“The threat of being Morganized will not deter us”: William Lyon Mackenzie, Freemasonry and the Morgan Affair
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In January 1827 William Lyon Mackenzie applied for membership to in York’s lodge of Freemasons, an episode in his life totally ignored by his biographers. His action seems incompatible with the character and personality of the radical journalist. As he was re-establishing his printing business in the wake of its blatant destruction, why would Mackenzie, an outsider, want to join the Masons, the insiders? And why would the Masons consider welcoming him into their secret circle? Freemasonry was embroiled in sandal over the abduction and supposed murder of William Morgan, author of a book exposing Masonic secrets. Mackenzie began publishing lurid stories of the Morgan affair. The Masons rejected his membership application. Mackenzie proceeded to put out his own edition of Morgan’s book. A mutually beneficial bargain, exchanging editorial silence for social status had failed – and Mackenzie published his version of the drama in the columns of the Colonial Advocate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".