Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce Page B

years, we have believed the unthinkable and gone right on with our lives. Because John Kennedy led plural lives, Dealey Plaza freezes us in the plural. If you make that bafflingly tight turn from Houston onto down-sloping Elm, a turn that still doesn’t make any sense if you’re trying to protect a president riding in an open car, hair in the breeze, if you enter in the first-person plural—“we lost our innocence”—then you must leave in the third:
    They killed him.
    But it ends there, in Dealey Plaza, where there is an X on the roadway and where German tourists cool themselves in the shade of the trees atop the grassy knoll. It wasn’t always so. The country once managed to make actual conspiracies, and the theories that attend them, work in concert in such a way that our appetite for the grotesque was satisfied, our appetite for hidden knowledge sated, and, most important of all, our appetite for freedom was sharpened. And, yes, the Masons were behind it all. Or so some people believed.

    ON an October day in 1827, people in the small town of Lewiston in western New York state, hard by Lake Ontario, fished a body out of Oak Orchard Creek. The body was badly decomposed. Townsfolk, however, were sure they knew who it was. It was a man who had been snatched from the jail in Canandaigua a year earlier—kidnapped and murdered, the townsfolk believed, because of what he knew. This unpleasant-looking lump of recent fish food, they said, was William Morgan, and it was the Masons who killed him.
    Morgan had come to New York from Virginia, a tramp bricklayer and stonemason, and a full-time pain in the ass. He joined one Masonic lodge, moved, and was denied admission to another, upscale lodge, probably because its membership looked upon Morgan as something of a bum. In retaliation, Morgan wrote and distributed a pamphlet describing in lurid detail Masonic rituals and ancient legends. The local Masons fought back, repeatedly having Morgan tossed into various local hoosegows as a habitual debtor and, eventually, even trying to burn down the shop of the fellow who’d printed up the pamphlet. The second time Morgan was incarcerated, two mysterious men showedup at the jail, paid his debt, and took him away. Nobody ever saw him again, unless it actually was William Morgan who was pulled out of the creek.
    (Morgan’s wife and his dentist both said the body was his. It was disinterred several times and, amid charges that someone had tampered with the corpse to make it look like Morgan, the local coroner just gave up entirely, declining to identify the corpse. The historian Sean Wilentz writes that a positive identification eventually became unnecessary: a local anti-Masonic leader admitted that the corpse was “a good enough Morgan” for the purposes of local political agitation.)
    Western New York exploded with the controversy. Local Masons were hauled before grand juries. The jailer in Canandaigua, who was a Mason and who had released Morgan to his two abductors, was indicted. When some Masons were brought to trial, other Masons refused to testify against them. Charges often were swiftly dismissed—because, people said, of Masonic influences on the judges and the juries.
    The Masons had been central to early American conspiracy theories, most of which connected them not to the Templars but to the Bavarian Illuminati, an obscure group founded in 1776 by a wandering academic named Adam Weishaupt and suppressed by the elector of Saxony eight years later. As Sean Wilentz points out, anti-Masonry had its beginnings in America not as a populist revolt against a mysterious, monied elite, but as the reaction of high-toned Protestant preachers in Federalist New England, who saw the hidden hand of Weishaupt’s group behind everything they considered politically inconvenient.
    The Illuminati were a constant, stubborn presence in the emerging underground American counternarrative. By 1789, in addition to being blamed for the Jacobin