The Great Agnostic

by Susan Jacoby

  When Ingersoll was at the height of his career, most newspapers still followed the hoary and informative journalistic custom of reporting applause and laughter in summaries of speeches. This created something of a quandary for papers with religiously orthodox owners, because headlines reflecting the publisher’s disapproval would be followed by articles detailing the audience’s enjoyment of the speech. So the New York Times placed a headline above an account of Ingersoll’s lectures at Booth’s Theater announcing, “The Great Infidel Preacher Roundly Hissed”—but the subsequent article revealed that the hissing was confined to representatives of the American Bible Society, who were handing out copies of the King James version outside the theater. Quotations from the speech would be punctuated by “Great Laughter” and “Laughter,” which followed Ingersoll’s description of the founding of the Church of England after Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn. “For awhile the new religion was regulated by law,” Ingersoll remarked, “and afterward God was compelled to study acts of Parliament to find out whether a man might be saved or not. [Laughter.]”

  Most satire involving contemporary events travels poorly over time, but it is not difficult to understand, after reading the basic texts of Ingersoll’s lectures, why his audiences—composed not only of freethinkers but of devoted religious believers nevertheless open to skepticism about literal interpretations of the Bible—would have been charmed by his good-natured jabs. In a frequently delivered lecture titled “Some Mistakes of Moses,” Ingersoll seduced his audiences by mocking the theories of a well-known theologian who, having half-digested Darwin, suggested that the serpent who deceived Eve into eating the forbidden fruit was probably a humanoid ape with the gift of speech. To the innocent Eve, the ape looked like an ordinary man (albeit a very hairy one); ergo, she was receptive to his suggestions. Subsequently, the talking ape was punished for his role in instigating original sin by being deprived of speech and condemned henceforth to the “chattering of monkeys.” Ingersoll had his own take on this tortuous theological speculation. “Here then is the ‘connecting link’ between man and the lower creation,” he explained. “The serpent was simply an orangoutang that spoke Hebrew with the greatest ease, and had the outward appearance of a perfect gentleman, seductive in manner, plausible, polite, and the most admirably calculated to deceive. It never did seem reasonable to me that a long, cold, and disgusting snake with an apple in its mouth could deceive anybody; and I am glad, even at this late date to know that the something that persuaded Eve to taste the forbidden fruit was, at least in the shape of a man.”10 A man who combined reason with humor, who drew audiences looking for entertainment along with enlightenment, was much more dangerous than someone disposed to harangue audiences with the conviction that they were simply wrong about what they had been taught since birth. Everyone who paid to hear Ingersoll speak knew that he or she would go away with the memory of good laughs to accompany unsettling new thoughts.

  He told his audiences that when he first read On the Origin of Species (1859) and became acquainted with Darwin’s theory of evolution, his initial reaction was to think about “how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the Old World. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the duke Orang Outang, or the princess Chimpanzee.”11 This sentence demonstrates what a brilliant orator he was, because he was taking advantage of an American hostility to Old World, and especially British, aristocracy that was much more alive in the nineteenth century than it is today. He used the American disdain for unearned hereditary privilege (which, then as now, did not necessarily extend to inherited wealth) to make the idea of descent from lower animals more accessible and less threatening. “I read about rudimentary bones and muscles,” he confided. “I was told that everybody had rudimentary muscles extending from the ear into the cheek. I asked, ‘What are they?’ I was told: ‘They are the muscles with which your ancestors used to flap their ears.’ I do not so much wonder that we had them as that we have outgrown them.”12

  Although Ingersoll opposed organized religion in general, his specific targets were believers and clerics who wanted to impose their convictions on their fellow citizens and stifle inquiry that challenged faith. If he could not quite convince his audiences that all religion was superstitious myth, he did convince many to seek out a form of religion that did not require them to renounce the insights of contemporary science or non-mythological history. Ingersoll himself was not much interested in debating abstract theological or philosophical questions, although he did so occasionally with reform-minded believers like his good friend Henry Ward Beecher, the best-known clerical orator of the late nineteenth century and a leader of liberalizing forces within American Protestantism. Ingersoll was, however, interested in creating a bridge between the world of secular freethought, for which he spoke so eloquently, and religions, including Reform Judaism and liberal Protestant denominations, that were willing to make room for secular knowledge (as Unitarians had in the eighteenth century in response to Enlightenment political thought and geological discoveries that posed the first solid scientific challenge to the biblical precept that the earth was only four thousand years old). In this respect, Ingersoll differed significantly from those who have been dubbed the “new atheists” in recent years and who consider “moderate” religion as bad as or worse than fundamentalism because they believe that religious moderates provide a cover that confers social respectability on all faiths.

  Ingersoll himself made no distinction between atheists and agnostics. In 1885, he was asked by an interviewer for a Philadelphia newspaper, “Don’t you think that the belief of the Agnostic is more satisfactory to the believer that that of the Atheist?” He replied succinctly, “The Agnostic is an Atheist. The Atheist is an Agnostic. The Agnostic says: ‘I do not know; but I do not believe there is any god.’ The Atheist says the same. The orthodox Christian says he knows there is a God: but we know that he does not know. The Atheist [too] cannot know that God does not exist.”13 This critical point remains a source of both confusion and willful distortion in American discourse, in large measure because the word “atheist” has a much harsher sound to American ears than the word “agnostic.”* Indeed, the more equivocal, bland tone of the latter is arguably the main reason for its invention in the late nineteenth century, since atheism and atheist had long been considered extreme pejoratives.

  Ingersoll frequently pointed out that the labels “atheist” and “infidel” had generally been applied as epithets to anyone, religious or not, who refused to accept biblical stories that were scientifically impossible. That had happened to Thomas Paine, who was also called a Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, and archbeast by his religiously orthodox contemporaries. Had he done nothing else, Ingersoll’s lifelong effort to restore Paine’s reputation should have earned him a permanent place in American intellectual history. The future president Theodore Roosevelt dismissed Paine in 1888 as a “filthy little atheist … that apparently esteems a bladder of dirty water as the proper weapon with which to assail Christianity.”14 In this cultural climate, Ingersoll subtitled his standard lecture about Paine, “With His Name Left Out, The History of Liberty Cannot Be Written.” He made it one of his missions not only to remind citizens in America’s second century of Paine’s indispensible rhetorical contributions to the revolutionary cause but to link those ideals to Paine’s fierce defense of liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state.

  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 consi
derable 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.”15 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.”16

  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.*

  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.”17 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.”18