Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Destiny of America came out in 1944.
Hall’s claim is simple: the United States wasn’t an accident.
He says a long-running “Great Plan,” what he calls the Order of the Quest, picked this continent on purpose.
Mystery schools, philosophers, later Rosicrucians and Masons. Same thread.
Goal was an experiment in self-rule, religious liberty, and eventually some kind of worldwide cooperation that wasn’t built on conquest.
He traces the idea back. Plato’s Atlantis. Bacon’s New Atlantis. Akhenaten. Pythagoreans.
Then the European secret societies that supposedly carried the same blueprint west. Hall says a lot of the Founders were in on it, or at least sitting in the same lodges.
Washington. Franklin. A chunk of the men who signed the Declaration and the Constitution.
Then he points at the paper in your wallet. Unfinished pyramid. Eye of Providence on the Great Seal. Hall reads that as the country still being incomplete.
The experiment isn’t finished. Needs “higher wisdom.”
He wrote the first book in the middle of World War II. So the pitch at the end is America leading a “commonwealth of nations” held together by brotherhood instead of empire.