. Big city editors need to be educated and cultivated. This takes time and many of our leaders would rather sit around and moan and groan. I'm not suggesting threats and boycotts but I am saying that education and cultivation contains a subtle pressure. These are busy men and women so you have to be organized and succinct.
The number and cost of our meeting notices that run regularly in the classifieds, an estimate of Masonic families (not just brothers but those in their families) in the viewing/listening/reading area, prominent members of the community, charitable projects and the various philanthropies can all be worked into the conversation in a friendly, informative manner during a brief visit or a luncheon invitation. Instead of assuming they are against us we should suppose they are in need of light. We should follow the visit with brochures on related topics. We should send a note of appreciation for any mention and encourage the entire membership to compliment major coverage of an event. Editors are human and they don't get that many "thank you's". Masonry does have a public relations problem and it's largely of our own making, in my opinion.
Dick: I fully agree. And, conversely, when they run something on the negative side we should let them know we're unhappy and ask for equal time.
Bob: That's what we should do but we don't. The Deputy Grand or some other official issues a verbal order that there will be no response. Even the rumor of such an order gives the rest of us an excuse for doing nothing. It's a form of buck passing. I would have answered but...And, in the meantime, the editor and a lot of readers believe the outlandish distortions and allegations, especially when there is no rebuttal forthcoming.
Jack: But if Masonry is unable to even marshal! its forces in a community then how can we ever hope the Grand Lodges would unite in common cause? Perhaps the Fraternity has outlived its usefullness and deserves to be turned into the Tower of Babel our enemies are constructing for it.
Dick: You know I was in Las Cruces, New Mexico recently and heard the story of a family in dire straits who were on an emergency trip from the south to the west coast and had broken down in Las Cruces. They had mistaken the lodge for a church and came in where about a dozen brothers and their wives were preparing for an installation and dinner. The man and his wife and two children were fed and the hat was passed and $170 was collected. Before the evening was over two ladies present had gone home to retrieve new coats under their Christmas trees and bring them back to the lodge for the destitute couple's two children. With the assistance of one of the Masons present the family was given shelter and the father who was not a Mason, incidentally - was given work until they could get back on their feet and continue their journey. None of this was even recorded in the lodge minutes. I know most of us would say it was merely another example of Masonic compassion and we don't perform charitable acts for recognition or publicity but what's wrong with letting the public know what we're doing or patting ourselves on the back once in a while.
Bob: In my opinion, nothing. In fact, some wit once observed that if you don't honk your own horn once in a while someone will mistake it for a funnel. But this brings me back to our leadership. We have avoided publicizing our numerous philanthropic activities. We ignore the most ridiculous assertions and malicious attacks by our enemies. No wonder our public image has suffered and our membership has declined. Our leaders across the land take pride in pointing out that religion, politics, and other controversial subjects are never discussed in the lodge room and, as a result, nothing much of interest ever occurs during lodge except the same ritual and turning out members like a grist mill for our appendant bodies. ..
Dick: Wait a minute, Bob, are you indicating you believe partisan politics, denominational religion, and emotional issues such as abortion, defense policies, nuclear energy or what have you should be discussed during meetings?
Jack: That might momentarily increase attendance at Blue Lodge but in the long run it would tear the Fraternity apart. . .
Dick: You bet it would! Why we would be worrying about a bigger membership problem than the one we've been kicking around.
Bob: Just hear me out. I guess I'm suggesting that our lodges have become sterile and our meetings boring - in worrying about offending someone or having brother argue with brother we trapped ourselves into a position of banning any topic that might create disagreement. But it hasn't always been that way. If you think politics weren't being discussed in that tavern the night an act took place that became known in our history books as the Boston Tea party - you're wrong! And if you think politics weren't being discussed in lodges on both sides in our Revolutionary War or our Civil War, I think you're mistaken. Yet both conflicts - as in all our other wars we have ever fought - recorded many brotherly acts between adversaries who were also Masons. I have difficulty in accepting any claims that controversial subjects were never discussed in lodge when George Washington was serving as the first president of this country and concurrently the Worshipful Master of his Alexandria lodge. Intelligent men can discuss and debate issues without becoming antagonists or splitting an organization wide open. Of course it requires leadership to allow the deliberations to be informative and stimulating and yet keep them from becoming personal - vicious - ridiculous - out of hand. I believe we had that kind of Masonic leadership in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America. But we don't have it today. So the safest approach with poor leadership is to forbid discussion of any topic that might prove exciting albeit arguable. Such reasoning is specious and, as a result, our assemblies are poorly attended because they are monotonous, repetitious, insipid.
