The Great Agnostic

by Susan Jacoby

  To the oft-repeated orthodox religious argument that the theory of evolution degraded man, Ingersoll responded that precisely the opposite was the case. “The church teaches that man was created perfect and that for six thousand years he has degenerated,” he observed. “Darwin demonstrated the falsity of this dogma. He shows that man has for thousands of ages steadily advanced; that the Garden of Eden is an ignorant myth; that the doctrine of original sin has no foundation in fact; that the atonement is an absurdity; that the serpent did not tempt, and that man did not ‘fall.’”8

  What made Ingersoll more effective as a communicator of science and reason than intellectuals of great distinction like Huxley was his capacity to explain—but not oversimplify—complex subjects for Americans who might have no more than a few years of formal education. In 1911, Ingersoll’s near-contemporary Herman Kittredge described the orator as “preeminently the teacher of the masses. Farmers, mechanics, laborers, used to say, on hearing his explanation … ‘Well, I can understand that now.’”9 In describing the impact of an orator who lived and died before the age of sound recording, one can only rely on the descriptions of his contemporaries. One of the most precise accounts of Ingersoll’s success at communicating with ordinary people appears in a volume by Hamlin Garland, who noted that Ingersoll strode briskly onto the stage and began to speak almost before he left the wings—as if he simply could not wait to share his thoughts with the audience. “He appeared to be speaking to each one of us individually,” Garland recalled. “His tone was confidential, friendly, and yet authoritative. ‘Do you know,’ he began, ‘that every race has created all its gods and all its devils? The childhood of the race put faries in the breeze and a kobold in every stream.” Garland described Ingersoll’s effect on the audience in much the same way that the Chicago newspapers had described the “Plumed Knight” speech in 1876. “He bantered us, challenged us, electrified us. At times his eloquence held us silent as images and then some witty turn, some humorous phrase, brought roars of applause. At times we cheered almost every sentence like delegates at a political convention. At other moments we rose in our seats and yelled. There was something hypnotic in his rhythm as well as in his marvelous lines like a Saxon minstrel. … He taught me the value of speaking as if thinking out loud. After hearing him, the harsh, monotonous cadences of other orators became a weariness.”10

  In his speeches about religion (in contrast to his earlier, more florid political speeches), Ingersoll avoided the flights of hyperbole characteristic of many orators of his era. William Jennings Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech, accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896, was the antithesis of Ingersoll’s style.* Ingersoll’s tone was informal, his language colloquial, and his humor dry and direct. “It is this quality which made his ‘Mistakes of Moses’ irresistible even to his opponents,” Garland remembered. “I recall his roguish look when after he had computed that in order to produce a flood which would cover the tops of the mountains in the space of forty days and forty nights, it would be necessary to have something like ten feet of rain per hour, he suddenly asked, ‘How is that for dampness?’ He was not merely humorous; he was witty. He had an Irishman’s ability to answer on the spot.”11

  Ingersoll’s emphasis on logic appealed not only, or even predominantly, to those prepared to reject religion altogether but to those who wished to reconcile their religion with science. Unlike some of the most prominent figures among the “new atheists” today, Ingersoll was more than willing to find common ground, when that was possible, with reform-minded religious leaders like his close personal friend Henry Ward Beecher and Felix Adler, the Reform Jew who founded the Society for Ethical Culture. Ingersoll played a particularly important role in the widening of the division between mainstream American Protestantism and right-wing evangelical fundamentalism—a far-reaching schism that continues to this day and has contributed mightily to the culture wars that have infused American politics and religion since the 1980s.

  Yet Ingersoll could also be as acerbic as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris about what he considered the irreconcilability of religion and science. Nothing that the “new atheists” have written could be any more offensive to devout believers than Ingersoll’s observation, in 1885, that religion had sought to strangle science in its cradle. “Now that science has attained its youth,” Ingersoll said, “and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: ‘Let us be friends.’ It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: ‘Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.’”12 Nevertheless, Ingersoll’s rejection of all religion as superstition did not prevent him from recognizing that any move away from biblical literalism on the part of religion was good for freethought. “Mr. Beecher is trying to do something to harmonize superstition and science,” Ingersoll told Truth Seeker. “He is reading between the lines. He has discovered that Darwin is only a later Saint Paul, or that Saint Paul was the original Darwin. He is endeavoring to make the New Testament a scientific text-book. Of course he will fail. But his intentions are good. Thousands of people will read the New Testament with more freedom than heretofore. They will look for new meanings; and he who looks for new meanings will not be satisfied with the old ones.”13 In reading this passage, one is struck by the capacity of at least some prominent nineteenth-century public antagonists to disagree sharply and remain on not only civil but cordial terms. Beecher was a frequent guest at Ingersoll’s parties at his home in Gramercy Park, which also included some of the most famous musicians, actors, writers, and public officials—of varying religious and political persuasions—on the New York scene.

