The Great Agnostic

by Susan Jacoby

  Ingersoll’s funeral was simple, attended only by family and close friends, even as Eva Ingersoll received hundreds of telegrams and letters from famous and unknown men and women whose lives and thought had been changed by her husband’s arguments. There was no music, although Ingersoll was a passionate lover of classical music and a generous donor to orchestral groups. A week after Ingersoll’s death, the forty-member St. Nicholas Orchestra paid tribute to one of their major patrons with one of his favorite pieces of music, Siegfried’s “Funeral March” from Götterdämmerung. When it was proposed that the music be played at his funeral, Eva Ingersoll said she could not bear to hear it while she was grieving so deeply. There was no eulogy, although the words Robert had spoken over his brother Ebon Clark’s grave, when he died at age forty-seven in 1879, were read by a friend. Robert’s tribute to his brother applied just as strongly to the Great Agnostic himself, who had used the lines in many of his speeches: “He believed that happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.”3 Robert had also set forth his own philosophy of peaceful death when he described his brother’s final moments. “He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his latest breath, ‘I am better now.’ Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and tears, that these dear words are true of all the countless dead.”4

  Ingersoll was cremated, according to his wishes, after the memorial service, and his wife kept his ashes on her bedroom mantel in their townhouse, in a vase with the inscription L’urne garde la poussière, le coeur le souvenir (“The urn guards the dust, the heart the memory”). At the time, cremation itself was an eloquent statement of Ingersoll’s rejection of religion, since nearly all Christian denominations, as well as Judaism, not only frowned on but forbade the practice. In 1923, when Eva Ingersoll died, her ashes were mingled with her husband’s. The urn was interred in 1932 by the family in Arlington National Cemetery, in what Ingersoll had often described as “the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust.”5 Coincidentally, the grave of William Jennings Bryan, who died shortly after the Scopes trial, is nearby.

  Because Ingersoll died on a Friday, many ministers—especially in the cities where he had spoken most frequently—devoted their Sunday sermons to what they considered his blasphemous and unproductive life. Many of the divines shed crocodile tears at the distinguished career that Ingersoll might have had as a politician, a diplomat, or a judge—if only he had not wasted his life trying to destroy the religious foundation of society. One Presbyterian minister, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, predicted that “it is as an opponent of Christianity that he will be remembered … when he is remembered at all. Here his work was destructive solely, without the desire to build.”

  The coverage of Ingersoll’s death and its aftermath was particularly extensive in Chicago, where Ingersoll first rose to national prominence as an orator with his “Plumed Knight” speech in 1876 and where he had returned many times to preach the gospel of reason during his decades as a resident of Washington and New York. A telling characteristic of the Tribune roundup of comments from the clergy was that it consisted almost entirely of sermons by Protestant ministers. There was no comment by a rabbi—a half-century would pass before public figures began to pay reflexive homage to “our Judaeo-Christian heritage”—and only one sermon excerpt from a Catholic priest. Even though Chicago was a city in the process of transformation by Catholic immigration from Italy and Slavic countries and by Jewish immigration from Russia and eastern Europe, Protestant opinions were still considered the only opinions that counted. The ministers alternated between assertions that Ingersoll had had no effect at all on American religion (if this was so, one wonders why so many divines devoted their sermons to speaking ill of the dead) and anger at his successful efforts to lead misguided souls astray (especially, from the clerical perspective, the young, gullible, and poorly educated). The Reverend George A. Wallace, a Congregationalist minister, outdid the rest of the Chicago clergy with his claim that “all intelligent students of history know, Christianity and the church have been the authors and saviors of all the world’s liberties, civil and religious.”6

