by Susan Jacoby
The Age of Reason was widely read in the 1790s because it was written in the same direct, commonsensical language as Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets and was therefore understandable—unlike abstruse theological arguments in defense of orthodox religion and union between church and state—to anyone who could read. “The ‘Age of Reason’ has liberalized us all,” Ingersoll said. “It put arguments in the mouths of the people; it put the church on the defensive; it enabled somebody in every village to corner the parson; it made the world wiser, and the church better; it took power from the pulpit and divided it among the pews.”10
Ingersoll often told the story of Paine’s near-death of an ulcer in the Luxembourg prison before the U.S. government intervened to obtain his release. He was not allowed to return to the United States until 1802, after Thomas Jefferson was elected president, and Jefferson was sharply criticized for allowing the revolutionary hero—now denigrated as an infidel—to come home on an American navy ship. As Ingersoll had noted in one of his early freethought orations in 1870, Paine was forced to eat “the bitter bread of sorrow” for expressing his skepticism about religion. “His friends were untrue to him because he was true to himself and true to them. He lost the respect of what is called society, but kept his own. His life is what the world calls failure and what history calls success.”11
Only in 1892 would Paine receive his full due as both a revolutionary writer and a religious skeptic, in a magisterial two-volume biography by Moncure Daniel Conway, a minister-turned-freethinker. This book, which received considerable attention because it was published at the height of the nineteenth-century freethought movement, remains an indispensible source for Paine scholars today. Conway concluded his biography with an account of the removal of Paine’s skeleton from his obscure grave in New Rochelle, New York, and the transportation of his bones to England. “There is a legend that Paine’s little finger was left in America,” Conway wrote, “a fable, perhaps of his once small movement, now stronger than the loins of the bigotry that refused him a vote or a grave in the land he so greatly served. As to his bones, no man knows the place of their rest to this day. His principles rest not.”12 Ingersoll, in an 1892 review of Conway’s biography, rejoiced that at long last, “the real history of Thomas Paine, of what he attempted and accomplished, of what he taught and suffered, has been intelligently, truthfully and candidly given to the world. Henceforth the slanderer will be without excuse.”13 (In an 1888 biography of the Federalist politician Gouverneur Morris, Theodore Roosevelt had described Paine as a “filthy little atheist.” Morris, as it happens, was President George Washington’s minister to France in 1793, when Paine was arrested for his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI. A fierce critic of Paine’s religious and economic views, Morris misled the French with the claim that the new United States government did not recognize the British-born Paine’s American citizenship. At the same time, Morris told Washington—who, though he too disliked Paine’s economic radicalism, recognized his debt to the author of The Crisis Papers—that everything was being done to obtain Paine’s release from Luxembourg Prison. Only when James Monroe, a freethinker, replaced Morris in Paris did the American government apply pressure to obtain Paine’s freedom. He had spent nine months in solitary confinement and nearly died of an ulcer.)
Like the public’s reaction against Paine in the early 1900s, the intense, divided response to Ingersoll at the end of the century was ignited not only by the continuing tension between religious power in American society and legal separation of church and state but also by the expanding influence of secularism even among the religious. In this respect, the religious landscape of the United States during the Gilded Age was not dissimilar from our own: the influence of biblically literal evangelicalism was growing even as mainstream Protestantism struggled to accommodate science and modernism by viewing the stories in both the Christian and Jewish Bibles in a metaphoric rather than a literal sense.
In the nineteenth century, despite the much stronger influence of Protestantism and the growing influence of Catholicism, the formidable nature of the challenge posed by contemporary science, especially biology and geology, to biblical literalism may be inferred from the fact that the young William Jennings Bryan, while a student at Illinois College, wrote a letter to Ingersoll asking for his advice about dealing with the emerging contradictions between his education and his faith. This approach by Bryan to Ingersoll is not entirely surprising, since Bryan was born in 1860 in Marion County, Illinois, where Ingersoll, like Lincoln, began his career as a lawyer. By the time Bryan was a college student in the 1870s, Ingersoll had also begun his career as an opponent of organized religion.* The man who would one day be known as “the great commoner” had heard the great agnostic speak, although Bryan himself would follow the more histrionic and sentimental style of evangelical preachers, better suited to his message than Ingersoll’s matter-of-fact way of speaking to an audience.14 The connection between old-time religion and politics, however, was the reverse of today’s close relationship between religion and economic conservatism. Bryan was the leader of the entwined forces of economic and religious populism until his death in 1925 (shortly after the Scopes trial). His famous 1896 “cross of gold” speech had embodied the philosophical linkage between turn-of-the-century evangelical religion and the desire for economic (though not racial) justice. Bryan would undoubtedly have been astonished had someone told him in the 1890s that a century in the future, Americans who upheld the literal truth of Genesis would be equally committed to the idea that the rich should pay lower taxes and that corporations should be treated as people.