  Beecher once introduced Ingersoll at a political rally as a man “that for a full score and more of years has worked for the right in the great, broad field of humanity, and for the cause of human rights.”* Ingersoll himself delivered a eulogy for Beecher at his funeral in 1884, and this speech reached millions who read it in liberal Protestant publications and in magazines and newspapers intended for a general audience. This tribute to the liberalizing religious impulse represented by Beecher does much to explain why Ingersoll’s influence extended far beyond the relatively small circle of Americans who were proud to call themselves agnostics, atheists, or even freethinkers. As the mourners knew well, Beecher, born in 1813, was the son of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, one of the most influential and theologically retrograde American ministers of the nineteenth century. Ingersoll described his friend’s childhood as a “Puritan penitentiary” that “despised every natural joy, hated pictures, abhorred statues as lewd and lustful things, execrated music, regarded nature as fallen and corrupt, man as totally depraved and woman as somewhat worse.” Nevertheless, young Henry had caught glimpses of a larger world “through the grated windows of his cell. … Another heaven bent above his life.” When Beecher became a minister, he moved away from the theory of predestined damnation that his father had taught him. In Ingersoll’s view, Beecher had “passed from harsh and cruel creeds to that serene philosophy that has no place for pride or hate, that threatens no revenge, that looks on sin as stumblings of the blind and pities those who fall, knowing that in the souls of all there is a sacred yearning for life … that men are part of Nature’s self—kindred of all life—the gradual growth of countless years; that all the sacred books were helps until outgrown, and all religions rough and devious paths that man has worn with weary feet in sad and painful search for truth and peace.”14

  Ingersoll’s appreciation of Beecher as a person, and as a religious leader who had helped move his own denomination toward a god of love rather than a god of vengeance, in no way implied that the Great Agnostic himself subscribed to a diluted brand of Christianity. Rather, Ingersoll considered it a great social boon that the religion practiced by a majority of his countrymen had produced at least some preachers who wanted to forge an accommodation between faith and science. For his part, Beecher—despite his sincere friendship with Ingersoll—did not entirely
dismiss the idea that there must be some sort of reckoning in an afterlife for those who had rejected religion altogether. He once remarked, apropos of Ingersoll’s well-known love of the poetry of Robert Burns, that Ingersoll’s epitaph might well turn out to be “Robert burns.”15

  Ingersoll did not, of course, agree with the Protestant accommodationists who were willing to concede the validity of evolution while maintaining that God was the prime instigator of the process. Like atheists today, Ingersoll argued that no all-powerful God, as conventionally imagined by orthodox believers, would have been such a bumbler as to set in motion a process of creation that involved billions of years and the appearance and subsequent extinction of entire species. He was, however, convinced that the progress of science, and the growing acceptance of evolution—even in a limited way—by liberal Protestants would inevitably create more atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers and that science would eventually render all religious creeds obsolete. The sharp increase in just the past twenty years in the number of Americans who belong to no church and consider their outlook on public affairs predominantly secular indicates that Ingersoll was right about the connection between religious liberalism and secularism. But the persistent presence of a large proportion of hard-core biblical literalists in this country—an oft-told story beyond the scope of this book—was not anticipated either by freethinkers or by proponents of “rational” religion at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no question, though, that the large and heterogeneous audiences attracted to Ingersoll’s lectures, and his ability to charm and lay out some areas of agreement with more progressive members of the clergy, gave rise to a new generation of Americans who were unwilling to say a flat no to science on religious grounds and who educated their children in the opening decades of the twentieth century in religious adaptation rather than resistance to science.

  Ingersoll took aim at the structure of religious belief at its weakest point—the growing realization in the late nineteenth century that if ancient afflictions long thought to be of divine origin could be eliminated through the intelligent efforts of man, the divine origins could no longer be taken for granted. In 1898, when President William McKinley issued a proclamation thanking God for the American victory at Santiago de Cuba, the site of Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, Ingersoll slyly wondered why the president did not also thank God for sending the yellow fever that killed so many Spanish soldiers and seamen.

  Ingersoll’s deepest belief, and the reason for the seductiveness of his oratory, was that the removal of one illogical chink in the edifice of supernaturalism could bring the whole structure tumbling down. Darwin’s vision of human evolution, with “the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving”—higher animals—produced from “the war of nature, from famine and death” was a flaw in the very foundation of humanity’s claim to a share in divinity. Fundamentalists, in Ingersoll’s time as well as our own, understood this instinctively in a way that more reason-oriented religious leaders like Beecher did not. Darwin’s famous concluding statement from On the Origin of Species was one of Ingersoll’s favorite passages in the English language: “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone on cycling along according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” To Ingersoll, this language was more inspirational than the Bible precisely because it did not rest on a repudiation of nature in order to envisage future, higher possibilities for man as nature’s most intelligent creature.

  IV

  The Humanistic Freethinker

  While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. The creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed.

  —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.* 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.”1 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.* 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 Brya
n, 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.* 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.