  Notable for their absence from the public prints were the voices of prominent national Republican politicians whose campaigns had benefited so greatly from Ingersoll’s political oratory. All Republican candidates for the presidency, beginning with Ulysses S. Grant, had been eager for the support of the crowds who gathered—in some instances, by the thousands—to hear Ingersoll speak on their behalf, but none of those still alive (including the sitting president, William McKinley) were willing to be associated with the nation’s best-known heretic. Received opinion was also unanimous on another point: Republican presidents had been absolutely right to bar Ingersoll from any important appointive government job as a result of his agnosticism. President Rutherford B. Hayes rejected a proposal from Illinois Republicans that Ingersoll be named U.S. minister to Berlin in 1877. The Times commented approvingly in its obituary, “The suggestion that a dedicated and boasting unbeliever should be chosen to represent a Christian country brought a storm of indignation.” Indeed, the press itself had raised a storm about Ingersoll’s irreligion when his name was being bandied about as a possible ambassador. Why, he could never use the common German expression “Mein Gott!” According to The Washington Post, Ingersoll was already employed in the diplomatic corps as the “sleek, jolly plenipotentiary of his Satanic Majesty to the United States of America.”7

  There were, of course, endless tributes to Ingersoll, but most of them came from people already associated in some way with religious unorthodoxy. Some of the most powerful praise came from those on the left, like Eugene V. Debs, who had disagreed with many of Ingersoll’s political and economic opinions over the years. In the Truth Seeker roundup of eulogies for the Great Agnostic, Debs wrote:

  The name of Robert G. Ingersoll is written in the Pantheon of the world. More than any other man he destroyed religious superstition. Like an electric storm he purified the religious atmosphere. With rare courage and brilliant ability he applied himself to his tasks and won an immortality of gratitude and glory. He was the Shakespeare of oratory. … Ingersoll lived and died far in advance of his time. He fought nobly for the transformation of this world into a habitable place, and long after the last echo of detraction will be silence his name will be loved and honored and his fame will shine resplendent, for his immortality is fixed and glorious.8

  Ingersoll’s personal charm was so great (apparently, only the New York Times could remain immune to the appeal of a man who kept his cash in an unlocked drawer) that even newspaper writers who felt obliged to condemn his antireligious views took care to separate the man from his agnosticism. The Chicago Tribune, which dutifully reported the universal disapproval of Ingersoll by the city’s clergy, concentrated on his personal qualities and speaking talents in the newspaper’s first editorial commentary on his death. The unsigned editorial noted, “To all Americans who have heard and seen Robert G. Ingersoll on the stump or the platform—and their name is legion—the news of his departure from this world for another, which he had no faith in, will be a surprise and a shock. They will feel that they have lost an old familiar friend whose wit has made them shriek with laughter and whose pathos has unsealed the fountains of their tears.”9

  Despite the praise for Ingersoll’s personal qualities in much of the press commentary, the Truth Seeker, after an exhaustive search, could find only two mainstream newspaper editorials with a good word for freethought itself. In California, the Stockton Daily Record declared, “The age does not fully appreciate, but as the religion of superstition and impulse and passion gives way and the religion of intelligence, of love and justice is developed, he will be appreciated as a hero, and it is a grand compliment to the intelligence of the present age that he was not also a martyr.”10 This excerpt was unearthed by Frank Smith, the author of
the most recent full-scale biography of Ingersoll, issued in 1990 by the freethought publisher Prometheus Books. It is a significant quotation because the small California paper was entirely accurate in its observation that someone who publicly espoused Ingersoll’s views about religion would almost certainly have been martyred in a time and place that antedated the United States by only a century.

