The Great Agnostic (3 page)

To be sure, Ingersoll achieved only partial success in his attempt to return Paine to the American historical canon. Paine's name is much better known than Ingersoll's in the United States today mainly because his role as the chief polemicist for the revolution can be described for the consumption of schoolchildren without mentioning his later accomplishments as a scourge of organized religion and a radical economic thinker. The Paine who wrote “these are the times that try men's souls” in the darkest hour for General George Washington's army is a recognizable name to a considerable number of Americans in the twenty-first century. But the Paine who wrote
The Age of Reason
(1794)—which put forth the heretical idea that the sacred books of all religions were written by human beings, not by any deity—is nearly as obscure as Ingersoll is to Americans with little interest in or knowledge about the secular side of their history.

Since no champion arose to restore Ingersoll's memory in the twentieth century as Ingersoll had once labored to revive Paine's reputation, it is not surprising that Ingersoll, who was primarily an orator even though his collected works amount to twelve volumes, is the inhabitant of a smaller historical niche than Paine today. But, contrary to the suggestions of many scholars, the ephemeral nature of oratory is not the main reason why Ingersoll is all but forgotten, just as the fact that Paine never held public
office is not the main reason why there is no marble statue of him in the U.S. Capitol. The real reason why both men have been downgraded or eliminated altogether from standard school history books is their staunch and outspoken opposition to organized religion and any entanglement between religion and government. Paine, who was not in fact an atheist but a deist with religious views closely resembling those of Washington, John Adams, and Jefferson (the latter being the only one of the first three presidents to defend his old friend after publication of
The Age of Reason
), never recovered from the damage to his American reputation inflicted by the heretical book he had written in France, just before being imprisoned by the revolutionary government for his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI. Paine was destitute when he died in New York in 1809, and even the Quakers—whose religion was one of the few he admired—refused to allow him to be buried in one of their cemeteries. The anniversary of his death, marked at the time by a private burial ceremony with no family to mourn him, was observed only within the shrinking early nineteenth-century free-thought community. It was a death in line with the stereotypical right-wing religious image of the fate that an agnostic or atheist deserves.

Unlike Paine, Ingersoll did not die alone and unmourned but with his wife, Eva, sitting by his bedside,
after he had consumed a typically large breakfast. He also did much better financially during his lifetime than Paine, because he commanded high fees for both his legal services and his speeches—regardless of whether his audiences were scandalized or uplifted by the content. Indeed, the fact that Ingersoll made a good living out of questioning religion particularly enraged his opponents. This view is encapsulated in a cartoon, published in the satirical magazine
Puck
in 1880, showing Ingersoll beating the Bible with a stick labeled “atheism” as coins fall out of the Holy Book into the orator's briefcase. Ingersoll was, however, better at making and spending money than he was at saving, and while he did not die in debt, he left nothing like a fortune to his wife. He was fond of entertaining, and he and Eva gave legendary parties in the succession of Manhattan townhouses where they lived for the last fifteen years of Ingersoll's life. He also gave away a good deal of money away to freethought causes, the arts, and impecunious relatives and was, as he was the first to acknowledge, an inept investor. In a letter to his brother John, he wrote, “I have a positive genius for losing money.”
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Nevertheless, Ingersoll not only lived well but had, by all accounts (including his own and those of his wife and their two daughters) an extraordinarily happy marriage and family life. This abundance of creature comforts and domestic happiness did not sit well with orthodox believers,
who thought that the evil of questioning the existence of God should be punished in both this life and the next. Ingersoll died in his sleep, probably of a heart attack. Every major newspaper in the country, while taking care to disavow Ingersoll's attacks on organized religion, offered extensive editorial commentaries that, more often than not, praised his personal virtues, acknowledged his influence, and regretted that he had devoted his talents to debunking religion.

Ingersoll's twelve-volume collected works were published within a few years of his death by his brother-in-law C. P. Farrell, who owned the Dresden Publishing Company (named for Ingersoll's birthplace in upstate New York). The Great Agnostic remained a well-known, frequently cited recent historical figure into the 1920s not only because many of his friends and enemies remained alive but because his writings were still thought to be capable of corrupting American youth. However, the memory of Ingersoll faded swiftly after the famous 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” which pitted the leading spokesman for religious fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, against Clarence Darrow, the nation's most famous criminal lawyer and an equally famous agnostic, who had been strongly influenced by hearing Ingersoll's speeches in the 1870s and 1880s. Bryan succeeded in obtaining the conviction of
John T. Scopes, a high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, on grounds of having violated a state law banning the teaching of evolution (although the verdict was reversed on appeal). But Darrow—at least in the North and among intellectuals—was thought to have been the real winner and fundamentalism the real loser after Bryan was forced to admit that even he did not take every word in the Bible literally.

That admission and the trial itself attested powerfully to the accomplishments of the freethought movement in the late nineteenth century. The Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution would not have been deemed necessary by fundamentalist legislatures had evolution not made its way into high school biology textbooks by the early twentieth century. Without an orator of Ingersoll's persuasive powers to make fun of human pretensions about distinguished lineage and to humanize an idea that originally seemed so alien—that man was descended from the very creatures over whom God has supposedly given him dominion—who knows how long it would have taken for Darwin's scientific ideas to have made it into high school biology texts? In Ingersoll's era, there were other pro-evolution and pro-science speakers well known to educated Americans—most notably Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's close friend and the foremost international popularizer of the theory of evolution by means of natural
selection (also thought to be the originator of the word “agnostic”), and Herbert Spencer, a British philosopher who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” (often mistakenly attributed to Darwin). Spencer, who was even more influential in the United States than in England—though he is rarely read today—made the error of arguing that “survival of the fittest” could and should be applied to man in a state of civilization, thereby justifying the vast Gilded Age gap between the rich and the poor.

