The Social World

Author: Bill Kauffman

  • The anti-Masonic roots of the Republican party

    The anti-Masonic roots of the Republican party

    I suppose the big anniversary event of the coming new year is the semi-quincentennial of the American Revolution. I’m all for celebrating revolution and secession but spare a good thought for the bicentennial we’ll be celebrating hereabouts in 2026: that of the Morgan Affair, featuring betrayal, a possible murder, an enduring mystery and a political eruption whose ejecta would one day help form the Republican party.

    I’m writing this while sitting on the polished granite bench in the Batavia Cemetery dedicated to my late friend and swimming teacher Catherine Roth, grande dame, who waged a righteously “wrothful” battle against the urban renewers who razed and ruined so much of downtown Batavia, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. (Greatest Generation my ass!)

    Through the bare boughs of the towering maples, I espy the cenotaph honoring our town’s most famous drunk, Captain William Morgan, who was no more a captain than Harland Sanders was a colonel. Nor was he the eponym of the sorority-girl rum. Rather, Morgan was an apostate member of the Masonic Order who was – or was he? – kidnapped by Masons, furious that he had revealed their rituals, and drowned in the Niagara River in 1826, thereby setting off a ferocious reaction against “secret societies” and begetting the Anti-Masonic party, the first third party in American political history.

    William Morgan was one of those ne’er-do-wells whom Fate or Providence elect to martyrdom. (Or, if the cynical Masons are correct, sham martyrdom of the Jim Morrison-lounged-around-Paris-for-the-next-50-years variety.)

    Morgan, a footloose stonemason (ironically), had been initiated into the LeRoy, New York, chapter of the ancient fraternal order in 1825. He moved the following year to nearby Batavia, whose more fastidious Masonic chapter rejected the application of a man they regarded as an indolent blowhard. Plotting revenge, Morgan vowed to expose the inner workings of Masonry. For this the renegade was kidnapped and on September 11 – there’s that date again – he disappeared.

    Morgan’s book, Freemasonry Exposed and Explained, described the order’s sadomasochistic-flavored initiation rites (the votive’s naked breast is spiked with the point of a compass) and lurid punishments for vocal apostasy: “To have my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the roots and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea at low water-mark.” Ouch!

    “Like wildfire” doesn’t begin to capture the incendiary public response to Morgan’s alleged murder. Masonry was arraigned as an elitist, possibly Satanic entity bent on subverting the republic. After all, its tentacles reached throughout the ruling class: New York Governor DeWitt Clinton was a Mason, as were numerous Founders, among them George Washington and Ben Franklin.

    Within a year, Anti-Masons were being elected to the New York State Assembly. By 1830, the party had sent members to Congress and captured the governorship of Vermont. In my home of rural Genesee County, Anti-Masons held every countywide office from 1827-33. The party’s 1832 presidential candidate, William Wirt, even carried Vermont. (That Wirt was a Mason suggests the complications to come.)

    As will happen, the more picturesque and flamboyant Anti-Masons – who were wont to refer to Masonry as “the Beast with seven heads and ten horns” – were displaced by scheming politicos. The party was taken over by the wily political operators Thurlow Weed and William Seward, later leading lights in the Republican party, who essentially purged the Anti-Masonic party of anti-Masonry, replacing the purpose embedded in its very name with a dirigiste agenda of internal improvements and a national bank.

    The party did leave us some truly rousing campaign songs. One of my favorites begins, “The Freemen bring the monster/ Before the public place it/ And though it scowl with phiz most foul/ Will Anti-Masons face it.” Another concludes, “Tis Morgan whose blood still proclaims from the ground/ That life is in peril where Masonry’s found.” Talk about demonizing one’s foes! (As historian Lee Benson wrote, understatedly, “Anti-Masons tended not to believe in venial sins.”)

    So what did it all mean? American Masonry was decimated, especially in the Northeast, though it would eventually return as an inoffensive civic-minded organization, sponsor of Little League teams and blood drives and the like. William Morgan’s body was never found. Perhaps he slept with the fishes, though to this day Masons insist that he escaped and found refuge in Canada or the Caribbean. His memory lives here, though, embodied in the cenotaph upon which I gaze.

