The Great Agnostic (15 page)

Finally, Ingersoll considered the separation of church and state in free public schools (and by free, he meant in both the intellectual and financial senses of the word) of ultimate importance. Born at a time when Americans were an overwhelmingly Protestant people, his main concern in the early years of his emergence as the “Great Agnostic” was the lingering influence of Calvinism in public education. Ingersoll was no fan of primers that used “in Adam's fall, we sinned all” to teach children to read. His daughters, Eva and Maud, were mainly educated by private tutors because the Ingersolls did not want their children exposed to religious dogma as a condition of teaching (although the Ingersoll girls, like their parents, were well schooled in the Bible as a work of literature and philosophy).

As the great migration from southern and eastern Europe continued in the 1880s and 1890s, Ingersoll became more concerned about the Catholic Church's push for the kind of state support that Catholic schools received in many European countries. This freethought position was
descended directly from the 1786 Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, written by James Madison and passed in response to a proposal that property taxes be levied for the support of teachers of the Christian religion in common schools. Ingersoll was not happy that some Protestant theological conventions had remained embedded in many public schools throughout the nation (an argument the Catholic Church used in its unsuccessful attempts to gain public tax support for its own schools), but his solution was to get all religious teaching out of the public schools—not to provide state support for alternative religious schools. (In the nineteenth century, Jews did not figure in this debate because immigrant Jews—even the most religious—were simply happy to have access to a public education that had been denied them in most Catholic and Protestant regions of eastern Europe and Russia. In the post–World War II twentieth century, Jewish organizations would adopt the old freethought position that remnants of Christian education had no place in public schools.)

Ingersoll believed that education was the best investment government could make at any level and still regretted the fact that in the early republic, Congress had yielded to pressure by denominational colleges (which Harvard, Yale, and other prestigious institutions still were in the early 1800s). Congress also rejected a legacy left by
President George Washington, upon his death in 1799, for the establishment of a publicly supported, secular national university. Ingersoll considered the schools in his own city, New York, to be poorly supported by local and state government in the 1890s. “Many of them are small, dark, unventilated and unhealthy,” he said in an interview in the
New York World.
“They should be the finest buildings in the city. It would be far better for the Episcopalians to build a university than a cathedral.”
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He asserted that we “need far more schoolhouses than we have, and while money is being wasted in a thousand directions, thousands of children are left to be educated in the gutter. It is far cheaper to build schoolhouses than prisons, and it is much better to have scholars than convicts.”
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For Ingersoll, it was a given that tax-supported schools should be thoroughly secular and teach only what could be deduced “about this world, about this life.” Like so many of the causes he championed, Ingersoll's vision of secular American education, and of a nation in which the line between church and state is clearly drawn and respected by all, remains a work-in-progress.

Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you.

—Walt Whitman, “To a Common Prostitute”

Allusions to this famous, once-scandalous Whitman poem occur many times, in many contexts, in Robert Ingersoll's lectures, essays, and interviews. His attachment to this particular line of American verse explains, on an even deeper level than his advocacy of science, secularism, and the separation of church and state, why the word “great” was appended to the informal title used not only by his admirers but by his more open-minded critics. Then as now, freethinkers, secularists, agnostics, and atheists—whatever they call themselves or others choose to call them—were often portrayed by their religious enemies as cool, uncaring skeptics who had nothing but contempt for the emotional needs served by religion. If the freethinkers were right, and there was no benevolent creator,
no reason for suffering, no eternal life, what, then, would comfort the grieving and the afflicted? Even the tough-minded suffragist and agnostic Susan B. Anthony wondered whether “if it be true that we die like the flower, leaving behind only the fragrance … what a delusion has the race ever been in—what a dream is the life of man.”
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To such existential questions, Ingersoll did not offer reason and the search for truth as their own rewards (although he did consider them greater blessings than any promise of eternal life). Instead, he offered the emotional argument that finitude is what gives this life meaning. In a graveside eulogy for a friend's child, he told the mourners, “If those we press and strain within our arms could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. May be this common fate treads from out the paths between our hearts and the weeds of selfishness and hate. And I had rather live and love where death is king, than have eternal life where love is not. … They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only the perfect rest.”
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By referring to faith in what “is to be,” Ingersoll was not implying that he believed in eternal life or otherworldly reunions with loved ones—even though, as a proper agnostic, he simply maintained that there was no evidence of an afterlife and that the ancient longing of
human beings for immortality had no bearing on the question. Ingersoll's eulogies, which always emphasized that the dead, in a state of “perfect rest,” could feel no pain and sorrow, appealed to many liberal religious believers as well as freethinkers, because one of the distinctive characteristics of modernizing forces within American Protestantism was less emphasis on divine punishment.
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In all of the earthly matters he considered most important, Ingersoll saw no conflict between emotion and reason, between passion and rationality—unless emotion and passion were subordinated to rigid ideology of either a religious or secular nature. His insistence that passion and reason must work in tandem for the good of humanity made him unusual in his own time and explained why he could never accept total determinism of any kind—whether social Darwinism on the right or European socialist ideology on the left. That Ingersoll himself espoused many causes supported by American socialists, like the eight-hour workday, attested to both the humanism and the pragmatism integral to his idea of how reason should operate in society. If compassion and a sense of common humanity were not reason enough for owners to
treat workers fairly, Ingersoll argued, the self-interest of capitalists was served by decent conditions for labor. A consultation with God or his self-proclaimed representatives on earth was neither required nor useful in the continuing struggle to devise a more just and productive human environment.