Jack: Now that's something to think about.
Dick: I agree.
(To Be Continued)
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.....Full of Sound and Fury
A column wherein our gentil readers shake a lance at ignorance, at one another, at ye aide editor and on rare occasions even succeed in hitting ye nails on ye heads.
Dear Brother Marsengill:
In the February issue I enjoyed reading the article on the origin of the name of the society almost as much as I enjoyed writing it. My one regret is that, somehow, two of the pictures that went with the article managed to get their captions interchanged. It would be a pity if any of your readers were misled by this stupid mistake, and the guilty party certainly owes us all an apology. The pity is, I don't know whether the author was the one who managed to mix them up, or whether the editor is to blame. Can you shed any light on this?
W. McLeod. FPS
Editor's note: I'm sure that all our subscribers accept your apology. I know I do. - J.E.M.
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The History Fund Is Growing
The History Fund is young. It has been established to permit The Philalethes Society to publish good Masonic books for its members. These books will go to the members of the Society as a bonus periodically. Additional copies will be available at a reasonable price.
Several asked if they could make donations to the fund in memory of a deceased friend or Brother, or in honor of some deserving Freemason. The answer is yes. A Living Memorial will be accepted and an appropriate card sent to person's spouse or next of kin. When making such a contribution, please specify to whom the card is to be sent.
Contributors To The History Fund (to February 15,1988)
Frank L. Beesley Jerald A. Merrick Floyd R. Sowers
Chester C. Coffin Melvin J. Reinhard Hadley S. Tremaine
John E. Daugherty, lIl Allen E. Roberts Rodney J. Van Houten
Francis A. Derby Aldon C. Rogers Harry N. Young
B.F. Mandlebaum Gary W. Shaulis
George S. Mann Gary L. Shaw
In Memory of Donald R. Wright, MPS, Virginia
Dougal Maclntyre, Scotland Allen and Dottie Roberts, Virginia
Virginia Craftsmen, Virginia
The Fund stands at $452.50 as of February 15,1988
To answer a question from two Chapters: Yes, contributions may be made by groups and individuals "in Honor of..." whoever they wish to honor. These, and Memorial Gifts, will be acknowledged by the Society to the family or person designated by the donor.
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Christianity and American Freemasonry
by William J. Whalen: Our Sunday Visitor Press Indiana, 1987; $6.95
Reviewed and critiqued by Allen E. Roberts, FPS
This is a hard book to digest, mainly because Professor Whalen has made a thorough study of Freemasonry from at least 1958 when the first edition appeared (this is a revised edition). He knows more about the history and principles of Freemasonry than 99% of us. Consequently, he must know that his story is loaded with untruths, half truths and outright distortions. The bigots who know nothing about what they are claiming might be excused, but there's no excuse for a learned person to deliberately distort the truth no matter what reason he may have for doing it.
Whalen, in his Preface, does have one truism: "If there is one secret in Masonry, it is that there are no secrets." Later he says that the idea of keeping genuine secrets in a mass organization is preposterous. He says he was assisted by three former Masons but won't name them to "spare them any possible harassment by their former brethren." This, of course, is a dodge used constantly by media reporters to get their points across by using unnamed "sources." I strongly suspect these "sources," such as "deepthroat," can be classed with the fairies we played with as youngsters. I am among those he thanked for providing him with information. He doesn't say that I sent him many pages refuting his premise, although I appreciate him saying "We agreed to disagree."
He names dozens of Protestant denominations that abhor Freemasonry. He doesn't say they also hate Roman Catholicism and anything else that doesn't agree with their doctrine. He also doesn't say that Roman Catholicism declines to recognize them as religions, and would have nothing good to do or say about them except in this particular book. He names several men whom he claims were Freemasons. At least one, Alexander Hamilton, was not a member of the Craft. He cites another authority who claims only one Masonic lodge sided with the patriots at the start of the War for American Independence. Interesting.
