The Great Agnostic (10 page)

—RGI

Robert Green Ingersoll's “happiness creed,” frequently included in his speeches and recorded for posterity in 1894 in Thomas Edison's original New Jersey laboratory, combines his antireligious views with humanistic, classically liberal social thought in ways that not only made him difficult to pigeonhole among his freethinking contemporaries but would also render him an elusive figure for biographers in the second half of the twentieth century.
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As a Gilded Age Republican who considered the alleviation of poverty a social responsibility, an individualist
and libertarian who insisted that government protect the rights of minorities, an economic conservative on some issues but an advocate for social reform who often sounded like Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, Ingersoll held opinions that sometimes seemed contradictory even to contemporaries who deeply admired him for his opposition to religion. Thus, it is not surprising that Ingersoll has been misunderstood to some extent by many of his biographers—especially because Republicanism in the late twentieth century fused religious orthodoxy with economic conservatism.

Until the late 1890s, when President McKinley elicited Ingersoll's scorn by declaring that God had been on our side in the Spanish-American War, national Republican politicians took care to distance themselves from those who wished to claim divine sanction for political actions. Abraham Lincoln, whose political guile has been sanctified by time, evaded the demands of a powerful group of Protestant ministers who, in 1864, asked him to support a constitutional amendment establishing God in general, and Christ in particular, as the source of American governmental authority—thereby remedying the theocratically inexcusable failure of the framers to cast their eyes heavenward beyond “we the people.” Lincoln promised the overwrought clerics that he would “take such action upon it as my responsibility to my Maker and our country
demands.”
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In this matter, Lincoln's concept of his responsibility to both his maker and his country was to let the proposed Christian amendment die in Congress. While Lincoln's attitude toward organized religion was generally neutral, the next elected Republican president, Ulysses S. Grant, took a stance that might reasonably be described as hostile when he put forward the ill-received suggestion that religious institutions pay property taxes.

Republicans in high office were unenthusiastic about another cause espoused by organized religion—the punitive anti-obscenity laws passed by many state legislatures and Congress and named after Anthony Comstock, the fanatical anti-vice crusader who began his career by trying to clean up prostitution and pornography in, of all places, New York City. While still in his twenties, Comstock became the president of the YMCA's New York–based Society for the Suppression of Vice, which he used as a base to lobby for both federal and state laws prohibiting the distribution of “obscene” materials through the mails. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, as a personal favor to Ingersoll, dropped a federal obscenity case against William D. Bennett, publisher of the
Truth Seeker
and one of Comstock's longtime targets. Ingersoll was no defender of even the relatively non-explicit pornographic images of his era, but he did not think the government had any business defining obscenity and was especially appalled
by the Comstock Laws' classification of advertisements for or articles about contraception as obscene material (notwithstanding the inefficacy of contemporary birth control devices). Freethought newspapers did mention contraception, and the laws provided a pretext for the late nineteenth-century religious right to interfere with publications largely devoted to challenging religion and upholding the separation of church and state.
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Even though Ingersoll could not run for public office and tar his party with the infernal whiff of public ungodliness, there was no reason why he could not be both an influential Republican and a freethinker. He was able to use his political clout behind the scenes with officeholders like Hayes, who had benefited from his oratory on the party's behalf. For evangelical fundamentalist Protestants like William Jennings Bryan, there was no place to go in the late nineteenth century but the Democratic Party, and the alignment lasted until the 1960s, when Democrats spearheaded passage of civil rights laws. Nineteenth-century Catholics were also overwhelmingly Democratic, not only because the Republicans rejected tax support for parochial
schools but because the vast majority of Catholic immigrants were blue-collar workers whose economic interests were directly opposed to the party of the robber barons.

