The Freemasons Get Away With Murder (Probably)
2026-10-05 · 32 min · episode 3 · 6 entities
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Episode description as stored
October 7, 1827. A body washes up on the shore of Lake Ontario. A Rochester newspaperman named Thurlow Weed believes he knows whose it is: William Morgan, a down-on-his-luck ex-Freemason who threatened to publish the order's secrets. He was pulled from a jail in Canandaigua a year earlier, and never seen again.
How does one man's disappearance set off a panic about secret societies, gut Freemasonry in America, and build the country's first third party? And why do the Anti-Masons, who vanish almost as fast as they rose, leave behind a playbook that shapes American politics for a century?
Special thanks to our guests: Mark Schmeller, Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University and author of the forthcoming A Man Cried Murder: The Masonic Conspiracy That Transformed American Politics; and Joshua Kastenberg, Professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law.
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