Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Next, Smart blamed “the malicious intent” of Mack. Party politics no doubt played a role, as Smart was an elected Democrat and Mack a staunch Republican during one of the most intense election cycles in American history. Even though he denounced Smart “as slippery as Sam Tilden, his fellow Democrat,” Mack denied ever having met Smart or having any feelings about him one way or another (though Mack most certainly did know Alice Chenoweth).38

  By August 17, even Smart’s hometown paper started to turn against him. The editors of the Jackson Standard admitted that they had met Smart several times and been impressed with him as a teacher and as a scholar. But they had also met Isaac Mack, who ran for lieutenant governor the previous year, and knew that “he is a man of ability” whose word should be taken seriously. The Standard then reprinted the two most recent Sandusky editorials about Smart and demanded, “Is Mr. Smart, by his silence going to admit that these damaging charges are true?”39 With pressure mounting, Smart printed a flyer proclaiming his innocence. Even this did not assuage his critics or the newspaper editors who opined that “the card is a very tame affair and will not go very far in convincing the people of his innocence.”40

  Compounding Smart’s problems, Lillian Durst, editor of the Circleville Herald (Circleville is where the Smart family had recently lived), reported that Smart had told a dentist in a nearby town that he was a widower. Durst had known Love Smart for many years, but she had a hard time convincing the dentist that Charles Smart was lying, so persuasive was the school commissioner. Smart traveled in person to Circleville to proclaim his innocence to Durst. Finding her out of the office, he left a note: “I never told a dentist or anyone else I am or was a widower. I never caused injury to any lady or woman in Sandusky or anywhere else.”41

  Charles Smart’s affair with the young principal also called to mind another prominent scandal of the 1870s: the Beecher-Tilton affair. In its coverage of the Smart-Chenoweth scandal, the Jackson Standard described it as “a very bad Beecher case.”42 In 1872, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, “the most famous man in America” and the brother of Catharine and Harriet Beecher, had chastised the free love ideals of feminist Victoria Woodhull, who had championed the “New Departure” strategy and who was then running for president, the first woman to seek the office.

  Woodhull was outraged. How dare Beecher criticize her relationships when she knew full well that the married Beecher had long been carrying on an affair with his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton, who also happened to be the wife of his close friend. To protest this obvious hypocrisy, Woodhull published an account of Beecher’s transgressions in her newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. Woodhull wanted to defend herself as well as call attention to the sexual double standard for men and women.

  In daring to write about Beecher’s affair, however, Woodhull alone was punished. Beecher was ultimately acquitted of the affair in a civil trial brought by Elizabeth Tilton’s husband and in the court of public opinion, but Woodhull was arrested for violating the Comstock Laws simply for writing about it. She spent the 1872 election night in a New York jail.43

  The Beecher-Tilton affair, known to every literate American, provided a script through which people interpreted extramarital affairs. Men, married or otherwise, could do as they pleased, with little or no consequence. Women, on the other hand, routinely had their lives ruined—in a seemingly endless variety of ways—for having sex outside of marriage.

  Despite Smart’s protestations of innocence, the Sandusky Daily Register stood by their charges, promised to produce additional proof if necessary, and revealed that “through Smart’s conduct the lady [teacher] was forced to resign and leave the city.”44 Who was the lady teacher? Everyone in Sandusky already knew, and in October, the Jackson Standard published her name: “Miss Chinoweth.”45

  ALICE CHENOWETH left Sandusky in the summer of 1876 and never returned to teaching. Meanwhile, Charles Smart completed his term as school commissioner and submitted a thoroughgoing report on the state’s public schools. His reputation suffered as a result of the affair, but he did not lose his livelihood or his home over it. “A man is valued of men for many things, least of which is his chastity. A woman is valued of men for few things, chief of which is her chastity,” Alice caustically observed years later. “This double code can by no sane or reasonable person be claimed as woman made.” Of all the injustices and illogical practices Alice had witnessed in her twenty-three years, this humiliation stung the most. Men were encouraged to “sow their wild oats”; yet, for women, the premarital loss of virginity generally amounted to “social, moral, and physical death.”46 The aftermath of her affair set her on a lifelong course to understand why women were evaluated, publicly and privately, in terms of their sexual relationships with men—as virgins, wives, fallen women, or spinsters—and why women had no voice in the laws governing relationships between the sexes.

  In her first novel, written fifteen years after the start of her affair, Alice detailed the condition of “fallen women,” the term for women who had succumbed to premarital sex. It was “conventional opinion that it was the duty of a young girl to form and maintain, not only her own character and basis of action, but that she must hold her lover to a given line of conduct, failing which he was privileged to take advantage of her love and confidence with no shame whatever to himself.” No matter how the relationship progressed, only the woman would be blamed. “If he were not a gentleman,” Alice observed, “it was her fault. If he took advantage of her tenderness and confidence in him, it was her fault. If he swore to her by all that was holy, and she believed him, and acted upon his word, and the results were disastrous, it was her fault.”47 Everyone knew as much, and few thought to question this supposedly natural and eternal state of affairs.