Although Spencer and Ingersoll were friends, Ingersoll did not make the social Darwinist mistake of believing that “tooth and claw” should be the rule in civilized societies. His rejection of social Darwinism, at a time when many freethinkers, to their discredit, shared the views of conservative religious believers about the natural inferiority of the poor, immigrants, and blacks, raises Ingersoll above most of his contemporaries in American secular thought. There are two distinct threads in the history of American secularism—the first descending from the humanism and egalitarianism of Paine and the second from nineteenth-century social Darwinism through the twentieth-century every-man-for-himself “objectivism” of Ayn Rand. A true intellectual descendant of Paine, Ingersoll linked reason and science to the success and survival of democracy, as the Enlightenment deists among the
founders did, and contended that the capacity for rational thought existed among all races and social classes.

Ingersoll's belief in the intellectual potential of those at every level of society, coupled with his own modest origins, added considerable weight to the message he delivered in small towns, where farmers and baseball players were more likely to show up than university professors. Spencer's presentations certainly would not have gone over as well in Sherman, Texas, as they did in New York and Boston, given that audiences in the less culturally sophisticated towns on the frontier might have suspected that
they
would not have survived the British philosopher's social fitness test.

Looking back on the extraordinary decline in religious literalism that took place among educated Americans in the decades bracketing the turn of the century, it is easy to see why fundamentalism was prematurely declared dead by many prominent American intellectuals in the 1920s, just as the death of God would be prematurely reported in the 1960s. In 1931, the distinguished editor of
Harper's
magazine, Frederick Lewis Allen, summed up the Scopes trial in a classic work of popular history,
Only Yesterday,
that has never been out of print. “Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws,” Allen wrote, “and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in
a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”
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That is how things looked at the beginning of the Great Depression in the offices of prestigious magazines in New York and Boston, and that is pretty much how they would continue to look to secular intellectuals well into the 1980s. The mistaken conclusion that “science-proof” thinking would simply disappear in the enlightened twentieth century was the main factor in Ingersoll's disappearance from the consciousness of American intellectuals in the generation after his death. Ingersoll's arguments would come to seem not provocative or dangerous but irrelevant to most in the generation of historians who came of age during the Depression and the Second World War and who, like Allen, considered fundamentalism no more than an interesting relic of ages past.
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The fading-away of Ingersoll's memory seems particularly poignant at a time when American politics have confirmed the shortsightedness of those who assumed, throughout much of the twentieth century, that religion
itself was vanishing as a divisive force in American civic life.
The New York Times,
which took care to denounce Ingersoll's views about religion, nevertheless acknowledged in an editorial shortly after his death that the Great Agnostic's refusal to give up his antireligious views meant that he “never took that place in the social, the professional, or the public life of his country to which by his talents he would otherwise have been eminently entitled.”
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Edgar W. Howe, publisher of the
Atchison Daily Globe
in Kansas, expressed this view, in much more positive fashion, in a memorial editorial that spoke for freethinkers in the American heartland: “The death of Robert Ingersoll removed one of America's greatest citizens. It is not popular to admire Ingersoll but his brilliancy, his integrity and patriotism cannot be doubted. Had not Ingersoll been frank enough to express his opinions on religion, he would have been President of the United States. Hypocrisy in religion pays. There will come a time when public men may speak their honest convictions in religion without being maligned by the ignorant and superstitious, but not yet.”
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Disobedience is one of the conditions of progress.

—RGI, “Individuality”

In the tiny town of Dresden, near the shore of Lake Seneca in upstate New York, stands the modest frame house in which Robert Ingersoll was born. The Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, operated by the Council for Secular Humanism, houses the memorabilia of a lifetime dedicated to the cause of freethought. The collection contains mementos ranging from a scratchy recording Ingersoll made in his friend Thomas Edison's laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to a Yiddish translation of his lecture “Some Mistakes of Moses,” indicating that freethinking Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East Side were as attuned to the Great Agnostic's message as American-born expatriates from Christianity. Supported by a small number of donors, the facility attracts only the most devout
freethought enthusiasts, partly because it lacks the digital paraphernalia considered essential for the expansion of museum audiences and partly because of its off-the-beaten-track location. Although the area is spectacularly beautiful, with crystalline lakes (known as the Finger Lakes because of their shape) formed more than two million years ago by glaciers during the Ice Age, it is at least a five-hour drive from any major population center in the Northeast. But the Ingersoll museum's obscurity in the tourist landscape has less to do with its location or its antiquated paper-and-ink aura (which can be an advantage for small historic houses) than with the general lack of public knowledge about America's secular freethought traditions. Only an hour's drive away in Seneca Falls, the National Women's Hall of Fame, founded in 1969, offers visitors a technologically up-to-date experience in the town where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott launched the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement with a declaration that “all men and women are created equal.”
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The feminist movement has done a much more effective job of reclaiming its own history, and of garnering donations, than the growing number of American
secularists have of preserving and publicizing their heritage. The proportion of Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion and who consider their outlook on public affairs wholly or predominantly secular has doubled during the past two decades, but this decline in religious faith does not necessarily translate into a commitment to the promotion of secular values or knowledge of secular American history and its heroes.
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