A Conscience for America (Scottish Rite Freemasonry)

The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry produced a VHS tape in the early 1990s and named it “A Conscience for America.” The double-headed eagle is on the front cover. No digital version of this tape exists online. No search results for the title have been found in any database. This is a promotional or educational video produced for internal distribution by one of the largest Masonic bodies in the Western Hemisphere, and it has not been streamed yet.

Fraternal organization VHS tapes occupy their own archival category. These were produced for recruitment, member education, or civic outreach — not commercial distribution and not broadcast. The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry had a substantial presence in American civic life through the 20th century, running hospitals, providing scholarships, and maintaining a public identity as a civic institution. “A Conscience for America” fits that positioning: it is an organization explaining its own significance, its own history, its own relationship to American values. That kind of self-presentation is almost never preserved outside of the organization that made it.

The tape arrived in a clamshell case with a printed label. 120 minutes, SP mode, good condition. The ManWithHats Collection included several items in this category of institutional and corporate promotional VHS. What the tape contains beyond the cover description is unknown until it gets opened. It is sitting in the archive waiting.