by Susan Jacoby
Ingersoll’s Republican connections drew criticism even from his contemporary admirers among freethinkers on the political left. Clarence Darrow, who paid a moving tribute to the Great Agnostic shortly after Ingersoll’s death in 1899, did not hesitate to speak ill of the dead only a year later. He told an audience in Chicago that although the Great Agnostic had viewed religion with unflinching rationality, he had abandoned reason on purely political issues. “The older and more venerable a political superstition,” Darrow said, “the more he [Ingersoll] would cling to it.”2 Darrow was speaking primarily about Ingersoll’s conservatism on economic issues like the gold standard, while ignoring Ingersoll’s frequent rejections of the Gilded Age Republican party line when it conflicted with his social values. Ingersoll disagreed openly with many Republican policies, most notably the party’s abandonment of civil rights in the 1880s and its hard anti-labor stance. In 1886, he supported Henry George, the author of the highly influential work Progress and Poverty (1879), in his unsuccessful candidacy for mayor of New York on a platform of a “single tax” on land. It is hard to imagine that a dedicated plutocrat would have believed, along with Ingersoll, that no one should be allowed to own any land he did not use personally. “And why?” Ingersoll asked. “Don’t you know that if people could bottle the air, they would? Don’t you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don’t you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air?”3 No supporter of a pure, unregulated market could have written the following passage from “Eight Hours Must Come,” an essay published in 1890.
For thousands of years men have been talking and writing about the great law of supply and demand—and insisting that in some way this mysterious law has governed and will continue to govern the activities of the human race. It is admitted that this law is merciless—that when the demand fails, the producer, the laborer, must suffer, must perish—that the law feels neither pity nor malice—it simply acts, regardless of consequences. Under this law, capital will employ the cheapest [means possible]. … The great law has nothing to do with food or clothes, with filth or crime. It cares nothing for homes, for penitentiaries, or asylums. It simply acts—and some men triumph, some succeed, some fail, and some perish.4
In this essay, Ingersoll repudiated the social Darwinism that was as much an article of faith for many wealthy misinterpreters of Darwin’s theory of evolution as Genesis was for religious fundamentalists. Endorsing both the eight-hour day and the right of workers to strike if humane working conditions could be achieved in no other way, Ingersoll argued, “The working people should be protected by law. If they are not, the capitalists will require just as many hours as human nature can bear. We have seen here in America street-car drivers working sixteen and seventeen hours a day. It was necessary to have a strike in order to get to fourteen, another strike to get to twelve, and nobody could blame them for keeping on striking till they get to eight hours.”*
Ingersoll also saw a connection between secular public education and the unwillingness of workers to simply accept conditions set by their employers. Not long ago, he said, there were “no teachers except the church, and the church taught obedience and faith—told the poor people that although they had a hard time here, working for nothing, they would be paid in Paradise with a large interest.” But a reward in the afterlife would no longer satisfy workers who could read, write, and think for themselves. Ingersoll made an even more extraordinary statement, coming as it did from a rich white man of his time. Economic justice, he said, must apply to women as well as to men, and working men should remember that “all who labor are their brothers, and that all women who labor are their sisters.” The worst-paid, worst-treated workers in America were women, Ingersoll noted more than two decades before the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.† “Think of the sewing women in this city,” he wrote, “and yet we call ourselves civilized!”5
This passage exemplifies the cast of mind that distinguished Ingersoll from the social Darwinists among his contemporaries—including Herbert Spencer and Yale University political scientist William Graham Sumner—who insisted that Darwin’s description of “tooth-and-claw” natural selection did and should also apply to man in a state of nature. Darwin explicitly rejected this concept if applied to civilized humans. The difference between civilization and nature, Darwin said, was that civilized man cares for instead of exterminates the weaker members of the species. “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy,” he declared, “which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered … more tender and widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”6 Spencer’s equation between biological natural selection and what he called “social selection” led him to oppose all state aid to the poor, public education, health laws, and even public postal service. Sumner, a prototypical public intellectual who imbued thousands of the nation’s future leaders with the ideology of untrammeled market capitalism during his tenure at Yale between 1872 and 1910, insisted that the business leaders of the Gilded Age had emerged through a process of selection equivalent to the triumph of the human species in nature. Furthermore, there were atheists and agnostics (on the political left as well as the right) who were convinced not only that the poor were poor because they were unfit but that natural selection had established a hierarchy of inferior and superior “races” (many of which would be called ethnic groups today). The statements of, among others, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Sanger about the inferiority of immigrants are a continuing embarrassment to those who would like to think that their favorite social reformers, feminists, and antireligious dissenters were untainted by the prejudices of their era.
