America's Prophet (9 page)

Later that hour, after securing the building and speaking with his wife, Daniel headed outside to begin walking home. “That’s when the first tower fell,” he said. “I saw the dust. It looked like it was alive. Soon I was covered in it.” He made it back to the front door, and he and his colleagues decided to use Federal Hall as a shelter. They
ushered victims inside and offered them water. Then, disaster. The second tower fell. This time the blast blew out the windows and filled the building with soot and rubble. That’s when Daniel Merced thought,
“The Bible!”

He ran to the front desk and retrieved the key to the display case. He had never opened the case before and had never touched the Bible. “I was shocked, really,” he said. “It didn’t feel old and fragile. It was kind of strong for a book that old.” He quickly placed the book in the carrying case, raced downstairs, opened the museum’s vault, and secured the Bible in the safest place in Federal Hall. “Every now and then I’ll walk by the case today,” he said, “and I’ll think about what I did. Nobody else thought about the Bible that day. I’m proud of what I did for my country.” He smiled. “People often ask, ‘When something happens, what will I save?’ Then something happened, and I saved Washington’s Bible.”

BACK IN SAINT
Paul’s chapel, Geoffrey Hoderath was ready for the main event. “When Washington stepped onto the balcony, he was met with rousing cheers. Back then, the cheer was ‘Huzzah!’ I would like you to give it a try.
‘Three cheers for the president of the United States!’
”

The audience huzzahed on cue. As they did, the Very Worshipful Mason playing the president-elect strode onto the pulpit, wearing a brown suit and powdered wig. The Mason playing the secretary of the Senate took the Bible and held it open, while Washington repeated the oath of office specified in the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Some wit
nesses say that the president added the words “So help me God,” before bending to kiss the Bible.

When the original ceremony was over in 1789, Jacob Morton marked the page where Washington rested his hand: Genesis 49:13 through 50:8. These chapters come at the very end of the first book of Moses. Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who is dying in Egypt, has gathered his sons for a blessing. He enjoins them to return his bones to Hebron, where his grandfather is buried. Jacob dies and is mummified in the manner of an Egyptian nobleman. Then, in a passage rarely remembered, Joseph—Jacob’s favored son, who is serving as the second-highest official in Egypt—confronts the pharaoh and asks that he be allowed to return to the Promised Land to bury his father. And the pharaoh agrees. “Go up, and bury thy father.” In this peaceful precursor to the Exodus, Joseph departs for Canaan, taking along the senior members of the pharaoh’s court as well as Joseph’s household and brothers. “It was a very great company,” the Bible says.

It’s possible, as legend holds, that Washington selected this passage randomly. But there’s reason to doubt this. Washington obviously knew his Bible and planned every detail of his inauguration. Genesis is the first of more than seventy books in the Mason’s Bible, which includes the Apocrypha. Genesis 49 begins about one-twentieth of the way through the text. If you’re looking for a random passage, why reach for a page so obviously near the front? If you’re just letting the book fall open, what are the chances that it settles so close to the beginning? Or, more likely, if you believe you’re standing at the beginning of a grand experiment in democracy, if you’re conscious that every gesture you take, every thread you wear, every word you utter will be remembered forever as the first statement by the first president on his first day in office, wouldn’t you reach for
the first book of the Bible, with its epic founders and stories of Creation?

If Washington’s random selection wasn’t so random after all, what message was he trying to send? At first glance a passage about death, mummification, and burial hardly seems appropriate for a new beginning. But the closing chapters of Genesis are not merely about endings; they are about reconciling past rivalries and preparing for a future nation, two themes ripe for the Revolutionary generation. In the passage, as Jacob dies, he gathers his rivalrous sons and beseeches them to honor his blessing. After Jacob is buried, the sons who once sold Joseph into servitude in Egypt run to their brother and announce that their father urged Joseph to forgive them. Jacob had said no such thing.