To a man like Bryan, who was an economic populist as well as a devout fundamentalist, Ingersoll's ties to Republican business interests were as odious as his religious iconoclasm.
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As a lawyer, Ingersoll did not represent only widows and those accused of blasphemy (although he did do plenty of what would be called pro bono work today) but also politicians and government officials accused of corruption. Among the most famous of his cases were the “Star Route” trials in the early 1880s. Ingersoll, who had moved to Washington after his “Plumed Knight” speech in 1876, was lead counsel for Senator Stephen W. Dorsey, an old friend and one of the many Republicans, dating back to Grant's administration, accused of corruption in awarding postal contracts in the West. The rural postal routes, served by stagecoach and horses in parts of the nation not reachable by boat or railroads, were awarded to private businesses, and the contracts required delivery
of the mail with “certainty, celerity, and security.” Since legal documents were written by hand before the typewriter became a standard office tool, tired scribes often substituted asterisks for the three nouns—hence the term “Star Route.” After two lengthy trials, all of the Star Route defendants were eventually acquitted. There was little direct evidence of money actually changing hands in return for postal contracts (although there is no doubt that it happened), and juries were as skeptical about conspiracy cases in the nineteenth century as they are today. Ingersoll, because of his reputation as an antireligious orator and a spellbinder in the presence of juries, received more attention than any of the dozens of other lawyers involved in the trials. He compared Dorsey's wife, who, unusually for that time, was present in the courtroom to watch her husband's legal ordeal, to a weeping Mary Magdalene—a rhetorical flourish that goaded the government prosecutor into questioning the propriety of the Great Agnostic's allusion to a crucifixion whose redemptive value he did not acknowledge.

Ingersoll's Republican connections drew criticism even from his contemporary admirers among freethinkers on the political left. Clarence Darrow, who paid a moving tribute to the Great Agnostic shortly after Ingersoll's death in 1899, did not hesitate to speak ill of the dead only a year later. He told an audience in Chicago that although
the Great Agnostic had viewed religion with unflinching rationality, he had abandoned reason on purely political issues. “The older and more venerable a political superstition,” Darrow said, “the more he [Ingersoll] would cling to it.”
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Darrow was speaking primarily about Ingersoll's conservatism on economic issues like the gold standard, while ignoring Ingersoll's frequent rejections of the Gilded Age Republican party line when it conflicted with his social values. Ingersoll disagreed openly with many Republican policies, most notably the party's abandonment of civil rights in the 1880s and its hard anti-labor stance. In 1886, he supported Henry George, the author of the highly influential work
Progress and Poverty
(1879), in his unsuccessful candidacy for mayor of New York on a platform of a “single tax” on land. It is hard to imagine that a dedicated plutocrat would have believed, along with Ingersoll, that no one should be allowed to own any land he did not use personally. “And why?” Ingersoll asked. “Don't you know that if people could bottle the air, they would? Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air?”
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No supporter of a pure, unregulated market could have written the following passage from “Eight Hours Must Come,” an essay published in 1890.