Broadly speaking, there are two divergent strains of American secular thought. One can be traced to the radical humanism of Tom Paine, who saw the separation of church and state not only as the guarantor of personal freedom of conscience but also as the foundation of a world in which inherited status and wealth would be replaced by merit and intellect as the dominant forces in the lives of individuals. Recognition of a common humanity, not tooth-and-claw competition, would create social progress. The other distinct current of American secularism begins with the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century and continues through the “objectivism” and exaltation of the Übermensch preached by the twentieth-century atheist and unregulated market idolator Ayn Rand. These diverging currents can also be found within the “new atheist” movement today, in which people often make a point of labeling themselves as either secular humanists, who are usually liberals, or skeptics, who are generally libertarian conservatives.* Even Ingersoll’s friend Henry Ward Beecher, the champion of liberal Protestantism, delivered some astonishing perorations that made God sound like a social Darwinist. “God intended the great to be great and the little to be little,” he preached in an 1877 sermon quoted approvingly in the New York Times. “I do not say that a dollar a day is enough to support a working man. But it is enough to support a man!”7 After reading all of Ingersoll’s published works and much of his private correspondence, I still find it difficult to explain the seeming inconsistency between his own place in the tradition of democratic secular humanism pioneered by Paine and his close personal relations with many social Darwinists. That paradox is the source of his singular importance in the history of American secularism, but it is also the reason why it has been difficult for historians to place him. Part of the explanation for Ingersoll’s refusal to cast his lot with the social Darwinists surely lies in his big-hearted personality, because he also maintained friendly relations with men like Eugene V. Debs, a Socialist whose views on politics and economics could not have been farther from the allegiances of the wealthy. Ingersoll had met Debs in 1875, when the young Debs invited the Peoria lawyer—just beginning to “come out” as an agnosti
c—to speak before the Occidental Literary Club of Terra Haute, Indiana. The future Socialist candidate for president was so captivated by Ingersoll’s talk that he not only accompanied him to the Terra Haute train station but bought himself a ticket and rode all the way to Cincinnati so that he and Ingersoll could continue their conversation.
No one, of course, is ever completely free of contemporary received opinion, but Ingersoll was far ahead of his time—farther ahead than many who agreed with his antireligious views—on a number of critical issues connected with but not solely defined by religious orthodoxy. The most important of these are racial equality, respect for varied ethnic groups, women’s rights, and many disputes that would today fall within the realm of civil liberties. From a secular humanist perspective, Ingersoll was on the right side of nearly all of these issues. From the perspective of the social Darwinist-Randian secularists, Ingersoll was often on the wrong side—as he would be on the wrong side of Rand’s devotees today.
After the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868, there is little to admire in the attitudes or actions of prominent white Americans, whatever their political affiliation, concerning the potential transformation of a recently enslaved race into a people who might make vital contributions to a nation that had, in its Faustian founding bargain, stripped them of human rights. That generalization applies to freethinkers, most of whom had been ardent abolitionists, as much as it does to any post-Reconstruction southern Democratic politician dedicated to the replacement of de jure with de facto slavery. While nearly all white freethinkers opposed slavery, that did not mean they were any more willing than the religiously orthodox to entertain the thought that blacks might be, even potentially, their social and intellectual equals.
In 1883, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that ought to be as infamous in the history of civil rights as Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the “separate but equal” doctrine, in 1896. The 1883 decision basically gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations and transportation.* Those provisions were declared unconstitutional, and the decision would stand as the basis of Jim Crow in everyday southern life for more than eighty years, until passage of the Public Accommodations Act of 1964. A week after the court handed down its ruling, with a stinging dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan, hundreds gathered for a protest meeting in Washington’s Lincoln Hall. Ingersoll was introduced as one of the main speakers by Frederick Douglass and proceeded, unlike most leaders of his party, to eviscerate the court’s logic. “This decision takes from seven millions of people the shield of the Constitution,” he said. “It leaves the best of the colored race at the mercy of the meanest of the white. It feeds fat the ancient grudge that vicious ignorance bears toward race and color. It will be approved and quoted by hundreds of thousands of unjust men. The masked wretches who, in the darkness of night, drag the poor negro from his cabin, and lacerate with whip and thong his quivering flesh, will, with bloody hands, applaud the Supreme Court. The men who, by mob violence, prevent the negro from depositing his ballot—those who with gun and revolver drive him from the polls, and those who insult with vile and vulgar words the inoffensive colored girl, will welcome this decision with hyena joy. The basest will rejoice—the noblest will mourn.”8 There could hardly have been a more prescient statement, given that the high court’s 1883 ruling stood largely unchallenged until the day in 1956 when a weary Rosa Parks sat down in the whites-only section of a bus in Birmingham, Alabama. Ingersoll also drew a clear connection between a law that would deny people the right to have a drink of water at a lunch counter and the legal sanction of violence that denied an entire race the right to vote. In a statement directed specifically to his fellow Republicans, Ingersoll expressed indignation that “a man like Frederick Douglass can be denied entrance to a car, that the doors of a hotel can be shut in his face; that he may be prevented from entering a theatre—the idea that there shall be some ignominious corner into which such a man can be thrown by a decision of the Supreme Court.”9 He voiced the hope that the party of Lincoln, forged just before the Civil War, would realize that its mission had not ended with the formal abolition of slavery and would mount a new campaign for a public consensus on equal treatment of the races.