Whalen mentions William Morgan, as do all anti-Masons. He speaks of the body that was found and identified as Morgan's. But he must know that body wasn't Morgan at all, but was "good enough to be Morgan until after the election," Thurlow Weed, a politician, said. Whalen notes that Nathan Bedford Forrest "founded the Ku Klux Klan." He doesn't mention that this was done to protect Southerners from Carpetbaggers, and that Forrest got out of the Klan when it deviated from its original purpose.
He quotes someone named Charles Van Cott: "The members of the Lodges are tired of watching third-rate actors, out of character, out of time, muttering the same old stuff." He may have a point. But we can chalk up one for our side. Whalen admits: "The Masonic lodges in the United States enroll some of the finest gentlemen in the nation." Then he proceeds to demolish us: "We will try to show that a person cannot be a thoughtful Christian and a thoughtful Mason, but we will never question the sincerity of anyone who claims to be both; we must question his consistency in giving allegiance to an exclusive religion such as Christianity and to the religion of naturalism propagated by the Masonic lodge." How in the world can he have it both ways?
How exclusive is the religion of Christianity, really? Says Whalen: "Not all religious systems in the world are exclusive; Christianity is." Are there no theological differences among the various sects of Roman Catholicism? The Protestants? If you believe there are none, see me about buying an antiquated bridge. With the coming of the satellite era, at any hour we can witness dozens of religious services that purport to be Christian. Every one of them speaks a different theology. Have you ever listened to fundamentalists from different denominations arguing? They're hilarious!
The rituals that are included in the book are interesting indeed, but no man would ever gain admission to one of my lodges with this stuff. As do most antiMasonic writers, Whalen quotes from Albert Pike: "...he [the candidate] is intentionally misled by false interpretations [of the ritual]. It is not intended that he shall understand them; but it is intended that he shall imagine he understands them." But then Pike explains why he has spoken this falsehood: "Their true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry." Pike's trying to sell Scottish Rite Masonry! This is so obvious most anti-Masonic writers won't add the last sentence. But Whalen, to his credit, has recognized exactly what Pike was doing and says: "He had to dangle a carrot before Masons who were quite satisfied to remain in Craft Masonry."
It thoroughly disturbs Whalen, and all critics of Freemasonry, because "modern Freemasonry opens its doors to Deists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and any who acknowledge the existence of the G.A.O.T.U. [the Great (or Grand) Architect of the Universe] and believe in the immortality of the soul." It seems that religious bigots cannot understand how good men, of whatever religious persuasion, can meet together as friends. Amazing!
When I reached his chapter on oaths I literally spewed a mouthful of coffee over the page. Oaths, obligations, vows, what they mean and don't mean, who should use them and who shouldn't, I've been forced to read about until it has got sickening. Many of the sects mentioned refuse to join their country in keeping freedom alive and their "religious" right to be obnoxious. They'll gladly let Freemasons and other patriotic Americans fight and die so they can stay free to tell us how foolish they are.
How dangerous is this book, and other anti-Masonic tracts, and the lies spread by so-called Christians over the air waves? Substantially. Had I been exposed to this mis-information before I asked for a petition, I doubt I would have wanted to be a Freemason. Of course, that's the objective. Now that I've read Whalen's version of the obligation Shriners must assume, I have to wonder how the Shrine can attract intelligent men. That is, of course, if the wording is correct. Since other portions of the book are erroneous, I sure wouldn't take his version on faith.
Professor Whalen is a dangerous opponent. He does an excellent job of distortion. He knows Freemasonry constitutes no danger to the Roman Catholic Church, or any other organization or person. He knows Freemasonry is no more a religion than is Lionism. Yet he is evidently considered the foremost authority on the subject, so many readers will believe he hasn't distorted history. Moreover, he was the man who wrote most (if not all) of the Masonic portion of the Catholic Bishops' Report.
This being said, let me add that I've enjoyed my correspondence with him. He makes me think.
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by Jack Soroka, MPS
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 6, 1706. No notable of his generation established a more enduring fame than our late Brother, Ben Franklin. As a printer, Freemason, journalist, humorist, diplomat, scientist, statesman, and philosopher, he was easily first among his peers.