    Finally, we can’t forget Morgan’s fetching young wife, Lucinda, who evidently had a thing for notorious Upstate New Yorkers. She later became one of Mormonism founder Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Smith, too, was murdered. That gal was bad, bad luck.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Has Los Angeles killed America’s imagination?

    Has Los Angeles killed America’s imagination?

    The magnificent Griffith Park Observatory turned 90 this year and, as fans of nonagenarians, my wife and I hiked up the south slope of Mount Hollywood – well, our rental car did the hard work – to pay our respects.

    The city of Los Angeles sprawled out before us; the Hollywood sign loomed ominously above us. I suppose I should hate this city, the Typhoid Mary of cultural imperialism, infecting and deadening imaginations from Bangor to Bend. As Morrissey crooned: “We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/ London is dead.”

    But I dunno: it’s my wife’s hometown, I love her Armenian relatives and I’ve always been a sucker for the movies, at least in their pre-CGI, pre-Marvel, pre-woke, pre-franchise age.

    Griffith Park is something of a sentimental spot for us, as Lucine and I once reenacted the Observatory knife fight scene from Rebel Without a Cause here, sans cutlery, way back where the past was. So the first thing we did on this visit was scoot toward the Kenneth Kendall-sculpted bust of James Dean on the west side of the Observatory lawn.

    Several dozen gamesome schoolchildren were horsing around on the grounds, none paying the slightest attention to the brooding Hoosier overactor’s bronze visage, but it’s hard to score the LA School District for deficiencies in teaching film history: Rebel was released 70 years ago, so teenagers today are as unlikely to know, much less idolize, Dean as I would have been to have drooled over Florence Lawrence at their age.

    Then again, kids these days listen to the Doors and wear Beatles T-shirts, digging the pop music of threescore years earlier, though I rather doubt that many flowerchildren of the 1960s were grooving to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” or the “Swanee” stylings of Al Jolson.

    The James Dean bust – which the actor himself commissioned – is accompanied by an inscription that calls him “an American original who on a basis of high school honors and in a period of five years time rose to the very pinnacle of the theatrical profession and through the magic of motion pictures lives on in legend.”

    Speaking of the very pinnacle, Lucine snapped a shot of me standing in front of the Griffith Park Observatory’s Astronomers Monument, a 35-foot high sculpture featuring likenesses of the stellar sextet of Galileo, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Hipparchus and William Herschel. I titled the photo “Seven Great Astronomers.”

    I share a birthday with Herschel, discoverer of Uranus – and isn’t the seventh planet from the sun the favorite planet of every giggling 12-year-old boy? Uranus has not yet been canceled by planetary puritans – unlike its little brother Pluto, victim of microphobic astronomers. The erstwhile ninth planet’s demotion to the demeaning status of “dwarf planet” (no offense to little people) still pisses me off.

    I once interviewed David Levy, the greatest comet hunter of our age. He knew Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, whose biography he wrote. Levy told me that the elderly Tombaugh feared that his ejection from the exclusive Planet Discoverers Club was only a matter of time. At least the members of the International Astronomical Union had the minimal decency to wait until Clyde was dead before they committed their foul deed. (Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is a lively account by the chief murderer.)

    Yet I was glad to see that the Pluto plaque remains firmly in the ground of Griffith Park’s Solar System Lawn Model. It hasn’t been dug up by the planetary precisians yet.

    The eccentric musician Sufjan Stevens, who once claimed – tongue somewhat in cheek – the extraordinarily inspired ambition of devoting an album to each of the 50 states, recorded an instrumental, “For Clyde Tombaugh,” as part of his Illinois effort. Stevens only musicalized two states, the other being his native Michigan, but his was a rare pop-culture recognition that the states are not just administrative units of a national behemoth, as nanny-state progressives and power-mad Trumpsters seem to believe. They are real places with real histories, distinct and individuated and idiosyncratic and tragic and funny.

    In one of his best tunes, the late folksinger Phil Ochs hymned “Jim Dean of Indiana” and I suppose Stevens would have packed Dean into an Indiana album, standing at a cool remove from his fellow subjects Larry Bird and Kurt Vonnegut and Theodore Dreiser and the Jackson 5 and Eugene V. Debs and Booth Tarkington.

