by Susan Jacoby
Ingersoll’s views about religion were well known not only to his regional audiences but to national Republican leaders, who were acquainted with him through both his political speeches and his successful legal representation of many corporate clients, including railroads, with close ties to the party in the era of expanding industrial capitalism after the Civil War. Ingersoll had even stronger links to Republicans who had joined the party during the early years of its formation, in opposition to slavery and to southern secession. None of these associations, however, fully explain why Republican candidates who ostensibly respected religion were eager for the endorsement of an antireligious orator.
First and foremost, Ingersoll’s oratorical gifts, according to contemporary accounts, were incomparable. He was not a national figure until, in June 1876, he nominated James G. Blaine for the presidency at the Republican convention in Cincinnati. This became known as the “Plumed Knight” speech after Ingersoll declared, “Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and thrust his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his country and the maligners of his honor. For the Republican party to desert this gallant leader now, is as though an army should desert their general on the field of battle.”2 (As a member of Congress in the 1860s, Blaine had been associated with charges of corruption in the awarding of railroad contracts. No criminal wrongdoing was ever proved, but the lingering scent of scandal was enough to give Rutherford B. Hayes the nomination.) Ingersoll’s speech, however, endowed the orator with a national prominence that he would never lose. The day after Ingersoll’s nominating address, the Chicago Times described his oratory on behalf of Blaine as “the passionately dramatic scene of the day.” In the florid prose characteristic of contemporary press accounts of major public events, the newspaper declared that Ingersoll “had half won his audience before he spoke a word” and delivered a speech more brilliant than any ever seen at an American political convention. “The matchless measure of the man [Ingersoll] can never be imagined from the report in type,” the decidedly non-objective article continued. “To realize the prodigious force, the inexpressible power, the irrestrainable fervor of the audience requires actual sight. Words can do but meagre justice to the wizard power of this extraordinary man. He swayed and moved and impelled and restrained and worked in all ways with the mass before him as if he possessed some key to the innermost mechanism that moves the human heart, and when he finished, his fine, frank face as calm as when he began, the overwrought thousands sank back in an exhaustion of unspeakable wonder and delight.”3 You had to be there, I guess—especially since Ingersoll’s oratory did not sway enough delegates to win Blaine the nomination.* But the newspaper was accurate in its description of the emerging consensus about Ingersoll as the most compelling orator of his era. As the authors of a definitive history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American oratory would drily observe in 1943, “There was apparently an infectious quality in Ingersoll’s eloquence that tinctured even the reports of newspapermen who covered his speeches. … If even half the stories of his charm are true, it must have been very difficult for any audience that had fallen under the true spell of his geniality to disagree with him.”4 Mark Twain, a much more shrewd and skeptical observer than any newspaper reporter of his era, fell under the Great Agnostic’s spell in 1879 (the two had not yet met and become friends) when he first heard Ingersoll speak at a convention of veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. “He was to respond to the toast of ‘The Volunteers,’” Twain would recall, “and his first sentence or two showed his quality. As his third sentence fell from his lips the house let go with a crash. … Presently, when Ingersoll came to the passage in which he said that these volunteers had shed their blood and perilled their lives in order that a mother might own her own child, the language was so fine, whatever it was, for I have forgotten, and the delivery was so superb that the vast multitude wrote as one man and stood on their feet, shouting, stamping, and filling all the place with such a waving of napkins that it was like a snow storm.”5
A second, albeit also secondary, factor in Ingersoll’s influence as a Republican mover-and-shaker was the presence of many more freethinkers—even if they did not publicly acknowledge their religious skepticism and remained nominal Christians—among Republicans than among Democrats. The party of Lincoln was also the party most closely associated with respect for contemporary science, liberalizing trends within Protestantism, and the separation of church and state. Lincoln himself never joined a church, before or after becoming president, and he was so cagy about any public revelation of his religious views that nearly every American group of religious believers and religious skeptics has, at some point, tried to claim the martyred leader as its own.* In addition to his well-known admiration for such writers as Shakespeare, Byron, and Burns, all enshrined in the freethought pantheon, Lincoln was also influenced as a young man by Paine’s The Age of Reason and the French Enlightenment philosopher Constantin Volney’s The Ruins.† A more persuasive argument on behalf of Lincoln as a religious skeptic than his reading were his repeated rejections, as president, of demands that he call on divine authority as a justification for political decisions. The most explicit of these came in 1862, when Lincoln responded sardonically to a proposal from a mass assembly of Chicago Protestants that he issue a proclamation immediately emancipating slaves:
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that I represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed that he would reveal it directly to me; for unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is, I will do it! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right.6
It is unsurprising that Ingersoll would find a warmer reception in the party founded on the memory of a martyred president who had explicitly rejected divine revelation as a policy justification than he would in the Democratic Party, which, by the end of the century, would choose as its standard-bearer the champion of revealed religion William Jennings Bryan. Ulysses S. Grant, who succeeded Andrew Johnson as president, was another Republican who not only refused to join a church but also suggested that it might be a good idea to eliminate property tax exemptions for religious institutions.
