Great Doctors and Scientists As Free Masons*
Great doctors and scientists as free masons* ERWIN H. ACKERKNECHT During the summer of 1898, the nineteen year old Russian student Lew D. Bron stein was retained in the prison of Odessa, where he, on his visits to the library, encountered works dealing with freemasonry. He was fascinated by the extension and contradictions of this, now, two and a half centuries old movement and he wrote a Marxist book on it. The manuscript was lost and Bronstein turned to other subjects. Under the name of LeoTrotski, he became together with W.I. Lenin, the author of one of the most fatal events in history: the Russian October Revolution of 1917. The fascination of the young man is not difficult to understand. The order has had six English and seven German kings in its ranks, including Frederic the Great. Many of the leaders of the American Revolution (Washington, Franklin, Jefferson) were also Masons, and so were at least fifteen presidents in the U.S.A. Freemason vocabulary was used in the Declaration of Independence, and military lodges existed during wars of revolutions and of states on both sides. Most of Napoleon's marshalls were freemasons, as well as their adversaries Wellington, Nelson, Gneisenau, BlUcher and Kutusow. The generals McArthur, Marshall and Bradley continued the conspicuous tradition of military masonry. During the French Revolution, freemasons acted as moderates (Condorcet, Lafayette), or as terrorists (Cauthon, Marat), but also as reactionaries (J. de Maistre, the brother of the king, and later Guizot and Decazes). In more recent times we know mason-statesmen like Gambetta, Stresemann, Cecil Rhodes, Churchill, Eugen Debs, Rob.
[Show full text]