Behind the Scenes Minis: Mysteries of the Morgan Abduction

Holly and Tracy discuss the appeal of secret societies and the unity that people sometimes find in vilifying an outcast. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:28):
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

(00:53):
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

(01:13):
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

(01:37):
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

(01:59):
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

(02:20):
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,

(02:47):
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

(03:12):
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

(03:34):
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,

(04:00):
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

(04:21):
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

(04:44):
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

(05:08):
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,

(05:30):
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

(05:52):
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

(06:13):
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

(06:34):
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

(06:55):
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

(07:18):
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

(07:38):
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

(08:03):
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

(08:26):
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

(08:48):
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,

(09:09):
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

(09:29):
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

(09:52):
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

(10:17):
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

(10:38):
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

(11:00):
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,

(11:24):
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

(11:45):
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

(12:08):
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

(12:32):
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

(12:54):
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

(13:15):
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?

(13:40):
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,

(14:05):
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

(14:27):
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

(14:52):
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

(15:12):
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,

(15:32):
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
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(15:53):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.