    We do not need to look to Los Angeles for the language we use – or to Washington, DC, for that matter.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • A Neil Young concert in the waning days of summer

    A Neil Young concert in the waning days of summer

    By the time we got to Woodstock… actually, we never got to Woodstock. Bethel, the town in which the fabled festival of mud and myth took place, is about 50 miles as the crow flies from the famous musical happening’s eponym, and it was at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts that we saw and heard Neil Young in the waning days of summer, when melancholy always spices the air.

    It boggles the mind that half a million kids – the youngest of whom are now hoary-headed septuagenarians – flooded Sullivan County on a rain-soaked weekend in August 1969, but it is almost as remarkable that despite the drugs and unhygienic conditions, only three concertgoers died. (Meanwhile, more than 500 US soldiers and an untold number of Vietnamese were killed in action that month on the other side of the world.)

    Ole Neil has become something of a scold ever since he dumped Pegi, his late wife, trading in the earthy waitress for the spacey actress Daryl Hannah, but anyone who creates “Powderfinger,” “Pocahontas” and “Like a Hurricane” has earned a lifetime of free passes.

    We’d seen Young last summer in Toronto, where he bashed it out with his longtime backing band Crazy Horse, but this summer he was accompanied by the Chrome Hearts. Alas, he hadn’t changed his opening act, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, whose anti-consumerist hectoring is so heavy-handed that a ten–minute exposure thereto would send Greta Thunberg running to Prada, Oscar de la Renta or maybe just to the nearest Victoria’s Secret to splurge on a sealskin halter top.

    Reverend Billy is a mock preacher, a sort of Jimmy Swaggart without the sense of mischief, and though I agree with much of his critique I’d rather throw an empty beer can from a gas guzzler than join in his chant of “Earthalujah.”

    The stop-shopping shtick is especially rich given the $50 Neil Young T‑shirts and $16 beers on sale. What ideologues lack in self-awareness and humor, they sure make up for in fervor. This sour note’s for you, Neil. (To be fair, Young insists on the presence of local concessionaires and vendors at his concerts. He is not indifferent to place.)

    Neil Young’s politics, as explicated in Jimmy McDonough’s superb biography Shakey, are far from the caricature you might imagine. I’m not just referring to his pro-Reagan noises in the 1980s and his consistent support of America’s small farmers. His loyal manager, the late Elliot Roberts, gave this marvelous description of his client’s orientation: “Neil is more American than anyone, even though he’s Canadian… Neil’s an isolationist. I mean, if it were up to him, we’d have no foreign aid, we’d talk to no one, we’d really deal with no one else – ‘If they can’t cut it, fuck ’em.’ Neil is extreme…. One minute he’s a leftist Democrat, and the next minute he’s a conservative.”

    C’mon: the guy’s father was a Canadian hockey writer. Do you really think he posts “In This House We Believe…” signs on his ranch? Admittedly, Young has a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome – those who thought Trump might offer something other than the usual rancid diet of perpetual war and centralized control are no longer quite so dismissive of that condition – and this year’s show had a political tinge.

    Highlights included two songs (“Be the Rain” and “Sun Green”) off his excellent album Greendale, a family-values Earth First! saga, and a blistering “Ohio,” his 1970 response to the killings at Kent State. I still puzzle over the line “Soldiers are cutting us down / Shoulda been done long ago.” What the hell does that mean? Ah, well, I do like an ambiguous lyric.

    Neil’s stage patter is mostly limited to periodic ejaculations of “How ya’ doin’ out there?” He did exhort the crowd to “take America back!” and who doesn’t agree with that? But when Young launched into “Southern Man,” his safely anachronistic denunciation of slavery, lynching and the Ku Klux Klan, I got up to take a piss. It would have taken balls for Stephen Foster to sing this song to an audience in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1858, or for Faron Young to warble it in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1957, but Neil Young on the Woodstock festival grounds in 2025? Gimme a break, Old Man.

    A brilliant meteor – a fireball, perhaps – blazed through the Summer Triangle early in the show, eliciting oohs and aahs and apolitical cheers. The heavens understand that we must accept people as they are, even when they exasperate.