Franklin's versatility was marvelous. He was an epitome of his century. Ben's services as a statesman would alone have made him famous, and so would his contributions to science. His writings fill many volumes, but the bulk consists of scientific papers, political papers, and letters. He was the best letter-writer of his day in America. His literary fame rests chiefly upon his "Poor Richard's Almanac" and his "Autobiography." Dr. Franklin did not invent all his proverbs but had an unsurpassed gift for putting bits of practical wisdom in a pithy and striking way. The "Autobiography" is one of the most interesting books ever written. He was a man of the highest respectability and eminence in the colonies and abroad. He enjoyed a world-wide fame.
The services and contributions of Dr. Franklin to his country and fellow-men are beyond all calculation. It is certainly true that the Revolution could not have succeeded without him. No man in the colonies excelled him in wise, conservative judgement. He was always patriotic and incorruptible.
Things not so well known about him include:
- First notable American athlete
- Published the first foreign language newspaper in America
- Planned the first American magazine
- Made the original observations out of which the weather bureau developed
- Drew and printed the first American cartoon
- Invented a draft for fireplaces
- Pioneer in the science of ventilation
- First scholar to study the Gulf Stream
- Saw the first men go up in a free balloon and was the first to prophesy that war might be made from thin air
- Received the first letter carried through the air, by balloon from London to Paris
- Started the first anti-slavery society at Philadelphia in 1775
- Founded the first American Philosophical Society in 1743
- First postmaster-general of the colonies
- Started the first circulating library in America
- Started Philadelphia's first fire company
- Founded the University of Pennsylvania
- Helped to draft the Declaration of Independence
- Invented the lightning rod
- Organized the United States postal service and instituted the deadletter office
- Organized the first fire insurance company in America
- Probably no man since Solomon has given us so many proverbs
- Invented the Franklin stove
- Helped change Philadelphia from a little provincial town into the most important city in the American colonies
- Drew up a plan for a union of the colonies which was to be, as it turned out, a forecast of the United States
- By his famous kite experiment, demonstrated that lightning is electricity
- Was president of Pennsylvania
- Oldest of the great Masons of the Revolution
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by Allen E. Roberts, FPS
It was front page news for the Masonic Tribune of Seattle, Washington, but ignored by the rest of the media. Over 2,000 Freemasons from the Grand Lodge of Washington and the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Washington joined together to observe the 200th anniversary of the Constitution of the United States, It culminated on September 12 when the Masons of Washington presented the State of Washington a statue of George Washington kneeling at prayer at Valley Forge. It was a replica of the statue commissioned by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania years earlier. Said the Grand Master: "The Masons formed on the opposite side of the Capitol building from where the program was held. [Later] The Masons were marched around the circular road in front of the Capitol steps, and what a sight. Two thousand Masons marching together, six abreast in a seemingly endless line. I want to tell you. it was a sight and a thrill I shall ever remember."
What might be termed a sequel to the Washington story was written by Dave Workman of the News Tribune. It was entitled "Want media attention? Silliness is often the best tactic." He began his article: "It may have been the biggest collection of people to ever assemble in the capital city and be almost totally ignored. It was certainly the best dressed. On September 12, several thousand Masons came to the Capitol to give a $45,000 gift to the State of Washington. Now that would seem newsworthy, wouldn't it?" But it wasn't. It was completely ignored by the entire media. Workman added: "If the fine folks in the Masonic lodges of Washington want to get some attention, it's not enough to do good, wholesome, patriotic work. It's not even enough to set up a $35,000 perpetual scholarship fund for Washington youth - which, to their credit, they also did. No, they also have to be unpredictable. Or better yet, gimmicky. Best of all, absurd." No comment from this end!
From reports received from all over the country, the Grand Lodge of Texas had a tremendous year under the leadership of John E. Jack Kelly, MPS. He's also the long-time President of Southwest Chapter of the Philalethes Society. The Texas Freemason recorded "A History-Making Meeting" that took place in the George Washington Masonic National Memorial of October 17. At this special communication of the Grand Lodge of Texas, there were "seven sitting Grand Masters" and "leaders from every Masonic and Masonic-affiliated organization, ten Texas Past Grand Masters, 12 of 15 current Grand Lodge officers" present for the event. Among the dignitaries was Grand Master Donald M. Robey, MPS, of Virginia, who was officially received.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson became a Master Mason on May 21, 1987, with the Grand Master of the Illinois Prince Hall Grand Lodge officiating. He was honored by having 14 other Prince Hall Grand Masters present. This is certainly a step in the right direction.