Joseph’s response is telling. “Have no fear,” he says. “Am I a substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result.” At the height of his power, Joseph, the prime minister of Egypt and now de facto leader of Israel, declares,
I am no God. I am no king. I am your brother. We may have fought amongst ourselves in the past, but now we stand, removed from our father and cut off from our fatherland, and we must work together.
For George Washington, the consensus leader of God’s New Israel, the man who repeatedly stepped between the feuding founding brothers and urged them toward reconciliation, Genesis 49 and 50 may have been a private message, but it was a powerful statement of fraternal harmony.

Even more, by insisting that he is no substitute for God, Joseph stresses the limits of his own leadership, a theme Washington emphasized throughout his career, from the Continental Army to the Constitutional Convention to the presidency. Jacob, in the blessing he gives Joseph, accentuates his debt to God, “in whose ways my fathers walked…who has been my shepherd from my birth to this
day…who has redeemed me from all harm.” Washington echoed these words in his inaugural address, given just minutes later. “No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.”

On the first day of the American presidency, Washington used the first book of Moses to send a message of humility.

“Three cheers for George Washington!” the faux Robert Livingston cried. “The president of the United States.”

And the two hundred people gathered in lower Manhattan rose to their feet and cheered, “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”

AFTER THE CEREMONY
I lingered in the chapel for a few minutes and visited the pew where Washington is said to have worshiped following the inauguration. Framed above it is the oldest known painting of the Great Seal, dating from the eighteenth century. Nearby is the so-called Bell of Hope, donated by the mayor of London to honor the remarkable survival of Saint Paul’s on September 11, 2001, when the collapsing towers across the street filled the facility with soot and debris. A plaque explained that the bell was cast by Whitechapel Foundry, “the same foundry that cast Big Ben and the Liberty Bell.”

As I was preparing to leave, a man walked up behind me and grabbed my upper arm. Before I could react, he spun me around. “Who are you?” he asked, not exactly menacing but not welcoming, either.

I was startled. I collected myself and explained that I had reached out to the Masons repeatedly, that I had heard about this event. He
cut me off. “Wait here,” he said. “I need to speak to the Grand Master and our public relations representative.”

“Your PR rep?” I repeated.

He shrugged, as if to say the Masons had been getting a lot of negative publicity lately, then said,
“The Da Vinci Code.”
He huddled with some colleagues, returned, and jabbed his finger in my face. “You’re coming to lunch.”

The next thing I knew I was huddled onto a bus with fifty Masons, driven to the bottom of Manhattan, and led up four flights to the top of Fraunces Tavern, where Washington bade farewell to the Continental Army in 1783. Revolution-era flags hung from the rafters, and a huge deli buffet was spread across the room. Had I really penetrated the inner sanctum of America’s Most Secret Society only to find it filled with Oscar Mayer bologna and Vlasic pickles?

Over the next few hours I got acquainted with Masonry. The white aprons are a symbol of purity and a tribute to the stonemasons who helped build Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. A third of U.S. presidents have been Masons, along with thirty Supreme Court justices. When I began probing about Masonry and the Bible, I was told, “There’s someone you should meet.”

A few days later I walked through the revolving door of a building on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. On the wall was a giant mural depicting the all-seeing eye in a pyramid, flanked by seven men from ancient Egypt and six from colonial America. “Hmm,” I thought, thirteen. After a short elevator ride, the doors opened on more frescoed walls and four marble muses.

I was greeted by Tom Savini. A forty-something man who looked like an insurance salesman (albeit one with an earring), Tom is a historian of comparative religion, a lapsed Catholic, and a Mason. He showed me around the boardroom, which contained a gilded statue of Washington in an apron and the two-story marble sanctu
ary, complete with gilt-edged ceiling and thronelike chairs. The entire edifice struck me as one part Buckingham Palace, one part Trump Tower. We settled in the library, and I asked Savini if he thought Masonry was a religion.

“I would call it a catalyst for religion. It’s a belief system that focuses individuals on principles and patterns of living that Masonry believes are fulfilling and lead to a better society. And yet it doesn’t fill in the details. Masonry tells you to worship a Supreme Being, but it doesn’t ask you what you call that being. It reveres what it calls the Volume of Sacred Law but it doesn’t tell you what that volume should be.”