  Ingersoll the crusading agnostic, and his influence on American thought and American religion, generated considerable heat in intellectual discourse for at least a quarter-century after his death. His message may have been troubling but was seldom derided by theologically liberal, intellectual Protestants—like the ministers he had debated—because most of them wished to accommodate Darwin’s theory of evolution to their faith (and vice versa). The Unitarian minister and biblical scholar J. T. Sunderland, author of many erudite books that treated the Bible not as literally true but as divinely inspired, wrote in 1909 that Ingersoll had “pained the hearts not only of the ignorant, and the narrow, but of many of the most intelligent and broad-minded men and women” of his day and that his influence had lasted into the new century. Although Ingersoll had insulted believers with his irreverence, Sunderland praised him for having also “pricked the bubbles of many ecclesiastical and theological shams, hypocrisies, pretenses, make-believes” and being partly responsible, from the outside, for stimulating new thinking within religion.11 This observation was strikingly similar to one made a century earlier, after the death of Thomas Paine, by the Unitarian William Bentley, pastor of the East Church in Salem, Massachusetts. Bentley, an Enlightenment polymath interested in everything from geology to American Indian culture, said of Paine: “He was indeed a wonderful man, & he was the first to see in what part every System was most vulnerable. Even in his attacks on Christianity he felt without knowing it, the greatest difficulties which rational Christians have felt.”12

  Fundamentalist Protestants had little to say about Ingersoll, although they remained deeply disturbed, in the decade after the Scopes trial, by the role of the freethought movement in seducing liberal Protestants into serious consideration of the theory of evolution. By then, however, fundamentalists were interested not in sparring with a ghost so far removed from their beliefs but in reversing the inroads that evolution was making in science classes and textbooks used in the growing number of American high schools.

  The Roman Catholic Church—especially the scholarly Jesuits and Paulists—spoke out more forcefully against Ingersoll than it had during his lifetime. He was certainly blamed by Catholic bishops for having castigated, on every possible occasion, those who wished to obtain tax support for parochial schools. Although the church had given up (temporarily) on obtaining public revenue for Catholic education, its leaders were beginning to seize on the popular sentiment that linked patriotism with religion. In 1911, the Jesuit weekly publication America charged, “By destroying their belief in Christianity, Ingersoll did thousands of his fellow citizens an irreparable wrong and seriously imperiled his country’s future, for a nation of unbelievers can never be a great or enduring nation.”13

  By the end of the First World War, when the blood-soaked Bolshevik Revolution ushered in the first Red Scare, Catholic immigrants were much more Americanized than they had been in Ingersoll’s time, and the church had thrown in its lot with a nation that shared its strong opposition to communism and in which secularism itself could be identified as “un-American.” The Reverend James M. Gillis, an influential Catholic scholar and editor of the Catholic World, delivered a series of lectures in 1925 on secular thinkers, including Edward Gibbon, Paine, Voltaire, and Ingersoll. He described Ingersoll as a svengali for the uneducated and uncultured (although Gillis knew very well that the freethought movement appealed most strongly to the highly educated). “His fame, good or evil, persists as a tradition to the young,” Gillis said, “as a memory to those of middle age. He is the nearest approach we Americans have had to Voltaire.” Needless to say, the comparison to Voltaire was not intended as a compliment, though Ingersoll would surely have taken it as one.

  It is understandable that Ingersoll remained more of a bête noir for Catholic than for Protestant intellectuals in the first three decades of the twentieth century. While mainstream Protestant denominations had dropped many of the rigid theological positions that Ingersoll had mocked so effectively, Catholic doctrine had not changed significantly. The American Catholic hierarchy was, if anything, even more theologically conservative after the First World War than it had been in the late nineteenth century. Papal infallibility, which had been adopted as Catholic dogma only in 1870, at the First Vatican Council, had always been treated as a particularly ridiculous idea by Ingersoll, whose fundamental argument against all religion was that no individual or institution could claim divine authority.* Such arguments made few inroads in the beliefs of the nineteenth-century Catholic laity, with its large component of poorly schooled immigrants. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, American Catholics were better educated than they had been fifty years earlier. Ingersoll’s old arguments against papal infallibility, newly advanced by others, were accessible to the growing number of well-off, influential Catholics who were receiving a secular rather than a Catholic religious education.†

  Another explanation for the persistent Catholic animus toward “Ingersollism” was the increasing political clout of Catholic voters and the growing willingness of the hierarchy to campaign openly for laws that adhered to church doctrine. The church had failed in its attempts to gain tax support for parochial schools in the 1870s, but it had much more success, in combination with the most conservative descendants of the Puritans, with new issues that arose in the twentieth century—most notably the availability of means of birth control that could be used by women. The arguments used by Ingersoll in favor of birth control before there were effective contraceptives were the same ones used by Margaret Sanger in her unflagging attempts to make real twentieth-century birth control devices available to the poor as well as the rich. Translated into political action, the Catholic theological attack on birth control prevailed in Congress and many state legislatures in the decades between the wars, when new laws criminalizing the distribution and importation of contraceptives (including devices that, in contrast to petroleum jelly, actually worked) were added to the old Comstock laws.

