In October 1992, several dozen people gathered at the base of a statue outside the Labor Department building at 3rd and D Streets NW. Together they unfurled large white sheets, and with some effort, draped them over the tall statue. The costume was not part of a Halloween prank. The uninvited decorators were followers of fringe political figure Lyndon LaRouche, the sheets were stitched together to appear as Ku Klux Klan robes, and the statue was that of Albert Pike, the only Confederate general honored with a statue in the nation's capital. They returned the week after, and the week after, demanding that the statue be taken down.

Attorney William Lightfoot, then an at-large member of the D.C. city council, was moved to introduce a bill calling on members of the Congressional Black Caucus, then-District mayor Sharon Pratt Kelley, and directors of the Depts. of Labor and the Interior, to join the cause. The resolution read in part:

The United States Congress, on April 4 and 5, 1898, authorized a private organization to place the statue of Albert Pike on the public land of the United States, being falsely informed only that Albert Pike was a leader of white freemasons in the southern states, and "a distinguished citizen of the United States, an able lawyer and statesman, an accomplished poet, and a brave soldier."

The city councils of at least 18 cities joined in and called for removal of the statue -- Birmingham, Austin, Newark, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and New Orleans (one of many cities Pike called home) among them. (LaRouche was serving time in prison for tax evasion at the time, but that didn't keep him off the presidential ballot in several states where his supporters had organized.)

But not all who criticized Pike favored the statue's removal.

Robert Hunter, who in 2000 ran unsuccessfully for the Ward 7 city council seat, made a counter-intuitive argument for leaving the statue be. As he opined in the Baltimore Afro-American:

This statue is a representing symbol of the past and present practice of the evils of the American oppression. His imposing presence in the sculptured form presents the magnified arrogance of those who use cruelty as an experience of horror to oppress or destroy.

To remove the memorial statue of Albert Pike from public view; to excise and execute, to commit the statue to a death sentence; is to seek to remove this reality of evil from the American historical landscape. It is a movement to purge and cleanse the United States of any appearance of past and present evil. It is a simplistic effort to make the Country look "White and right" instead of "White and wrong."

On the other hand, the Washington Informer, a black newspaper, was skeptical of some claims against him. Despite written accounts of Pike's Klan membership, they wrote, "there is no supporting evidence that Gen. Pike was ever involved with the Klan. In fact, Arkansas professor Walter Lee Brown" -- a Mason who would go on to write a hefty Pike biography -- "has been quoted as defending Pike, noting that Pike was a schoolteacher and a successful lawyer in Washington, D.C."

It seems odd enough that there is even one memorial in the District dedicated to a Confederate of any rank. As Johnny Depp says in "Donnie Brasco" -- we're paraphrasing -- who won the war, huh?

In fact the 1898 congressional authorization made no mention of Pike's wartime activities, and he remains there in spite of them. Before he was a Confederate, he was many other things, including, especially, a Mason. The Judiciary Square monument was paid for and its placement petitioned by the Scottish Rite Freemasons, who hold him in great esteem for writing a very large and very dense philosophical tome called "Morals and Dogma." The whole thing is online, if ever you're curious.

Albert Pike was born in Boston and would have attended Harvard if only he could have afforded it. As a young man he traveled out West, and finding not much out there, headed back and settled in the South. In his early career, Pike was a schoolteacher, a newspaperman, a duelist and a lawyer. He joined the cavalry to fight in the Mexican-American war, became active as a Whig and later, when that dissolved, joined the nativist Know-Nothing American Party. At some point during this time, he got involved with Masonry, and became very active in the lodges there.

Pike doesn't seem to have been much of a secessionist, but when war broke out, he nevertheless threw in with his Southern neighbors. Having made friends with a number of Indian tribes, Pike persuaded some of them -- including the understandably sore descendents of those forced onto the Trail of Tears -- to joint the fight. He successfully led them in battle at Pea Ridge, only to suffer heavy casualties in battle soon after.

He fled the Confederate Army and was arrested and charged with treason. He was tried for the same crime some years later by the United States, bestowing upon him the dubious distinction of having been accused a traitor by two North American governments. One government ceased to exist in short order; the president of the other -- Andrew Johnson -- granted him a pardon.

Pike spent some postwar years in Tennessee editing the Memphis Appeal, which is still published today as the Commercial Appeal. It is during this time that he is alleged to have fallen in with the nascent Ku Klux Klan. The first "Wizard" (and Forrest Gump namesake) former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest traveled the region drumming up support for his organization.

Among those so drummed, some say, was Albert Pike.

Whether he did in fact join the Klan is no simple question. The fight over the statue paralleled the fight over this very matter, and in the early 1990s was carried out on the op-ed pages of the W. Post, among other publications.