In this biography, I have paid scant attention to the philosophical debates between Ingersoll and contemporary theologians, which were published in intellectual journals and aroused considerable interest among the same kind of people who now attend debates between atheist authors like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and their religious critics. Such debates have always attracted audiences composed mainly of those who are already committed to one religious or antireligious position and whose minds are unlikely to be changed by anything they hear. Ingersoll's genius as an advocate for freethought lay not in his ability to best clerical antagonists in arguments about the logical impossibility of the Holy Trinity (although, as a minister's son, he possessed the theological armament needed for such debates) but in his impassioned portrayal of decent behavior, of goodness, as an obligation of human beings toward one another simply by virtue of their common humanity.

When he made his argument for what he called the “gospel of humanity,” Ingersoll often turned to the arts. His love and knowledge of music, the theater, and literature was deep, and his contributions to the arts generous, as evinced by the letters of condolence Mrs. Ingersoll received from hundreds of actors and musicians, including the president of the American Federation of Musicians. Throughout the Ingersolls' thirteen years in Manhattan, where they settled in 1886 mainly because it offered a livelier cultural environment than Washington, their hospitality to writers, actors, and musicians was legendary. Their last residence, a townhouse adjoining Gramercy Park, was located just around the corner from The Players' Club, founded in 1888 by their friend Edwin Booth, the foremost American Shakespearean actor of his time.
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For Ingersoll, evidence-based science did not occupy a separate category from the greatest works of painting, sculpture, literature, and music: all were glorious evidence of the best human achievements, rendered even more precious because they were the products of natural evolution and human inspiration rather than supernatural creation and divine design. Unlike his more conservative contemporaries, whose reverence for the arts and artists did not include many of the masterpieces of the preceding half-century
(Beethoven, who died in 1827, just made it into the conventional Victorian–Gilded Age pantheon), Ingersoll actually enjoyed and supported the art of his own time. He revered Whitman above all contemporary American poets and novelists, because his work gave a powerful, distinctly American voice to humanism and the “religion of the body” (another phrase Ingersoll used frequently). Ingersoll turned most often to Shakespeare when he wished to offer an emotional vision of human possibilities unencumbered by gods and ghosts. He often described Lear's soliloquy, on finding a place of refuge on the heath, as “the greatest prayer that ever fell from human lips.”
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Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your unhoused heads, your unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? Oh, I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may'st shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

To Ingersoll, that prayer embodied his secularist creed. He did not, however, regard acts of kindness and generosity, on an individual or a social level, as salvation-seeking deeds of self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, or atonement for
sin mandated by religion but, on the contrary, as the surest way to attain a happy life for oneself.

Ingersoll delivered one of his most important and timely speeches citing Lear's soliloquy in New York, before a meeting of the American Secular Union on November 14, 1886. Only a month before, defendants in the socially polarizing Haymarket Square case—unquestionably the political trial of the century—had been sentenced to death. Tensions between rich and poor, always simmering beneath the surface of Gilded Age progress, had never been closer to the boiling point in the United States. On the evening of May 4, 1886, Chicago police arrived to disperse a peaceful assembly of workmen demonstrating on behalf of the eight-hour day, but a bomb (of unknown origin) was thrown, and police opened fire. Seven police officers and an unknown number of demonstrators and onlookers were killed, and eight of the protestors were indicted for murder.

Ingersoll himself had been asked to participate as counsel for the defense but declined because he felt that his antireligious reputation could only work against the defendants. He advised the defense team to “get a lawyer of national reputation who is a pillar of the church and who can cover these men with his conservative life and character.”
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Later, Ingersoll would plead for a commutation
of the sentences with the Republican governor of Illinois, his old friend Richard Oglesby. The governor commuted three of the sentences to life imprisonment, but five of the defendants were executed. Oglesby's successor, John Peter Altgeld, a Democrat, would review the evidence and end his bright political career by pardoning those still in prison. It was against the backdrop of anti-labor passion generated by the recent trial that Ingersoll asked the Secular Union's upper-middle-class audience, “Is the world forever to remain as it was when Lear made his prayer? Is it ever to remain as it is now? I hope not. Are there always to be millions whose lips are white with famine? Is the withered palm to be always extended, imploring from the stony heart of respectable charity, alms? … Are the rich always to be divided from the poor,—not only in fact, but in feeling?”
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Ingersoll rejected the dictum, as widely preached in his time as it is now, that religion is the foundation of morality and that there can be no morality without religion. In Ingersoll's view, religion served only to provide supernatural explanations of and sanctions for conditions—whether decent or indecent—produced solely by the interaction between human beings and nature. The religion that had so recently been used to justify slavery, Ingersoll reminded his audiences, was every bit as powerful as the religious
argument against slavery, and “thus sayeth the Lord” was used to isolate “the stony heart of respectable charity” from true exposure to “what wretches feel.” Any morality that contradicted reason, nature, and the evidence supplied by this world, and relied instead on fantasies about another world presumed to lie beyond nature (and therefore beyond proof of any kind) would collapse as soon as fear of punishment was removed.