“Jim, you’ve gotta
read this one …”

Jim Tresner, Grand Cross

So said M.W. Richard Fletcher, P.G.M., 33°, Blue Friar, and Executive Secretary of the Masonic Service Association when he called to tell me about Freedom Just Around the Corner. As I’ve mentioned before, when he recommends a book, I order it, no questions asked. He was right. This column contains several “must read” books. These are really remarkable.

Walter A. McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585–1828, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, hardcover and paperback, 638 pages, maps, good index, ISBN 0-06-019789-7, cover price $29.95, available from Amazon.com hardcover, new $19.72, used from $2.42 also available new and used in paperback.

This is a great book. It’s written in an easy, flowing style, and it tells the story of America primarily through people, some famous, but many obscure. The author has managed the difficult task of informing us about the great questions and conflicts of the time through the events and actions of ordinary people. I gave it the acid test—I loaned it to a friend who hates reading history and asked him just to read the first chapter. He read straight through the book, loaned it to someone else, so I had to buy another copy. He told me, “This isn’t history—it’s interesting!”

It certainly isn’t the history I read in school—so completely focused on events that people never seemed to matter. And it isn’t history as primarily written for school consumption today—so carefully politically correct that it seems nothing ever actually happened. It is the kind of living, vital history that makes you suddenly realize that perhaps the things you do in your everyday life may be important.

What makes it especially interesting to us starts on page 333. After writing at some length about Freemasonry, McDougall writes: “What the fraternal order did between 1790 and 1830 was to offer Americans in leadership and those aspiring to it a republicanism above faction, region, and sect, a civil religion enjoining unity and restraint so citizens might get on with the sacred task of completing that pyramid beneath the Eye and before the eyes of the world.” He returns many times in the text to the role Masonry played in the development of the country.

McDougall is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. And he has produced a fascinating, insightful and pleasurable book.

Mark A. Tabbert, 32°, American Freemasons: Three Centuries of Building Communities, Lexington, Mass.: National Heritage Museum and New York University Press, 2005, hardcover, 262 pages, many color illustrations, ISBN 0-8147-8292-2, cover price $29.95, available at Amazon.com for $19.77.

Worshipful Brother Tabbert has produced a gem of a book—almost literally, because nearly every page gleams in colors. There are wonderful illustrations here, from Masonic wall paper made for the home market, to postal cards, to artifacts. Hundreds of illustrations, mostly of articles which were commonplace in the Lodges and homes of America, really bring home to you just how central a part Freemasonry was in the daily lives of men and women, even those who were not members of the craft. Starting with a brief history of the Fraternity, he shows its importance in the life of large cities and rural communities alike. It was more than just a part of the cultural landscape; often, it was the landscape itself. Like McDougall’s book, it proves that individuals do make a difference, and when those individuals are inspired by a common set of virtues and values, the effect is greatly multiplied. Read the book carefully, then leave it out on the coffee table where your friends can see it. It is a work of art as a publication and a work of glory for the spirit.

Robert G. Davis, 33°, Grand Cross, Understanding Manhood in America: Freemasonry’s Enduring Path to the Mature Masculine, Lancaster, Virginia: Anchor Communications LLC, 2005, paperback, 193 pages, ISBN 0-935633-37-5, $19.95, order from Anchor Communications www.goanchor.com.

I’ve been waiting a long time to tell you about this book. Ill. Brother Bob Davis and I have been friends for decades, and I’ve watched this book grow from an idea to a reality, and eagerly read more than one draft along the way. It’s good!! The book is concerned with rites of passage, with what has to happen in the mind of a male in order for him to take his place as an autonomous man, a full, adult, creative, productive member of a society. Archaeological evidence suggests that question has been with us as long as we have been human. In today’s world there are very few rites of passage left. It is not a coincidence, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, that we see a rise in gang activity and membership. Males will seek a rite of passage, positive or negative. Perhaps Freemasonry’s most important activity is not in our charities, not in our connections, not in our educational outreach, but in the age-old path we provide by which men may discover what it means to be a man. This is not only a good book to read, it’s a good book to lend your friends. Highly recommended.

Jim Tresner, Valley of Guthrie, Okla., is the Director of the Masonic Leadership Institute; Editor of The Oklahoma Mason, Member of the Steering Committee, Masonic Information Center; Director of Work in Guthrie; and author, among other books, of Albert Pike: The Man Beyond the Monument and Vested in Glory: The Regalia of the Scottish Rite. Contacts: Grand Lodge of Oklahoma, P.O. Box 1019, Guthrie OK 73044; Tel. 405-282-3212; Fax 405-282-3244; okmasonmag@hotmail.com