The origins of what is now called speculative Freemasonry began in western Europe in the late seventeenth century. Though the movement claims roots in antiquity, it exploded when middle-class men adopted traditions from medieval stone layers. The heart of Freemasonry is an elaborate allegory that stretches back to Mount Sinai. After handing down the Ten Commandments, God instructs Moses to place the tablets inside the Ark of the Covenant. Later, when the Israelites conquer Jerusalem, the ark is transferred to its permanent home in Solomon’s Temple. But the Masons introduce a dimension of intrigue into the biblical story. The “master workman” of the temple, Hiram Abiff, is murdered for refusing to reveal some mysterious password. He’s buried under green moss. Those who discover his body utter, “Thanks be to God, our Master has got a Mossy House.” A shortened version of that statement,
Macbenah,
became the Mason password.

As historian Steven Bullock explained in
Revolutionary Brotherhood,
a history of Freemasonry, the use of necromancy, secret codes, and ancient wisdom appealed to Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries caught up in the twin allures of antiquity and the Enlightenment. Like Protestants, Freemasons viewed the Middle
Ages as “ignorant” and expressed greater interest in the Hebrew Bible as a primary source of knowledge. Masonic teaching involved “reconciling Plato and Moses,” said one observer. Yet Masonry insisted that wisdom could be found in all religions. Its morality plays, elaborate stage productions complete with costumes and sets, wove quotations from the Pentateuch with Newton, Pythagoras, even Shakespeare. The status that came with mastering these rituals attracted men cut off from traditional peerage. Masonry became a gentlemen’s club, a civic-promotion institution, and a pan-religious body all in one. By the mid-1700s, Masonry had spread across western Europe.

The lure of education and status particularly appealed to Americans far removed from English society. Lodges were set up in the 1730s in Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah. Benjamin Franklin published the Freemason’s code,
The Book of Constitutions,
in 1731. By the eve of the Revolution, the colonies brimmed with rebellion-minded members, including Samuel Adams, Ethan Allen, John Hancock, and Paul Revere. The movement transformed the social landscape of early America, says historian Gordon Wood. “Masonry was not only an enlightened institution, it was a republican one as well. It repudiated the monarchical hierarchy of family and favoritism and created a new hierarchical order that rested on ‘real worth and personal merit.’”

Masonry suffered a backlash in the nineteenth century, as Americans rebelled against its perceived influence, but it regained popularity in the twentieth century, reaching four million members following World War II. By the turn of the twenty-first century, that number had eroded by two-thirds, forcing the Masons to fling open their doors to attract members. Tom Savini explained that he often pleads to potential members, “Our air-conditioning is nice.”

I was more interested in Masonry during the founding era, specifically how the Mosaic story, working through Masonic liturgy, might have influenced the creation of American society. I asked Savini why Masons had focused so intently on Solomon’s Temple.

“The temple is just a symbol,” he said. “Interpreting it literally is going to drive you crazy. It represents a place where humans can live in concert with the divine. Our message is, ‘You should listen to what God is telling you. You should focus on the work in front of you, as a good craftsman. And you should judge how you’re doing by the stones you’re laying.”

“So you’re a student of religion,” I said. “Is that a message from the Hebrew Bible?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “I don’t think Masonry is self-reflective enough to say that it’s definitely more Mosaic than Christian, but it is. It has no concern with the afterlife. The focus is on the here and now. It encourages action. And there’s a strong element of suffering, of laboring, of caring for your brother, and working to preserve the community.”

I told him I’d learned that America has a meta-narrative, an overarching story that runs through the Pilgrims, the Great Awakening, the Revolution, and beyond. It’s the story of oppressed people from differing backgrounds, who tap into the idea that all humans have natural, God-given rights to dignity and freedom, then strive to create a better world, a New Israel, where they can fulfill those liberties and spread them to others. “Did the Masons help create the narrative of America?”