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By 1832, an Anti-Masonic national political party was strong enough to put up William Wirt as a presidential candidate against Mason Andrew Jackson and capture Vermont's electoral votes. A century later, Franklin Roosevelt, a 32nd degree Mason, won the electoral votes of every state in the Union except Vermont and Maine. Altogether, 13 U.S. Presidents have been Masons; some others: Johnson, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, and Harry Truman.
Today there are some 3,500,000 Masons in the U.S., some 1,500,000 in the rest of the world.
Implicit Threat. Hitler tried to stamp it out. Franco has suppressed it. The Soviet Union, seeing it as a creed of the bourgeoisie (which in fact it is), has done its best to destroy every vestige of it. To authoritarianism, Masonry has always been an implicit threat.
It has no formal international organization. Grand lodges, with regional jurisdiction over "constituent" lodges, are laws unto themselves. In the U.S. the regions are the 48 states and the District of Columbia. But Masonry is a theoretical world brotherhood open to any "good" man, Protestant, Jew, Catholic, Mohammedan, Taoist, Buddhist.
(In the U.S., the theory has the same obvious chink as the theory of democracy. With very rare exceptions, Negroes are kept out. There are, however, some 800,000 Negroes practicing the rites, the vast majority of them in what are known as Prince Hall Grand Lodges. At least two Negro lodges, one in New Jersey, and one in Massachusetts, can lay claim to the legitimacy of their charters; the others, white Masons insist, are "clandestine" lodges, neither bona fide nor legitimate.)
Tree of Learning. The root stock of Masonry is the so-called Blue Lodge (see chart), which includes the first three degrees and is as far as the great majority of brethren ever progress. Degrees, for all their impressive titles, are simply grades in Masonry's school. In the Blue Lodge the brethren learn all they need to know to be good Masons, including the legend of Hiram Abif.
A brother who wants to devote the time and effort to it can continue his education through various higher grades. He can go through the Scottish Rite, (Northern or Southern Jurisdiction, depending on the location of his lodge) and up through the degrees. He will be dubbed along the way Grand Master Architect, Prince of the Tabernacle, Grand Inspector Inquisitor Commander, etc. At the 32nd degree he is a Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret:** Or he can work up through the York Rite with fewer degrees but just as much prestige, to the top grade of Knight Templar. Or he can learn both rites. He does not necessarily emerge a better man than his Blue Lodge brother; he merely becomes a more erudite Mason.
Floating Cloud. The Order of the Mystic Shrine, sometimes called Masonry's "playground,"† is a kind of detached and whimsical cloud floating somewhere above Masonry's topmost branches. Its members must all be 32nd degree Masons or Knights Templar. It was started about 1870 by William Florence who was fascinated by some Oriental rites he saw in Marseille. Florence was a well-known American comedian of his day. Harold Lloyd, the new Imperial Potentate, therefore follows in a noble tradition.