For thousands of years men have been talking and writing about the great law of supply and demand—and insisting that in some way this mysterious law has governed and will continue to govern the activities of the human race. It is admitted that this law is merciless—that when the demand fails, the producer, the laborer, must suffer, must perish—that the law feels neither pity nor malice—it simply acts, regardless of consequences. Under this law, capital will employ the cheapest [means possible]. … The great law has nothing to do with food or clothes, with filth or crime. It cares nothing for homes, for penitentiaries, or asylums. It simply acts—and some men triumph, some succeed, some fail, and some perish.
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In this essay, Ingersoll repudiated the social Darwinism that was as much an article of faith for many wealthy misinterpreters of Darwin's theory of evolution as Genesis was for religious fundamentalists. Endorsing both the eight-hour day and the right of workers to strike if humane working conditions could be achieved in no other way, Ingersoll argued, “The working people should be protected by law. If they are not, the capitalists will require just as many hours as human nature can bear. We have seen here in America street-car drivers working sixteen and seventeen hours a day. It was necessary to have a
strike in order to get to fourteen, another strike to get to twelve, and nobody could blame them for keeping on striking till they get to eight hours.”
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Ingersoll also saw a connection between secular public education and the unwillingness of workers to simply accept conditions set by their employers. Not long ago, he said, there were “no teachers except the church, and the church taught obedience and faith—told the poor people that although they had a hard time here, working for nothing, they would be paid in Paradise with a large interest.” But a reward in the afterlife would no longer satisfy workers who could read, write, and think for themselves. Ingersoll made an even more extraordinary statement, coming as it did from a rich white man of his time. Economic justice, he said, must apply to women as well as to men, and working men should remember that “all who labor are their brothers, and that all women who labor are their sisters.” The worst-paid, worst-treated workers in America were women, Ingersoll noted more than two decades before the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
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“Think of the sewing women in this city,” he wrote, “and yet we call ourselves civilized!”
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This passage exemplifies the cast of mind that distinguished Ingersoll from the social Darwinists among his contemporaries—including Herbert Spencer and Yale University political scientist William Graham Sumner—who insisted that Darwin's description of “tooth-and-claw” natural selection did and should also apply to man in a state of nature. Darwin explicitly rejected this concept if applied to civilized humans. The difference between civilization and nature, Darwin said, was that civilized man cares for instead of exterminates the weaker members of the species. “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy,” he declared, “which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered … more tender and widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”
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Spencer's equation between biological natural selection and what he called “social selection” led him to oppose all state aid to the poor, public education, health laws, and even public postal service. Sumner, a prototypical public intellectual who imbued thousands of the nation's future leaders with the ideology of untrammeled market capitalism during his tenure at Yale between 1872 and 1910, insisted that the business leaders of the Gilded Age had emerged through a process of selection equivalent to the
triumph of the human species in nature. Furthermore, there were atheists and agnostics (on the political left as well as the right) who were convinced not only that the poor were poor because they were unfit but that natural selection had established a hierarchy of inferior and superior “races” (many of which would be called ethnic groups today). The statements of, among others, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Sanger about the inferiority of immigrants are a continuing embarrassment to those who would like to think that their favorite social reformers, feminists, and antireligious dissenters were untainted by the prejudices of their era.

Broadly speaking, there are two divergent strains of American secular thought. One can be traced to the radical humanism of Tom Paine, who saw the separation of church and state not only as the guarantor of personal freedom of conscience but also as the foundation of a world in which inherited status and wealth would be replaced by merit and intellect as the dominant forces in the lives of individuals. Recognition of a common humanity, not tooth-and-claw competition, would create social progress. The other distinct current of American secularism begins with the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century and continues through the “objectivism” and exaltation of the Übermensch preached by the twentieth-century atheist and unregulated market idolator Ayn Rand. These
diverging currents can also be found within the “new atheist” movement today, in which people often make a point of labeling themselves as either secular humanists, who are usually liberals, or skeptics, who are generally libertarian conservatives.
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Even Ingersoll's friend Henry Ward Beecher, the champion of liberal Protestantism, delivered some astonishing perorations that made God sound like a social Darwinist. “God intended the great to be great and the little to be little,” he preached in an 1877 sermon quoted approvingly in the
New York Times.
“I do not say that a dollar a day is enough to support a working man. But it is enough to support a man!”
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After reading all of Ingersoll's published works and much of his private correspondence, I still find it difficult to explain the seeming inconsistency between his own place in the tradition of democratic secular humanism pioneered by Paine and his close personal relations with many social Darwinists. That paradox is the source of his singular importance in the history of American secularism, but it is also the reason why it has been difficult for historians to place him. Part of the explanation for Ingersoll's refusal to cast his lot with the social Darwinists surely lies in his big-hearted personality, because he also maintained friendly relations
with men like Eugene V. Debs, a Socialist whose views on politics and economics could not have been farther from the allegiances of the wealthy. Ingersoll had met Debs in 1875, when the young Debs invited the Peoria lawyer—just beginning to “come out” as an agnostic—to speak before the Occidental Literary Club of Terra Haute, Indiana. The future Socialist candidate for president was so captivated by Ingersoll's talk that he not only accompanied him to the Terra Haute train station but bought himself a ticket and rode all the way to Cincinnati so that he and Ingersoll could continue their conversation.