    Neil Young calls this his “Love Earth” tour, and for all the petty annoyances and out-of-the-blue gut punches in our lives, this really is a wonderful world, isn’t it?

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Thoughts on moving houses

    Thoughts on moving houses

    “A house for sale is not a home,” says Wendell Berry, which is perhaps why we have delayed putting our home up for sale as we slowly move, box by box, the five short – long? – miles down the road to the house my grandfather built in 1938.

    We are moving from Chapel Street to Bank Street, which I trust does not indicate a moral demotion from my lofty spiritual perch to the world of grubby materialism. I know for certain it does not augur riches.

    We are holding off on selling our Chapel Street home till we’ve cleared it out and are fully moved into Bank, though I nurture a ridiculous hope that before then I might unearth a rusted coffee can filled with 19th-century gold pieces that will enable us to keep both.

    Our Chapel Street abode is a Greek revival farmhouse dating from the early 1830s. For most of a century it was inhabited by our county’s leading family of spiritualists. I’ve never seen a ghost herein, though the squirrels in the attic do a pretty good impression of skittering haints. I would welcome ghosts in the new house, since there never was a kinder man than my grandfather.

    Lucine and I purchased our soon-to-be-former home in 1992 from a charming eccentric who had named it “La Maison des Fleurs Printemps,” and the first thing I did upon moving in was to rip out that sign—though of course the flowers still bloom every May.

    I had a wonderful second-floor office crammed with books and files, its walls papered with posters and our daughter’s artwork. The Kauffman homestead, which is at most two-thirds the size of our current home, offers no such aerie, so I am consigned to the basement, which provides ample room for my avalanche of books and LPs and autographed baseballs and posters bearing images and signatures of persons and things from George McGovern to Barber Conable, Gore Vidal to William Cullen Bryant, Ray Nitschke of the Green Bay Packers to Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto, and The Hired Hand to Zabriskie Point. (I’m a sucker for early 1970s cinema.)

    If I must settle in this netherworld, I told Lucine, the dingy-gray basement had to be chromatically transformed into something out of The Brady Bunch. So we’re painting it a color dubbed “sunshine yellow.” Bring sunglasses if you visit.

    We are leaving the home in which we raised our daughter, drank thousands of cups of coffee, laughed or rolled eyes at countless in-jokes and lived with humor and love and exasperation for the majority of our lives. We also threw the occasional idiotically themed party. The most preposterous was triggered by our buying a bottle of absinthe, out of which grew what we called the French Literary Party. Two dozen partiers endured readings from Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire before we all got back to drinking and talking about the Buffalo Bills. ‘Twas très magnifique!

    Technically we’re moving south, but I doubt we quite qualify as snowbirds

    Our pets are buried out back. The Chapel Street house has an unobstructed southern horizon that reveals the Greatest Show in the Universe every clear night. Now and then I’d drag out the eight-inch reflector telescope I bought decades ago with found money when an English publication (not The Spectator, I assure you!) paid me a debt I’d been owed for more than a year. I have relished walking to the post office every morning, dropping by the service station for coffee with Sam and Bob and Whitey and Bear. I don’t believe I will ever be able to think of that house without a tear coming to my eye.

    All my memories are there. But they’re also in the Kauffman homestead and, since none of the younger members of the clan wanted it, Lucine and I figured it fell to us to keep it in the family.

    The Bank Street house is just two lots from the home in which I grew up and in which my octogenarian parents still live. Technically we’re moving south, but I don’t think we quite qualify as snowbirds.

    We’ll be just one block from Dwyer Stadium, home of Batavia’s Muckdogs, where I have spent well over a thousand nights watching baseball in a cocoon of community from which I hope never to emerge. (Sixty-five years? How the hell did I get so old? I am like my late friend Henry W. Clune, the Rochester novelist, who lived to a Methuselan age of 105 but said that he always felt 18 inside. But then, he said, you look in the mirror…) “Sometimes I feel so happy/ Sometimes I feel so sad,” Lou Reed once sang. That about sums up my mood these days.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • It’s a frustrating time to be a college football fan

    It’s a frustrating time to be a college football fan

    Another pigskin season kicks off, and despite the multitudinous sins committed against the game and its culture by ESPN, university presidents, major conference commissioners, take-the-money-and-run athletes and other votaries of Mammon, I’m once again giving it the old college try. Which is why I picked up my copy of Lindy’s College Football Preview the other day. (Lindy’s ranks my local team, the University of Buffalo Bulls, 85th in nation –we’re movin’ on up!)