It is with mixed emotions we bid farewell to Stewart M.L. Pollard, FPS, as Executive Secretary of The Masonic Service Association. He, along with his good wife, Peg, retired as of December 31, 1987. Stew assures us he is not retiring from Freemasonry, but he's uncertain as to his future plans. He has taken over one job, though. He has replaced the late Alphonse Cerza, FPS, as the book reviewer for The Northern Light.
The Masonic Philatelist has a new and Improved look. One would expect this with Dr. Allan Boudreau doing the publishing. It's a quarterly publication of the New Masonic Stamp Club of New York, Masonic Hall-Box 10, 46 W. 24th St., New York, NY 10010. The club is seeking Master Masons interested in any phase of stamp collecting. The joining fee is $3.00; the annual dues are $7.00. If interested, send $10, along with a photo copy of your current Lodge dues card, to the above address. The club was founded in 1934, so it has longevity on its side. Over the years it has been instrumental in promoting Masonic commemorative stamps and first day covers. It has done a good job for the Craft in general.
The Indiana Freemason started a new series called "Look Well" in the January issue. It's going to be a series to follow with a great deal of interest. The style is reminiscent of that old "Masonic Warrior" Dwight L. Smith, FPS - and if he ain't the author you can watch me eat a second helping of dessert at the 1989 Assembly and Feast. Within this open letter the writer writes: "You made me uncomfortable only once, my lad, in last night's installation. That was in the understandable slip of the tongue when you referred to your ambition to be a Past Master of Acacia Lodge. An ambition to be a Past Master? Forget it, Tom. If I didn't know you as I believe I do, you want to be Master of our Lodge, the finest Master old Acacia Lodge has ever had. Let's keep those eyes focused on the true goal - the joy of leading and doing, and serving - not on the rewards that come."
The Virginia Masonic Herald for January 1988 ran an article entitled "The Finest Speech I Ever Heard in a Masonic Lodge." The speech was made by Judge David B. Sentelle, whose difficulties with certain individuals in the U.S. Senate were reported earlier in this column. In his "humorous, educational and poignantly revealing" talk in Cherrydale Lodge in Arlington, Virginia, the Judge named names. "Senator Leahy of Vermont characterized the Masonic Fraternity as an organization that routinely discriminates against blacks and women." Vermont, you may recall, is the only Grand Lodge to disintegrate during the Morgan anti-Masonic craze. When asked if he would resign from Freemasonry, Judge Sentelle said no. So, Senator Paul Simon of Illinois (remember the name) had a hold placed on Sentelle's nomination. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a Freemason, protested strongly. The nomination was finally cleared for debate. Then Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts, in his usual manner, held the nomination hostage. Justice did prevail, and as we know, Sentelle was appointed a Judge of the Court of Appeals. It should be noted that the Knights of Columbus opposed the actions of the political anti-Masons in the Senate; so did Prince Hall Masons.
Judge Sentelle said; "If I were to give up my membership in Excelsior Lodge No. 260, my membership in the Scottish Rite and in Oasis Temple of the Shrine it would be like saying that I had been doing something wrong in all the years I had been a judge; I would have been repudiating the principles that led my father, my grandfathers, my uncles and my brother into this Fraternity." Bravo!
Attilio G. "Tillie" Parisi, MPS, has been once again honored. This time with a brief write up in the Utah Mason. It took note of his well-deserved and long overdue receipt of the 33rd degree as a Scottish Rite Mason from the California bodies. His 41 years as a professional educator was noted. When he retired in 1966 Time magazine made him its "Man of the Year." Throughout his life Tillie has been active in sports and has been an official for many professional and amateur events. He is particularly proud to have been chosen a track official for the XXIII Olympic Games in 1984. He's small in stature but a giant among those who know and respect him. His love for Freemasonry, including The Philalethes Society, is without parallel. We salute him, along with Elizabeth ("Pinkie") who has supported him for 52 years.