The Most Famous Freemasons in History

Few organisations in history can match the Freemasons for sheer density of famous members. From the founding fathers of the United States to the fathers of modern science, the rolls of regular Grand Lodges include a remarkable list of presidents, scientists, generals, writers, composers and revolutionaries. Below is a survey of the most cited and most consequential.

American Presidents

At least fourteen United States presidents have been Masons. The most famous include:

• George Washington, raised 1752 at Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4 in Virginia. Washington was elected the first Master of Alexandria Lodge No. 22 and was the only president ever to be elected Master of a lodge.
• Benjamin Franklin, raised 1731 in a Philadelphia lodge; the only signer of all four of the founding documents of the United States.
• Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton.
• James Monroe, raised while a senator from Virginia.

The prevalence of Masons among the founders is one reason that the United States Capitol and the federal city of Washington are rich in Masonic architecture and hidden symbols.

British Royals and Statesmen

The British royal family has been Masonic for centuries. Kings George IV, William IV, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI were all Masons. So was the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo. Among Prime Ministers, Henry Addington, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, the Marquess of Salisbury, Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath and James Callaghan have all been members. The British fraternal tradition is intertwined with the Empire’s governing class.

Revolutionary Leaders

Several of the men who broke the British Empire in the Americas, Latin America and elsewhere were Masons. José de San Martín, Simón Bolívar and Bernardo O’Higgins were all initiated in lodges that had been founded by the British Grand Lodge system or by the Grand Orient de France. The role of Masonic lodges in the independence movements is widely recognised by historians.

Scientists and Inventors

The Royal Society’s modern founders, including Sir Isaac Newton, were Masons. Joseph Montgolfier, the balloonist, was a Mason; so was Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of long-distance radio. The list of doctor-inventors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is long enough to support a separate article.

Writers and Composers

Among the cultural figures, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the most cited, and his opera The Magic Flute contains Masonic ritual and symbolism by the dozen. Joseph Haydn was a Mason. The poet Friedrich Schiller was a Mason. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was raised in a lodge at Weimar. Robert Burns was a Scottish Mason. Arthur Conan Doyle was raised in a Phoenix lodge. Mark Twain was a Master Mason and Royal Arch Mason.

Military Figures

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, raised 1790; Horatio Nelson; the Duke of Marlborough; the American Civil War generals Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman and George McClellan; Winston Churchill, who was a Mason before he went into politics (he resigned his lodge in 1912 to focus on Parliament); and many others.

Civil Rights Leaders

Booker T. Washington was raised 1875 in Boston and became a celebrated orator in the Craft. The Pullman Porter’s Brotherhood included numerous Masons, and the connection between Black American freemasonry and the Civil Rights movement is substantial.

A Caveat

The most-cited lists of famous Masons often include figures whose Masonic membership is a matter of legend rather than documented record. The most rigorous roster would include only those whose membership is recorded in the ledgers of a regular lodge. The names above all meet that standard, but readers should be wary of attribution without a citation.

Why So Many Famous Men?

The disproportionate representation of famous men in the Masonic rolls is not, in itself, evidence of a hidden hand. It is partly a function of social class: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Masonic lodges were the most respectable secular organisations a man of standing could join, and ambitious men used them the way modern men use country clubs and the local chamber of commerce. It is partly a function of network effects: once a few famous men had joined, the social cost of joining dropped for their peers. It is also partly a function of the degree rituals themselves, which use the language of moral self-improvement and are unusually attractive to the kind of person who has both leisure to attend a lodge and interest in formal symbolism. The combined effect is the dense concentration of celebrated names that the modern Masonic fraternity is famous for.

What the Critics Say

Critics of the Masonic tradition sometimes point to the same roster and argue, in the language of the New World Order or the Illuminati card game, that the list of famous Masons is itself proof of a coordinated project. The scholarly answer is that correlation between Masonic membership and political, military and cultural prominence is exactly what one would expect from any large social fraternity with two centuries of continuous operation; the conspiratorial reading requires a great many additional assumptions that the public record does not support.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard reference is the Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia (William R. Denslow, 1961, reprinted 1996), still the most comprehensive single-volume reference for individual Masons. For the historical context of the various members, the relevant scholarly works are David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry (1988), and for the American case, Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (1991). The British royal connection is treated in the relevant chapter of John Hamill, The Craft (2019), and for the Latin American leaders, the standard source is the relevant essays in Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (Mark Carnes, 1989), with the comparison chapter in The Cambridge History of Latin America.

The Freemasonry explained cluster, famous secret societies, origin of the Freemason handshake, Skull and Bones, and how to become a Freemason cover the surrounding context.