It is of more than passing interest that Ingersoll made his speech denouncing his party’s abandonment of civil rights in Washington, which was as segregated well into the twentieth century as any city in the Deep South. He certainly knew that Douglass, attempting to enter the White House for a public reception after Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, was detained by guards because he was a “person of color” and was admitted only on Lincoln’s personal orders. Because freethought was primarily a northern phenomenon, many white freethinkers shared the enduring American delusion that racial discrimination was practiced mainly, if not exclusively, by southerners. Ingersoll, having spent most of his young manhood in the contested border areas between North and South, knew better.
What Ingersoll, like Voltaire and Paine before him, understood was the indivisibility of human rights, and he understood this not in spite of but precisely because of his disbelief in a deity who had supposedly “designed” the order of nature. The influence of social Darwinism had led many freethinkers to take a condescending view of the potential of new immigrant “races” in the United States—especially if, like the eastern European Jews, southern Italians, and Slavs who began pouring into the country after the Civil War, those people practiced their traditional (and strange to Americans of Anglo-Saxon origins) religions with the gusto and freedom allowed by the First Amendment. For female freethinkers, there was the added gall of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted the vote to male ex-slaves but not to women of any color. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the first meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association, personified the contempt with which some upper-class freethinkers regarded not only former black slaves but immigrants. “Think of Patrick and Sambo … and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic,” she said, “who can not read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, and Anna E. Dickinson.”10 Even if it were true that many Patricks, Sambos, and Yung Tungs could not yet read or understand the Constitution, Ingersoll saw the problem as entirely solvable by public education.
Ingersoll’s attitude toward Jewish immigration was consistent with his views about immigration in general. The Great Agnostic had no more use for religious Judaism than he did for Christianity (New York rabbis were just as offended by “Some Mistakes of Moses” as Catholic bishops and orthodox Protestant preachers were by Ingersoll’s mockery of their belief that a god-man rose from the dead), but he correctly identified the Christian insistence that the Jews had killed their god as major source of anti-Semitism. “When I was a child,” he recalled, “I was taught that the Jews were an exceedingly hard-hearted and cruel people, and that they were so destitute of the finer feelings that they had a little while before that time crucified the only perfect man who had appeared on earth; that this perfect man was also perfect God, and that the Jews had really stained their hands with the blood of the Infinite.”11
In Ingersoll’s time, however, the most virulent discrimination against immigrants was aimed not at any of the new arrivals from Europe but against Chinese, especially in the West. In 1882, Congress passed the first immigration law in the nation’s history—the Chinese Exclusion Act—specifically to bar the entrance of workers from a particular country. The Chinese had, of course, been welcome when there was a labor shortage and “coolies” were needed to build the transcontinental railroad. In 1892, the Exclusion Act was toughened under a law written by California representative Thomas J. Geary (the Geary whose memory is lionized in street names and other monuments throughout San Francisco). Under the Geary law, upheld by a 5–4 Supreme Court vote, all Chinese residents of the United States were required to carry a residence permit. Chinese were f
orbidden to bear witness in court should they be arrested for not carrying their internal “passport” and were denied bail. Once again, Ingersoll broke ranks with many in his party who supported both the Geary law (though Geary himself was a Democrat) and the earlier Exclusion Act, which was signed by Republican president Chester A. Arthur. As a lawyer, Ingersoll disagreed strongly with a statute that deprived Chinese of the legal protections enjoyed by all other immigrants. But his argument as a freethinker was based primarily on moral considerations and offered a powerful challenge to the social Darwinism preached by Spencer.
“The average American, like the average man of any country, has but little imagination,” Ingersoll said. “People who speak a different language, or worship some other god, or wear clothing unlike his own, are beyond the horizon of his sympathy. He cares but little or nothing for the sufferings or misfortunes of those who are of a different complexion or another race. His imagination is not powerful enough to recognize the human being, in spite of peculiarities. … If these ‘inferior people’ claim equal rights he feels insulted, and for the purpose of establishing his own superiority tramples on the rights of the so-called inferior.”12 Immigrants from China, he said, should be treated in exactly the same way and should enjoy the same legal rights as immigrants whose skin color and culture were more familiar to Americans. In another statement highly unusual for his time, Ingersoll went on to compare the persecution of Chinese in the United States with the persecution of Jews in Tsarist Russia. “We are in the same business,” he declared emphatically. “Our law is as inhuman as the order or ukase of the Czar.”13 Ingersoll considered the passage of laws that turned Chinese into a special category of American residents without constitutional rights as not only morally wrong but wrong in terms of American self-interest, since Chinese made up one-fourth of the human race and Americans surely wanted to trade with that country. “After all,” Ingersoll said, “it pays to do right. This is a hard truth to learn—especially for a nation. A great nation should be bound by the highest conception of justice and honor. … It should remember that its responsibilities are in accordance with its power and intelligence.”14