  Americans naturally had other, graver problems on their minds from the late 1920s through the mid-1940s, but the absence of an eloquent and widely recognized voice like Ingersoll’s on behalf of the separation of church and state also helped marginalize a wide range of issues, from birth control to the teaching of evolution, until after the Second World War. In spite of the mistaken conclusion of many American intellectuals that fundamentalism was finished, evolution actually lost ground in public school biology curriculums in the late 1920s and early 1930s. There was almost no discussion of this subject in the general news media for decades, although prominent scientists were appalled by the trend. In 1936, Oscar Riddle, a prominent biologist at the Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science that high schools were teaching much less about evolution then they had in the first decade of the twentieth century.14 But the proceedings of scientific meetings were not usually reported in mass-circulation newspapers. One of Ingersoll’s greatest strengths had been his ability to reach beyond the scientific community, and there was no equally influential nonspecialist to alert Americans in the first half of the new century to the persistence of the most repressive forms of religion and their continuing battle to minimize the influence of scientific knowledge and understanding. (One compelling example of the largely undetected erosion of freethought advances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a change in one of the standard high school science textbooks used throughout the nation for nearly four decades. The first edition of Truman Moon’s Biology for Beginners, published in 1921, had a portrait of Darwin as the frontispiece. The seco
nd edition, published after the Scopes trial in 1926, replaced Darwin with a drawing of the human digestive tract. The 1920s also ushered in the downplaying of any connection between lower animals and human evolution. The E-word was censored and replaced in texts with euphemistic phrases like “changes over time.” This cyclical antiscience drama returned in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with demands by the Texas State Board of Education—the second largest purchaser of school texts in the nation—for changes to minimize the subject of evolution in high school biology texts.)

  By the 1920s, the last generation of Americans who came of age while Ingersoll was in his prime were growing old, but to freethinkers, the issues raised by the Great Agnostic were far from settled. “A great many people contend that we now enjoy in this country as much liberty (or toleration) as is good for us,” essayist Michael Monahan, born in 1865, wrote. “To aim at the full measure which Colonel Ingersoll advocated is, in the opinion of these people, to advance the standard of Anarchy. By this reasoning a man who is only half or three-quarters well is better off than one in perfect health.” Monahan pointed out the tendency of contemporary religious leaders to dismiss Ingersoll as one who wasted his life taking on theological straw-men, “fighting battles that had been thoroughly fought out before his day.” (This position would also be taken by the few secular scholars who revisited Ingersoll in the 1960s and 1970s.) Monahan was one of the few cultural commentators of any generation to agree with my view that Ingersoll belongs to the ranks of classical liberals rather than of social Darwinists and that he was a true philosophical descendant of Thomas Paine. “Ingersoll was no mere echo and imitator of the great liberals who preceded him,” Monahan asserted. “… He was the best-equipped, most formidable and persistent advocate of the liberal principal which this country, at least, has ever known; and it is extremely doubtful if his equal as a popular propagandist was to be found any-where.”15 What were those liberal principles? Ingersoll believed “that everyone was entitled to comfort, well-being, happiness in this world. … He regarded pauperism not as a proof of the special favor of God, but as an indictment of man. … He pleaded for the abolition of the death penalty, that relic of savagery. … His great heart went out in sympathy to everything that suffers—to the dumb animals, beaten and overladen; to the feathered victims of caprice and cruelty.”*