Whether the American and/or the French revolutions were Masonic conspiracies is a question the Chronicler is not up to answering.

However, in the recently redesigned and revived museum in the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Curator Stephen E. Patrick has presented the rather ambiguous answer given by George Washington himself.

The first U.S. president was also the first Worshipful Master of Alexandria Lodge 22 -- a largely honorary position, says Patrick, who knows all these things. Many of Washington's military cohorts were, undeniably, also Freemasons.

In the late 1700s rumors circulated linking the French Revolution with the Masonic brothers. Washington wrote to the Grand Lodge of Maryland in 1798 attempting to put the proper spin on the whispers about the French and similar suggestions of a Masonic plot in the U.S. government:

"So far as I am acquainted with the principles and doctrines of Freemasonry, I conceive them to be founded on benevolence, and to be exercized for the good of mankind... ."

Patrick characterizes the letter -- on display here -- as an example of "Washington the politician."

Apparently the Maryland lodge was quite upset about the subject. Patrick cites a letter to the lodge written by President John Adams -- who had the distinction of not being a Mason -- saying that Freemasonry "has not heretofore been applied to mischievous purposes."

In 1798, a G.W. Snyder of Frederick, Md., sent Washington a book "freshly printed in America," called "Proofs of a Conspiracy," which charged European Masons with "fomenting rebellion and cautioned the world against the fraternity," Patrick says. A copy from the same edition (not Washington's) is exhibited in the museum. A 1799 book called "Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobism" (also exhibited here) has a chapter condemning the Freemasons.

Washington replied, "I believe notwithstanding, that none of the lodges in this country are contaminated with the principles ascribed to the society of the Illuminati." The term Illuminati, Patrick says, refers to one of the many French political groups. They may have claimed to be based on the 18th-century philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The memorial museum is an intriguing place to visit -- especially appropriate to Presidents Day or Washington's birthday, this Saturday. The 1932 building was designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett (later a Rockefeller Center architect). From a colonnaded base, three ever-smaller stories are stacked and topped with a tiered pyramid, to make a tower with a height of 333 feet. The elevators, Patrick says, have to go sideways. In the impressive main floor stands a 17-foot-high bronze statue of Washington, in Masonic regalia, before a bronze chair. The adjacent walls carry 1950 murals by Allyn Cox, who also decorated the Capitol. One shows the Masons attending Washington at the laying of the cornerstone of the Capitol, the other a Masonic observance of Saint John's Day.

To celebrate the memorial's 60th anniversary, the museum has borrowed some choice pieces. A silver-and-paste past master's Masonic "jewel," lent from the Kenmore Association in Fredericksburg, Va., has just been found to be a part of Martha Washington's estate sale. A Washington nephew bought it in 1802 when the family held a private sale at her death. An eccentrically shaped desk, a truncated triangle married to a bow, was said to be the one in the Maryland Statehouse in Annapolis on which Commander in Chief Washington laid his commission when he resigned it at the end of the Revolution. The core of the museum's collection -- the 1966 gift by Washington's great-great-great-great nieces Anne Madison and Patty Willis Washington -- has just been recatalogued and researched.

Patrick turned up all sorts of prizes in the permanent collection. The family Bible has Washington's name written in the front. Only half remains of the first page of the family record in the middle of the book. On it, the nieces' father, Lawrence Washington, who as a small boy actually lived at Mount Vernon (till his father sold it in 1858 to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association), wrote that his grandmother had the half page listing George Washington's paternal lineage clipped to go in the Washington Monument cornerstone, laid on July 4, 1848.

Other finds in the permanent collection are worth a close look. A hand-drawn map sent to Washington showing the path of a 1790 expedition to Ohio turned up in a desk drawer at the memorial. A book on field artillery, by disgruntled Scotsman James Anderson, was sent to Washington in 1793. The 1798 encyclopedia set, the first American printing, was ordered by Washington in gilded calf-leather bindings.

An etching of Washington's deathbed scene shows his two Masonic doctors, a distraught Martha Washington, a useful bottle of port and a poem:

Americans behold & shed a grateful Tear

For a man who has gained yo.r freedom most dear

And now is departing unto the realms above

Where he may ever rest in lasting peace & love.

Washington died on Dec. 14, 1799, not quite a year before President Adams and Congress moved into his namesake city. A candle stub carried in the Masonic rites in his memory is here in a case.

The George Washington Masonic National Memorial, on Shuter's Hill (also called Shooter's Hill when occupied during the Civil War by the Union Army) at 101 Callahan Dr. in Alexandria, is open free to the public every day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.