Grant’s proposal that churches pay taxes went nowhere, but Republican efforts to bar any tax support for religious schools were more successful during Grant’s two-term presidency. In 1875, as Speaker of the House, Blaine nearly succeeded in persuading Congress to pass a constitutional amendment—first suggested by James Madison during the debate over ratification of the Bill of Rights and recently proposed by President Grant—that would in effect have extended the First Amendment’s establishment clause to the states. The Blaine amendment stipulated that “no state shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by school taxation in any State, for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund thereto, shall ever be raised under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised, or lands so devoted, be divided between religious sects or denominations.” The amendment passed the House 180 to 7 and fell just four votes short in the Senate of receiving the two-thirds majority required for presentation to the states for ratification. Sixteen states soon passed their own constitutional amendments forbidding aid to religious schools (they too were popularly known as Blaine amendments), and more than half of the fifty state
s now have similar laws that stand as a powerful barrier to the efforts of many religions to obtain taxpayer support, by the back door if not the front, for their schools.
Ingersoll himself was strongly opposed to public funding of any and all religious education, but there is little doubt that Blaine and much of the Republican WASP establishment was motivated as much by anti-Catholicism as by Madisonian constitutional principles. The Catholic Church—which benefited so much in the United States from the absence of a state-established religion—nevertheless wanted tax money for its schools. There was no federal aid to education of any kind at the time, so the political battle over tax support for religious education was fought solely at the state level. Protestants were still (though not for long) in charge of most big-city governments, and the old-line WASPs saw Catholic schools in particular as a threat to the assimilation of growing numbers of immigrants. Ingersoll supported the Blaine amendments not because he had a special animus toward Catholicism (although he considered the recently asserted doctrine of papal infallibility even more ridiculous than most religious teachings) but because Catholicism was the only religion attempting to establish a large school system as an alternative to public education and lobbying for public funding. When Blaine finally won the Republican nomination in 1884, he did everything possible to distance himself from Ingersoll and his antireligious views, which were much more widely known than they had been in 1876.
As events unfolded, Blaine might have been better advised to distance himself from his orthodox supporters among the Protestant clergy. He lost the election because he lost New York State and is generally thought to have done so because one of his prominent Presbyterian backers, the Reverend Samuel D. Buchard, described the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Blaine had attended the speech, refused to disavow the remarks, and lost the state by only one thousand votes—a margin that might well have been provided by angry Irish Catholic voters in New York City. Ingersoll told reporters that he stayed out of the fray because he did not want to add fuel to the fire with his reputation as one who disdained all religion. In a letter to his brother-in-law and publisher Clint Farrell, he wrote that he pitied the six hundred Protestant ministers who had promised Blaine “the support of Jehovah and Co.—I hate to have the old firm disappointed.”7 He also told reporters that one of the causes of Blaine’s defeat had been his earlier campaign statement that “the State cannot get along without the Church” (which would seem to directly contradict the Republican candidate’s early opposition to tax support for parochial schools).8 Ingersoll commented, “If I had been in politics at the time, I would have called a meeting that night to denounce him [Blaine], even though I had made fifty speeches before supporting him.”9
With the exception of the Blaine contretemps, Ingersoll’s political oratory on behalf of Republican candidates rarely focused on church-state issues. Yet the press, especially newspapers affiliated with the Democratic Party, frequently used Ingersoll’s involvement in Republican politics to attack the party of Lincoln. “The party which employs such agents to sustain its falling vitality had better die a quiet death,” the New York Sun commented after Ingersoll’s endorsement of Blaine in 1876. “To give him praise, to circulate his worthless wit, is an outrage. The only office which the press ought to perform is to help exterminate such a moral pestilence or hang the mortal carrion in chains upon a cross beam.”10 Such reactions deterred future Republican presidents from appointing Ingersoll to any office that required Senate confirmation—even if they had sought his oratorical support before being elected.
