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Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
submitted by Bro Steve Grant.

Sarmiento, Grand Master

The hero attained the maximum rank that is granted in Masonry. This facet of his life is little known.

MÓNICA MARTÍN - The life of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento has manifold facets. This has to do with the many and varied activities that he carried out during his 77 years. Of all of them, one of the facets least known was his participation in Masonry. In fact, in 1882 he achieved the highest position of Masons: Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Argentina of Free and Accepted Masons. But this remained private, by decision of the leader. This little known part of his life is one that will occupy at least a hundred pages of the biography that has been in preparation for 7 years by the historian Patricia Pascuali.

"The term Mason still continues to have shadowy connotations for some people. I believe that the activity of Sarmiento within Masonry did not become widely known because he did not want it to come to the attention of the Church ", said Patricia Pascuali. Masonry, a philosophical institution that was born in France, proclaimed the secularization of the State and nonreligious education, among other things. That is why "The Catholic Church persecuted those who were adherents of this ideology", said Pascuali.

"Sarmiento was one of the leaders punished for being a Mason. But it was not rare that the intellectuals of that time participated in this class of movements. The problem was that Sarmiento maintained it privately ", said Beatriz de Coria, who is in charge of the museum of the house where Sarmiento was born.

According to Pascuali, found in unpublished documentation that she is using to write the biography of Sarmiento, "When assuming the position of Grand Master he ordered that the strictest silence be kept on the investiture that he was assuming. It was obvious, that his central goal being to achieve the enactment of the law of Public Nonreligious Education, the importance of his position as Director of Masonry would have offered to his adversaries a powerful argument to disqualify Sarmiento from leadership ".

Sarmiento took his first steps in Masonry in Chile. There at the end of July 1854 he was initiated as a Freemason. In Buenos Aires he founded the "August and Respectable Lodge Union de la Plata".

He moved away from the ranks of Masonry on two occasions. The first time that he resigned was when he assumed the Presidency of the Argentine Republic, in 1868. "Many considered that this resignation meant a renunciation of the ideology. But it was not so. He only decided "to go dormant" until he finished his term as Chief Executive, because he thought that the two activities were incompatible ", said Pascuali.

Sarmiento himself affirmed this, in one of the speeches that he gave, after assuming the Presidency of Argentina: "A public man does not take to the government his own private convictions to make them the law and rule of the State". Moreover, he finished his speech by affirming that as soon as he left his position, he would return to take his place to labor in Masonry. This is indeed what happened, as proven by records that are in the Files of the Historical Building of Masonry on Perón street, in the Federal Capital, where there appears the name of Sarmiento as having returned to lodge activity in 1874.

The second resignation occurred in another context. According to Pascuali there were "ideological conflicts within the lodge. The conflict is quite complicated to unravel, because everything remained private. What one knows is that it had to do with the support of Sarmiento for the Law of Free and Nonreligious Education and his opposition to Roca ".

Anyway, once the hero died, Masons paid several tributes to him. When he died in Paraguay, in 1888, the Masons of that country rendered tributes to him. Later his remains were transferred to Buenos Aires and in San Nicolas de los Arroyos, in 1932, Masons there made a tribute to him, in the name of the Masonry of Argentina.

From another source:

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811- 1888) President of the Argentina, 1868-74. A journalist, he founded papers in Chile and Argentina, writing 52 books, many in the field of education.
An outspoken liberal, he was exiled three times. In 1845 he was commissioned by the president of Argentina to study scholastic methods in the U.S. and Europe. He was an advocate of free public instruction and was instrumental in bringing teachers from the U.S. to further his aims in this direction. He joined with General Urquiza in the fight against Rosas. Also allied with General Mitre, who, when he became president, appointed Sarmiento as minister to the U.S. While in America, he represented the Grand Lodge of Argentina in negotiations for recognition by numerous American grand lodges. He was a member of Union Del Plata Lodge. He was a grand orator of the Grand Lodge of Argentina, and was most active in reviving Freemasonry after the overthrow of the tyrant, Lansdale G. Sasscer Rosas. Opposing Mitre's foreign policy, he returned to his homeland from the U.S. in 1868, and was elected president of Argentina. His term was a stormy one, but he is remembered for his advancement of free and universal education.