Behind the Scenes Minis: Mysteries of the Morgan Abduction

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about William Morgan's abduction and death when a convoluted troubling story. Yeah, yeah, I read in one of the admittedly anti Masonic accounts, and I don't remember which one, but it really stuck with me and I found myself thinking about it for a couple of days. An interesting note on how Freemasonry became so popular in the US, and it's in particularly as the country was being founded and even during colonial era, that this idea that people were leaving England to start a new place where everyone would be equal and they could get out from under an aristocracy where it was like birthright gave you power, then set up a secret society that gave you power and kind of replicated a lot of those same things. And I was like, oh, I never thought of it that way. Yeah, And we should also note, like I am not an expert on freemasonry, it comes up a lot in historical stuff. Yeah, We've mentioned it so many times. There was a big shift where it went from being an organization my understanding about knowledge and whatnot. Then in the late eighteenth century, one particular dude kind of came in and added a lot of mysticism to it and made it more like secret society. Like it came a lot more intensely about secrets and separation from the normal world, and that that's a big point where things really start to spiral in directions that are unhealthy. You know, today there are still Freemasons. It's much more like an organization of people, you know, trying to better themselves. It has my understanding. Again, I'm not an expert to branches, one that still keeps to the more Christian ideology of it and one that has been stripped of the specifics of one religion. And there are also women now. So just in case anyone's like, hey, yeah, I know a Freemason and they're lovely, I don't. I'm not calling anybody a nefarious criminal. I feel like there's a prior episode of the show where we've sort of talked about an almost fad for the establishment of secret societies. Yeah, and I'm hard pressed to remember which episode that was. I think it's been several right, I think the Crowley episode probably touched on it a little. I think that might be what I'm thinking of. Madam Blovotsky touched on that stuff too. Like there's like a lot of them like are at their core basically like fraternal organizations or like almost mutual aid associations, but with this added element of like secrecy and some degree of mysticism. And there's just a lot, right. And the thing is, there's a lot because there's an appeal to that, right, right, Like gives people a sense of belonging to something that is both bigger than themselves but also that is not accessible to everyone. So like, not only is there a sense of belonging, but there's a sense of like betterness, whether you're consciously drawn to that or not. Like that's part of it. It's like I'm part of something you can't be a part of. Yeah, that's intoxicating, right, there's yeah, and then there's also the fact that like and a lot of these organizations like there is an actual important community role. Yeah. I I'm trying to like just recall from my memory old episodes. Uh. And I think it was in our interview about the Green Book or the I think the full title was The Negro Motorists Green Book, which was like a publication of places that it was safe for black travelers to stay and get a meal at a restaurant, and that kind of stuff in the days of more formalized segregation, and talking about how one of the like the the man who largely wrote that book, like one of he was a member of the Masons, and his Masonic connections were one of the ways that he was able to ensure his own safety right while traveling. And again this is me pulling an old episode from memory, So go listen to that episode rather than like using my actual my little synopsis I have tried to create right there. Yeah, yeah, uh. One of the other things I wanted to talk about, and you you brought it up at the end of the second episode is the victim blaming nature of a lot of the coverage of it. Yeah, there's a whole lot of sense of like, well, if he hadn't written that book, wouldn't have got murdered. Well, and there's also this thing that I refer to that happens in various cultures and communities as sick chicken syndrome, which I call it that because if you've ever had chickens in large numbers, which I grew up with. If one of them is sick, in some cases, the other chickens will peck it to death. Oh yeah, yeah, horrifying. Yeah. But like, even in fairly benign execution of this kind of mentality, like almost any social group will often develop the one outcast, and it's like they become united in disliking that person. And I feel like he was already on this path before he was like, I'm gonna expose your secrets, which again those aren't really very secret. Nobody cares how you shake hands. I don't. I mean maybe somebody does. But like, I think that's part of why it became so intense and escalated so quickly, is like, not only is it a person who's gonna tell our secrets, it's a person we already didn't like, right, And like it goes from zero to sixty in a shockingly short period of time. That whole thing, like as a study in groupthink, and like the way that crowds can rile themselves up is fascinating to me. Terrifying, sure, and fascinating. I really am fascinated by the insistence that he lived in Turkia, and was teaching English there. That is a weird one that came up again and again and again, and I you know, the the hint we never explicitly said so while we were telling this story, but the hint has always been as people have looked at this bigger picture that like, these were stories concocted by the masons of this area to discredit the idea that he had been murdered, because who's gonna fact check that he's sitting somewhere in you know, Smyrna, Turkia, right, going by a different name. You know, that's impossible for most people, Like it was not within the means of most people to be like, oh, I'm gonna get in touch with my friend there, and so you know, if so, it's kind of an ingenious way to