Nevertheless, there is little question that Ingersoll’s prominence in politics and in the courtroom won a broad audience for his skeptical religious views that he would not otherwise have attracted. Freethinkers had widely varying politics, and Ingersoll’s Republican credentials were of little importance to them (especially since many of his positions, such as lifelong support for women’s rights, were unpopular among the men who ran both parties). But there is no question that Ingersoll’s reputation as a political and a courtroom orator piqued the interest of Americans who were not freethinkers, agnostics, or atheists but were interested in being entertained by a witty talker. Harry Thurston Peck, a stuffy and religiously orthodox classics scholar at Columbia University, may well have been right when he argued, after Ingersoll’s death, that the Great Agnostic would probably have been ignored by respectable God-fearing folk if he had originally appeared on the national stage as a militant advocate of freethought rather than as a political orator. “Had he in the first place sought for widespread recognition as an opponent of Christianity, and of revealed religion, he would no doubt have gathered audiences; yet they would not have been precisely the same kind of audiences. … Hence it came about that instead of declaiming to the sort of audiences that usually gather to applaud the wonted peripatetic infidel—a crowd of illiterate or half-educated men, of long-haired agitators and obscene fanatics—Colonel Ingersoll delivered his attacks on Christianity before audiences made up in part, at least, of intelligent, serious-minded men and women. The political partisan had won a hearing for the professional atheist.”11 Peck did not, of course, intend this observation as a compliment to the Great Agnostic; on the contrary, he considered Ingersoll’s political and legal career a Trojan horse for his true vocation as an eviscerator of religion. In his reference to “long-haired agitators and obscene fanatics,” Peck was returning to a theme that first surfaced in the United States after the French Revolution, when the defenders of religious orthodoxy launched an attack on the secular Enlightenment ideals that played such an important role in the political philosophy of the founding generation. With their castigation of Thomas Paine in the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century, religious reactionaries attempted to equate the separation of church and state with the violent Jacobin period of the French Revolution.
By the end of the Gilded Age, which coincided with Ingersoll’s death, both the champions of evangelical fundamentalism and the defenders of conventional WASP civil religion (Peck belonged in the latter category) were beginning to link the freethought movement with anarchism, socialism, Bolshevism, and immigration—especially Jewish immigration. In the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War, the leaders of American freethought were almost entirely homegrown. There were few personal ties between the most prominent American freethinkers and the vibrant, education-hungry Jewish immigrant culture. Nevertheless, the Yiddish translations of Ingersoll’s works indicate that there was an audience among working-class Jewish readers, especially second-generation immigrants, for a skeptical view of religion that included Judaism itself. Furthermore, the new immigrants from Russia and eastern Europe (like the earlier generation of German Jewish immigrants) strongly supported the freethought position on the separation of church and state. Just as strongly, they opposed tax support for religious schools—for the obvious reason that only in America, with its nonsectarian tax-supported schools, were Jews able to satisfy the hunger for education that had been frustrated throughout the Tsarist empire.
These new Americans almost certainly were not the people Peck had in mind when he talked about the “intelligent, serious-minded men and women” who continued to display a regrettable interest in Ingersoll’s speeches. Peck was, no doubt, referring to Republican businessmen who stood outside Ingersoll’s lecture venues in New York for hours in hopes of obtaining a ticket, only to find that no one was willing to sell to scalpers at any price. He was referring to an eminently respectable audience in 1880 at Booth’s Theater on East Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan, where, the New York Times reported disapprovingly, the audience consisted “half of ladies.”12 Or perhaps Peck was thinking of Mrs. Anna M. Brooks, a Texas rancher’s wife who, in 1896, rode more than thirty miles on horseback to hear Ingersoll’s “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child” in the town of Sherman (pop. circa 9,000). When Mrs. Brooks rode into town,
she headed straight for Sherman’s best hotel, where she was sure that the Great Agnostic would be staying. In the dining room, she introduced herself to Eva Ingersoll, who invited her up to her room to meet her husband. “We shook hands,” Mrs. Brooks reported in a letter to the national freethought publication the Truth Seeker, “and when I told him how far I rode through the mud to see him and hear him he said he would give me a pass to the lecture. I thanked him but told him I thought myself fortunate that I had already bought my seat in a good place. He said he was sorry I had been in such a hurry to pay out my money. … I gave Mrs. Ingersoll my recipe for biscuit.”13
In any case, it was difficult to portray a freethinker who reached out to audiences throughout the nation, and whose fans included ranchers’ wives bearing biscuit recipes, as an alien in thrall to threatening European philosophies. As the young historian Sidney Warren observed in 1943, “Ingersoll was as much a part of his native land as Bunker Hill, as the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln. He knew and liked his America, but unlike another fighting Bob—LaFollette of Wisconsin, who spent his time combatting the practical evils of modern society—Ingersoll devoted his efforts to long-range objectives, divorced from immediate economic and social issues. None of his efforts could possibly have been crowned with immediate success; hence the road which Ingersoll traveled was less likely to bring him current recognition and fame. But Ingersoll was satisfied that he was dealing with the fundamental principles of society, and that his labors were of basic importance.”14