The great religious and political paradox of the golden age of freethought was that even as the proportion of freethinkers and “religious liberals” increased, politicians were required to pay greater obeisance to religion than they had been either in the founding generation or at various earlier points in the nineteenth century. President Andrew Jackson, at a time when Paine’s reputation had been obliterated except among freethinkers, declared that “Thomas Paine needs no monument made with hands” because he “has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty.” Lincoln—unlike William McKinley during the Spanish-American War—had explicitly rejected the claim that “God is on our side” during the Civil War. He pointedly observed in his Second Inaugural Address that both sides “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other,” adding that the prayers of both the North and the South could not be answered and that neither had been answered fully.
For Ingersoll, the primary danger of entanglement between religion and politics was that invoking divine authority would simply shut down discussion on controversial issues. The requirement that politicians be religious, or at least appear to be religious, ruled out a significant group of independent thinkers from office. Ingersoll decried the public religiosity required of politicians in a statement that is just as applicable today as it was then.
At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the centre of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are Catholics with Protestant proclivities, or Christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to do their own thinking.15
A candidate’s religious outlook, in Ingersoll’s opinion, should be an entirely private matter. “If we were in a storm at sea,” he said, “with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion wa
s on the five points of Calvinism.”16 Ingersoll felt that the churches of his day were becoming politicized and correctly predicted that it would not be long until religious institutions would “divide as sharply upon political, as upon theological questions.”
Then as now, American religious conservatives favored the use of government power to enforce specific, religiously based moral principles. The Comstock Laws, used to define both Walt Whitman’s poetry and advertisements for contraceptives as obscene, were backed by the most conservative Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church. Ingersoll had no particular interest in the obscenity issue per se—he was personally repelled by images that degraded women—but he argued that the Comstock Laws were being used to persecute editors and writers of publications like the Truth Seeker for unpopular antireligious and political views under the guise of obscenity. Since Ingersoll believed that women could be truly liberated only when science enabled them to decide whether to have children, he could hardly have considered advertisements for (largely ineffective) contraceptives obscene.* Comstock not only hounded the editors of freethought publications but played a personal role in the use of the law to prevent distribution of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for several decades after Whitman first self-published it in 1855. Ingersoll had long considered Whitman the greatest American poet and viewed the government-sponsored campaign to obstruct distribution of his work as a disgraceful example of religious interference, backed by the state, with liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Finally, Ingersoll considered the separation of church and state in free public schools (and by free, he meant in both the intellectual and financial senses of the word) of ultimate importance. Born at a time when Americans were an overwhelmingly Protestant people, his main concern in the early years of his emergence as the “Great Agnostic” was the lingering influence of Calvinism in public education. Ingersoll was no fan of primers that used “in Adam’s fall, we sinned all” to teach children to read. His daughters, Eva and Maud, were mainly educated by private tutors because the Ingersolls did not want their children exposed to religious dogma as a condition of teaching (although the Ingersoll girls, like their parents, were well schooled in the Bible as a work of literature and philosophy).
As the great migration from southern and eastern Europe continued in the 1880s and 1890s, Ingersoll became more concerned about the Catholic Church’s push for the kind of state support that Catholic schools received in many European countries. This freethought position was descended directly from the 1786 Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, written by James Madison and passed in response to a proposal that property taxes be levied for the support of teachers of the Christian religion in common schools. Ingersoll was not happy that some Protestant theological conventions had remained embedded in many public schools throughout the nation (an argument the Catholic Church used in its unsuccessful attempts to gain public tax support for its own schools), but his solution was to get all religious teaching out of the public schools—not to provide state support for alternative religious schools. (In the nineteenth century, Jews did not figure in this debate because immigrant Jews—even the most religious—were simply happy to have access to a public education that had been denied them in most Catholic and Protestant regions of eastern Europe and Russia. In the post–World War II twentieth century, Jewish organizations would adopt the old freethought position that remnants of Christian education had no place in public schools.)
Ingersoll believed that education was the best investment government could make at any level and still regretted the fact that in the early republic, Congress had yielded to pressure by denominational colleges (which Harvard, Yale, and other prestigious institutions still were in the early 1800s). Congress also rejected a legacy left by President George Washington, upon his death in 1799, for the establishment of a publicly supported, secular national university. Ingersoll considered the schools in his own city, New York, to be poorly supported by local and state government in the 1890s. “Many of them are small, dark, unventilated and unhealthy,” he said in an interview in the New York World. “They should be the finest buildings in the city. It would be far better for the Episcopalians to build a university than a cathedral.”* He asserted that we “need far more schoolhouses than we have, and while money is being wasted in a thousand directions, thousands of children are left to be educated in the gutter. It is far cheaper to build schoolhouses than prisons, and it is much better to have scholars than convicts.”17 For Ingersoll, it was a given that tax-supported schools should be thoroughly secular and teach only what could be deduced “about this world, about this life.” Like so many of the causes he championed, Ingersoll’s vision of secular American education, and of a nation in which the line between church and state is clearly drawn and respected by all, remains a work-in-progress.