    It’s a frustrating time to be a college football fan. Tradition is sacked by the almighty buck, as it typically is in the land of the dollar bill, and healthy sentiments and institutional affections are warped, processed and sold back to us in tawdry and expensive packages.

    Conference realignments have placed Pacific Coast schools Stanford and Berkeley in the now transcontinental Atlantic Coast Conference. They have swelled the Big Ten to the Big (and decidedly Unbeautiful) Eighteen, stretching that proud and sturdy beast of the Midwest on a rack that runs from Seattle to Piscataway, New Jersey. And they are on the verge of adding Northern Illinois to the Mountain West Conference, even though the highest point in the Land of Lincoln is merely a mound.

    Those Krazy Kampus Kut-ups who abolished sex and disappeared free speech are also into repealing geography, though I am reliably told by one who knows that hierarchs at the University of Southern California, which gutted the PAC-12 by defecting to the Big Eighteen, have realized, to their consternation, that there is no Chief Engineer Scotty to beam Trojan teams from Los Angeles to College Park, Maryland, in a trice (or a transporter). But still, I am that most mingy and contemptible thing: a fan. So I put my dudgeon on hold, leafing through Lindy’s and enjoying the names of this year’s gridiron gladiators.

    I can report both generational change and constancy, onomastically speaking. White jock names beginning with a C, usually hard – Colt, Colton, Cade, Caden, Cody, Cole, Cam and Chase – still rule the upper-level playground, but among black players there has been a decline in apostrophic forenames. African appellations are on the rise: my favorite this year belongs to Olasunkonmi Agunloye, defensive tackle for the Florida International Panthers. Fortunately for the FIU announcers, he has a nickname: Su.

    Other outstanding handles in the 2025 college football season include Cal linebacker Buom Jock; NC State running back Hollywood Smothers; Marshall right guard Jalen Slappy; and the jazzy Utah State running back Miles Davis. Arizona has a Rhino (left tackle Tapa’atoutai) and a Genesis (safety Smith). In the names that fit category, Central Florida’s Gaard Memmelaar is… a guard. Nomenclature is destiny. Finally, Pitt wide receiver Censere Lee’s full name, spoken without an intermediate breath, makes the classic epistolary valediction redundant.

    There are more Deuces – or even Duces, presumably born to Mussolini nostalgists – than Bills. In fact, I found not a single Bill in a starting lineup of any of the 136 major-college teams. Don’t even ask about Ed, Joe, LeRoy, Warren, or any name of the heroes of my youth. The names may have changed and respect for geography gone the way of the dropkick, but college football has been under indictment for more or less the same crimes – commercialism, degrading academics, cheating, broken bones – since the early 1900s, when academic luminaries like Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and frontier-thesis historian Frederick Jackson Turner campaigned for the game’s diminution – or even abolition.

    Perhaps the most errant prediction ventured by the critics came in the New Republic from economist Glenn E. Hoover, who prophesied hopefully in 1926 that the rise of professional football would “do for college football what it has done for college baseball, to wit, remove it from the spotlight, render it an innocuous thing and plunge it into oblivion.” Uh, no.

    The last nationally prominent abolitionist was University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins, who convinced his school’s trustees to drop football after the Maroons completed an abysmal 1939 season, lowlighted by an 85-0 loss to Michigan. Hutchins rejected suggestions that Chicago merely drop down in class, saying it would be “worse to be beaten by Beloit and Oberlin” than to get trounced by the Wolverines. Not that Hutchins wasn’t open to compromise: he endorsed former Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell’s proposal that teams play only one game a year, and that against their greatest rival.

    By the way, the University of Chicago – which refielded a team in 1969 – opens its 2025 season on September 6 against Carnegie Mellon. If anyone offers you the Maroons and 85 points, take the bet.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.