Fourteen Presidents have been Freemasons. Exactly one served as Grand Master of a state — and he did it in 1940, while sitting in the United States Senate, four years before he became Vice President and five before he had to decide whether to use the atomic bomb.
A Farmer Joins a Lodge
Harry S. Truman petitioned Belton Lodge No. 450 in Missouri in December 1908. He was twenty-four and farming his family's land at Grandview.
He was initiated on 9 February 1909, passed on 9 March, and raised on 18 March 1909. He was Junior Warden by 1910.
The story he liked to tell about why he joined is that a fellow farmer, seeing something in a ring Truman wore, asked whether his father had been a Mason, and the conversation ended with Truman asking for a petition.
In 1911 he did the thing that tells you he was serious: he organized a new lodge at Grandview — Lodge No. 618 — and became its first Master when it was chartered. Founding a lodge is not a matter of showing up. It means recruiting the petitioners, satisfying the Grand Lodge, finding a hall, and personally guaranteeing that the work will be done properly.
Thirty Years of Chairs
What follows is the least glamorous and most instructive part of Truman's Masonic record: he simply kept doing it, for decades, while the rest of his life happened.
- He worked through the chairs at Grandview and served as Master.
- He served the Grand Lodge of Missouri as District Deputy Grand Master and District Lecturer from 1925 to 1930 — the traveling, teaching, correcting work that keeps ritual alive in small-town lodges.
- He was elected Grand Master of Masons in Missouri, serving 1940–41.
Look at the dates against his public career. He commanded an artillery battery in France in 1918. He ran a failed haberdashery. He was a Jackson County judge — an administrative office — through the 1920s and early 1930s under the shadow of the Pendergast machine. He entered the U.S. Senate in 1935.
So when Missouri Masons elected him Grand Master in 1940, they were electing a sitting United States Senator who had been driving to their lodges for fifteen years to hear their ritual and fix it. He served the full term, and he did not treat it as ceremonial.
In October 1945 — six months into the presidency, weeks after the war ended — he was coroneted a 33rd degree Scottish Rite Mason.
And on 18 May 1959 he received his fifty-year award. He remains the only President of the United States to reach fifty years in the Craft.
Fourteen Presidents
Since the count gets garbled constantly, here is the documented list of Presidents who were Freemasons:
George Washington, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Gerald R. Ford.
That is fourteen out of forty-five men to hold the office — substantial, and nothing like the majority the conspiracy literature asserts. Lincoln was not a Mason; he is frequently and wrongly claimed. Neither were Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, or any President since Ford.
Of those fourteen, Truman alone served as the Grand Master of a Grand Lodge.
What the Craft Actually Gave Him
It is easy to make too much of this, so let us be careful about what can be shown.
Truman came to the presidency in April 1945 as one of the least prepared men ever to hold it. He had been Vice President for eighty-two days. He had not been briefed on the atomic bomb. Within months he had to decide about Hiroshima, manage Stalin at Potsdam, and improvise the postwar order.
What he had instead of preparation was a particular kind of formation. Truman had spent thirty years in rooms where a man is elected for one year, does the work, and hands the gavel to his successor. He had been a District Deputy, which is the job of telling other men, respectfully, that they have the work wrong. He had founded a lodge from nothing and been answerable for it.
Two things in his presidency look like they come from that soil. One is the buck stops here — the flat refusal to distribute responsibility downward, which is precisely what an Eastern chair teaches. The other is Executive Order 9981 of July 1948, desegregating the armed forces, issued against the advice of most of his party and at real political cost.
It would be too much to claim the lodge produced that order. Truman was a man of his time and place with the limitations that implies, and he had sat for thirty years in a fraternity that was itself segregated in practice in most of the country. But a man who has spent his life reciting that all Masons meet upon the level has been handed a standard, and standards have a way of catching up with the people who repeat them.
The Reason to Tell It Here
Not because a President was a Mason. Because of what he was doing in 1925.
In 1925 Harry Truman was an obscure county judge in Missouri with no future anyone could see, driving out to small lodges as a District Lecturer to hear their ritual and help them get it right. He kept that up for five years. Nobody was watching, it advanced nothing, and there was no reason to do it except that it needed doing.
That is the work of a lodge, and it is the same work in Pueblo as in Jackson County. Twenty years later the man doing it was President of the United States — but the work was worth doing when he was nobody, which is the only reason it was worth doing at all.