As the W. Times put it in a 1995 assessment, the "rumor spread that [Pike] had collaborated with [Forrest] in the formation of the rituals of the white supremacist organization. This could have been true, for Pike, as a Mason, always had been interested in secret rites. Many Southern whites at this time looked to the Klan for salvation from Reconstruction. Whether Pike played any part in the formation of the Klan probably will never be known, but there is certainly no evidence that he ever participated in the terror and bloodshed that became the Klan's heritage in the South."

This seems about right to us. While it certainly seems possible he was a Klansman, it is very far indeed from an established fact. Wikipedia makes no mention of the Klan on its Pike page, though it does link to a conspiracy website that argues he was. It also links to a Smithsonian Associates site which says it is "quite possible." So DCist is going to cop out and say we don't know.

Whatever his postbellum activites, Pike spent his later years in New York, Canada, and eventually Washington D.C. He continued to practice law, wrote poetry, and composed the aforementioned "Morals and Dogma," which even most Masons will admit to having never read. He died here in 1891.

His penultimate resting place was the Oak Hill Cemetery at 30th and R Streets NW in Georgetown. This, however, went against his wishes. In 1944 he was moved to a crypt in the House of the Temple, the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite headquarters at 1733 16th Street NW.

And of course there is the massive statue, the source of so much controversy, which went up just a decade after his passing. It was created by noted Italian sculptor Gaetano Trentanove, who also made the Daniel Webster statue that stands in Scott Circle. Also involved somehow in its creation is somebody by the name of F. Galli Fusero (who has just one Google reference, in French).

If you think "Fusero" sounds like "Tristero," you're not the only one who's had Thomas Pynchon on the brain throughout all this. There's no post horn on the monument, but it's not without its intriguing symbolism.

For instance, the monument has that (unknown) woman holding a flag, on which there is depicted an eagle holding a banner reading: "DEUS MEUMQUE JUS" -- Latin for "God and my right," a common Masonic phrase. Below her, on the pedestal, there is this inscription:

What this means, we're not sure -- something about the fruits of labor, at least -- but it is what he asked be written on his gravestone.

On the back lower base is written:

There are not actually underscores after each letter, but actually three dots arranged as the points of an equilateral triangle. We looked up what they meant. As we expected to find, it was an alternative to regular periods once popular with Masons, supposedly the origination of an unofficial order of French Masons in the 18th century. Apparently, however, their significance is no longer known. (Or so they say?)

The former acronym stands for "Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite," the latter for the "Southern Jurisdiction" of a country whose name we think you can guess.

On the corners of the pedestal's base are inscribed many words to describe his career: Author, Poet, Orator, Jurist, Philanthropist, Philosopher, Soldier Scholar.

A few of his critics have been unable to resist adding a few appellations of their own. In 2000, when debate about the statue returned briefly to the op-ed pages of the W. Post, former Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Richard Zimmerman added "bigot, indicted traitor, alleged barbarian, suspected plagiarist, jailbird."

There seems to be no middle ground when it comes to Albert Pike.

The Masons love him, of course, and Masonic websites devoted to him add superlative adjectives and achievements to his already impressive resume: short story writer, bon vivant and humorist. He is also extolled as a "political activist" and "revolutionary," though of course there is no mention of the Klan, nor anything of his supposed racist tendencies.

They have also named for him a number of roads, schools and natural formations throughout Arkansas and Missouri, not to mention a county in Oklahoma. Pikes Peak is not named for him -- that would be Zebulon Pike -- the explorer and soldier who first spied it.

And the statue they erected, of course, has not budged. The National Park Service, which looks after it, has no jurisdiction in the matter. If they don't like it, they haven't said so. The city of Washington has rarely had much leverage with Congress, who would have to order the statue removed were that to happen; the eventual falling off of this controversy may be attributed to that.

Whether he was in the KKK or not, one must still think there is something disconcerting about there being a statue dedicated to a Confederate in the United States Capitol.

But there is at least one good reason to keep him right where he is. In 1993, Freemason Gary Scott argued in the Masonic magazine Philalethes:

If Pike is condemned and demands are made for the removal of his statue because he may have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, then the park Service may be asked to condemn and remove statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and many other Americans who owned slaves. Otherwise, we become like totalitarian states, constantly revising history to justify tearing down statues of previous generations of leaders just to facilitate currently ideologies.

On this point, at least, the Freemasons and Robert Hunter -- if not all of Pike's critics -- can agree.

Bonus Fun Fact: Michael Richards -- you know, Cosmo Kramer -- got interested in Freemasonry around the time that "Seinfeld" ended. In 2001 he told the Post's Peter Carlson about reading "Morals and Dogma." Said Richards: "I don't fully understand it, but I have an intuitive understanding of what it means." That Kramer -- he's always up to something!

To visit the Albert Pike monument, take the Metrorail Red line to Judiciary Square. Exit the East side to 4th Street NW between D and E. Walk to D Street between 3rd and 4th. Look up.

Portrait of Albert Pike courtesy NPS.gov. Portrait of Cosmo Kramer courtesy of NBC. Pynchonian "post horn" courtesy Harper & Row.