VI
Reason and Passion
Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you.
—Walt Whitman, “To a Common Prostitute”
Allusions to this famous, once-scandalous Whitman poem occur many times, in many contexts, in Robert Ingersoll’s lectures, essays, and interviews. His attachment to this particular line of American verse explains, on an even deeper level than his advocacy of science, secularism, and the separation of church and state, why the word “great” was appended to the informal title used not only by his admirers but by his more open-minded critics. Then as now, freethinkers, secularists, agnostics, and atheists—whatever they call themselves or others choose to call them—were often portrayed by their religious enemies as cool, uncaring skeptics who had nothing but contempt for the emotional needs served by religion. If the freethinkers were right, and there was no benevolent creator, no reason for suffering, no eternal life, what, then, would comfort the grieving and the afflicted? Even the tough-minded suffragist and agnostic Susan B. Anthony wondered whether “if it be true that we die like the flower, leaving behind only the fragrance … what a delusion has the race ever been in—what a dream is the life of man.”1 To such existential questions, Ingersoll did not offer reason and the search for truth as their own rewards (although he did consider them greater blessings than any promise of eternal life). Instead, he offered the emotional argument that finitude is what gives this life meaning. In a graveside eulogy for a friend’s child, he told the mourners, “If those we press and strain within our arms could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. May be this common fate treads from out the paths between our hearts and the weeds of selfishness and hate. And I had rather live and love where death is king, than have eternal life where love is not. … They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only the perfect rest.”2 By referring to faith in what “is to be,” Ingersoll was not implying that he believed in eternal life or otherworldly reunions with loved ones—even though, as a proper agnostic, he simply maintained that there was no evidence of an afterlife and that the ancient longing of human beings for immortality had no bearing on the question. Ingersoll’s eulogies, which always emphasized that the dead, in a state of “perfect rest,” could feel no pain and sorrow, appealed to many liberal religious believers as well as freethinkers, because one of the distinctive characteristics of modernizing forces within American Protestantism was less emphasis on divine punishment.*
In all of the earthly matters he considered most important, Ingersoll saw no conflict between emotion and reason, between passion and rationality—unless emotion and passion were subordinated to rigid ideology of either a religious or secular nature. His insistence that passion and reason must work in tandem for the good of humanity made him unusual in his own time and explained why he could never accept total determinism of any kind—whether social Darwinism on the right or European socialist ideology on the left. That Ingersoll himself espoused many causes supported by American socialists, like the eight-hour workday,
attested to both the humanism and the pragmatism integral to his idea of how reason should operate in society. If compassion and a sense of common humanity were not reason enough for owners to treat workers fairly, Ingersoll argued, the self-interest of capitalists was served by decent conditions for labor. A consultation with God or his self-proclaimed representatives on earth was neither required nor useful in the continuing struggle to devise a more just and productive human environment.
In this biography, I have paid scant attention to the philosophical debates between Ingersoll and contemporary theologians, which were published in intellectual journals and aroused considerable interest among the same kind of people who now attend debates between atheist authors like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and their religious critics. Such debates have always attracted audiences composed mainly of those who are already committed to one religious or antireligious position and whose minds are unlikely to be changed by anything they hear. Ingersoll’s genius as an advocate for freethought lay not in his ability to best clerical antagonists in arguments about the logical impossibility of the Holy Trinity (although, as a minister’s son, he possessed the theological armament needed for such debates) but in his impassioned portrayal of decent behavior, of goodness, as an obligation of human beings toward one another simply by virtue of their common humanity.
When he made his argument for what he called the “gospel of humanity,” Ingersoll often turned to the arts. His love and knowledge of music, the theater, and literature was deep, and his contributions to the arts generous, as evinced by the letters of condolence Mrs. Ingersoll received from hundreds of actors and musicians, including the president of the American Federation of Musicians. Throughout the Ingersolls’ thirteen years in Manhattan, where they settled in 1886 mainly because it offered a livelier cultural environment than Washington, their hospitality to writers, actors, and musicians was legendary. Their last residence, a townhouse adjoining Gramercy Park, was located just around the corner from The Players’ Club, founded in 1888 by their friend Edwin Booth, the foremost American Shakespearean actor of his time.*