If the OP still regards their question to be unanswered - why have the Masons been stamping pennies for so long - then consider this line of reasoning.
Freemasonry is a secret society. Noteworthy amongst their publicly-known tenets are:
- Don't divulge any secrets you might be taught within Freemasonry
- Don't actively recruit new members.
That second point is perhaps more pertinent to this topic. Freemasons are famously prohibited from openly soliciting, asking or inviting a prospective member if they would like to join. Which is why you'll never see Freemasons standing on the street corner, preaching to the non-members and trying to convert them to Freemasonry. They're supposed to just sit there in their Lodges and wait for the prospective members to take the initiative and "express an interest" in joining. So, most of their "advertisements" must therefore be oblique and subtle.
A counterstamped penny, deliberately put into circulation, is just such an oblique advertisement. It is designed to tell you that the Freemasons exist, they have secrets they want to teach you, and are waiting to hear from you if you wish to join them, without actually saying any of that.
Even if an "official reason", a top-down, authorized and officially sanctioned programme to create and issue these pieces existed, you'd never find out about it, for three reasons.
One, the Freemasons are inherently secretive and don't tell outsiders, or even other people within their own organization, anything they don't need to know.
Two, advertising the fact that they're doing a covert advertising campaign would kind of defeat the purpose of the original covertness. Keeping people guessing, and keeping people curious, is the goal.
Third, placing advertising onto
US coinage and putting it into circulation is, technically, illegal, and I believe has been illegal since at least 1940. A Masonic Lodge might be secretive but is nevertheless a chartered or incorporated organization and as such could be targeted by the Federal government for breaches of
18 USC 475, and fined. Just like 20th Century Fox got fined for producing those "Silver Surfer quarters" back in 2007.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Posted 12/05/2020 12:16 am