to cover your tracks. I guess right again, at a time when that would have been like, well, disrespected guy said that he's there. That must be true. He's not dead, I know the truth. That is the other part of it, right, is that there's the secret society element that gives people a sense of belonging in this story. But there is also the element of I have figured out the real truth, which is a whole other type of group think that happens in like conspiracy theory groups, and it's all in play in this one wild story, which I just find super interesting. I think that's part of why I was so compelled by it. Like, yeah, when I stumbled upon that first eighteen eighty one we found the body of this man who was killed by Masons, and we've always and I'm like, uh what, Yeah, I was reminded of the lists of logical fallacies that will circuit around social media sometimes. Yeah, one of them being the no true Scotsman fallacy, which is the idea, like, no true Scotsman would do bloody, bloody blood because Scotsmen don't do that in this fallacy, and so it was like this idea that like, no Freemasons would ever do this, uh upstanding citizens, all right, Yeah, it's a This brings us to that eighteen eighty two article that we talked about that was in the New York Times regarding the monument. And obviously the person writing that article thinks that the anti Mason movement is jerkery, but also the way that they support that argument is also kind of insulting to Masons, because they're like You've seen pictures of Freemasons, and they all look kind of fat and happy and like lazy and like they couldn't do anything, So surely they couldn't commit a murder. And it's like, do you just hate everybody? I don't, right, I just want to insult all the people. One other interesting thing that got introduced in a couple of these accounts that I read from the nineteenth century that were written later on, after you know, decades had passed. Make a couple of them make the case that the anti masonry issue would have continued to stay much more important in the public eye had it not been for the abolitionist movement, and that as like the Civil War played out and people got more like the bone of contention among the people of the United States was over the issue of slavery, and that like that kind of pushed out this idea of like secret society's good or bad being debated anymore because we didn't have time for both, and that was the obviously the more pressing issue that led to the conflict. So that was an interesting thing, Like this idea that and some of them even I think it's Samuel Green that connects the dots in a way. That's like, because the slavery issue obscured the masonry issue, some of these nefarious Masons were able to regroup and reform their societies and like, we're gonna have another wave. And I was like, this is fascinating. It's like there's so much otherism coming from both sides right that I just find myself completely like intrigued from a like I said, a psychological standpoint, I'm just like, this is it's so much stuff we see all the time today anyway, in playing out in media and on social media, and it's just a different flavor, but it is as vehement as anything we would hear today, and I'm I'm completely intrigued by it. There is so much reading one could do on this topic if you want. There are people who have you know, put together the entire list of everyone who was ever held to any level of account. We didn't even include them all because there are some where it's like, well, this one guy in one town got you know, had a minor charge against him, and sometimes those sputter out and sometimes those go to fruition, and there's just a lot and that becomes a big list of like and on the court on this day of this person, in this particular sheriff who was probably corrupt, was also doing the like there's a lot lot right, and we already had two episodes, so that's why those it all didn't get included. There's so much more. I was surprised by how many modern retellings are still pretty vitriolic about William Morgan. And I will say this, I find myself questioning my own morality in the following way. So many of these people that justified this horrific abduction and probably murder really all do as we said, the victim blame me thing, but like they seem to think it is so much more dishonorable that someone would break an oath to keep a secret than abduct and kill someone. And I'm like, it's no, wait, am I morally bankrupt? Because I don't think that's a big a deal. Look, I also had I kept questioning myself and changing the use of the words kidnapping versus abduction. Oh sure, yeah, because you could on a technicality make either case. Right. He was subducted, nobody made there was a ransom. Ransom, but they did try to get his wife to turn over whatever pieces of manuscript she had with the promise that she would get to see him and presumably have him returned. So it kind of is a kidnapping, but kind of it's not. And I debated and did several finding replaces and then undid and kept doing that throughout working on it, and so both words creep in. Yeah. I also don't remember when federal laws were passed about kidnapping, because I know it's come up on the show before that, like we would have to find this as kidnapping, but that was not a legal right term yet And I don't remember exactly when that happened. Yeah, yeah, Will we ever know the real real No, probably not at this point, but maybe one never knows. Older mysteries have been solved. I mean, this one's only a couple hundred years. Soldier Race. If this is your weekend coming up, I hope you don't feel compelled to solve mysteries unless that's something very fun for you and it happens in a very benign, gentleman safe way. If you don't have time off, I hope you still have a great weekend and that you get some bit of rest and relaxation in. But everybody's cool to each other, and then nobody feels compelled to do anything bad to anybody else. This is my wish, but it will never come true. It seems we will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we'll have another new one. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.