  Alice later learned that Smart had been untruthful in other dealings, so it is likely that he did lie to her about his wife—telling her, as her Sandusky neighbors reported, that he and Love were separated and that he would seek a divorce so that he could marry Alice. If she found out that this was a lie after they had had sex, what recourse did she, a “fallen woman,” have? Smart’s deception may have enticed Alice into the affair, and, once consummated, her best option seemed to continue with him down the illicit path. Her passion for Smart overtook her reason—the trait she most valued in others and in herself—and precipitated the affair that changed her life.

  From a distance of several years and many states, Alice repeatedly asserted that she had married Smart in 1875, the year their affair began. All of the biographical entries about her in encyclopedias and “who’s who” books repeat this information; their 1875 marriage date is even recorded as fact in the 1900 census. Everyone she later knew and everyone who knew of her accepted this as true, without question. The physical consummation of their affair may have seemed like a type of marriage to Alice, but the couple never legally married.48 Until now, Alice’s affair has never been part of her public biography. Perhaps Alice hoped she might marry Smart one day, but it is more likely that she deliberately chose the freedom of a fake marriage as the first step in her self-creation. Bound to no man, she would make her own rules.

  4

  Purgatory and Rebirth

  Every fallen woman is a perpetual monument to the infamy of a religion and a social custom that narrow her life to the possibilities of but one function, and provide her no escape—a system that trains her to depend wholly on one physical characteristic of her being, and to neglect all else.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1884

  AS THE NATION celebrated the American centennial, Alice Chenoweth left Sandusky, Ohio, in disgrace sometime between May and September of 1876. The historical record does not reveal precisely when she left town or where she went. In fact, she does not appear again definitively until 1884. There are hints and occasional glimpses of her during this exile, but her day-to-day comings and goings are open to interpretation. One thing is certain: Alice spent these eight years using her habits of “real thinking,�
�� honed at the Cincinnati Normal School, to mull over her life experiences. When she reemerged, in 1884, Alice had metamorphosed into a new person with a new name and a radical new worldview.

  Because she had inherited very little money from her father’s estate and was now without a paycheck, Alice most likely packed her trunk and traveled the 590 miles from Sandusky back to Olney, Missouri, to live with her brother Alfred and their mother Ann. In spite of deteriorating eyesight resulting from his Civil War illness, Alfred had attained his medical license, married, and had three children, with a fourth on the way.

  On her way to Olney, 80 miles from St. Louis, Alice’s train would have stopped in Cincinnati. Perhaps she took the opportunity to visit friends from the normal school or to take in some of the summer activities in the Queen City, possibly including the speeches and hoopla surrounding the Republican National Convention, which would prove to be one of the most consequential political conventions in American history. Through her late brother Bernard, Alice would have known the names of the Republican power brokers in attendance and maybe even secured an invitation.

  The question in the minds of Republicans that summer was the extent to which the next administration would continue federal Reconstruction in the South. Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes vied to succeed President Ulysses S. Grant. Another front-runner was James Blaine of Maine, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. On the night of June 14, Republican leaders selected the Civil War veteran, railroad lawyer, and freethinker (agnostic) Robert Ingersoll, of Peoria, Illinois, to introduce Blaine at the following day’s session. Even with just a few hours’ notice, the speech Ingersoll delivered in Cincinnati on the afternoon of June 15, 1876, changed his life, Alice Chenoweth’s life, and nearly the course of American history.

  Widely considered one of the best political speeches of the nineteenth century, Ingersoll’s “Plumed Knight” address, as it came to be known, almost earned Blaine the Republican nomination. After listening to Ingersoll, the crowd was riled up into such a frenzy that had the primary election been held right then, several observers commented, no doubt Blaine would have won. But Ingersoll’s speech did not conclude until 5:15 p.m., so the chairman adjourned the convention.1 The next day, cooler heads nominated Rutherford B. Hayes on the seventh ballot. That fall, Hayes narrowly lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel Tilden but was elevated to the presidency through the compromise of 1877, which heralded the end of Reconstruction and ushered in Jim Crow segregation, racist voter discrimination, and unprecedented violence against African Americans.

  Even though his candidate did not prevail, Ingersoll’s personal stock skyrocketed after news of his talents as an orator spread throughout the nation. The Chicago Evening Journal reported that “never in the history of politics was there such a demand for any one speaker as there is . . . for Robert Ingersoll.”2 If Alice Chenoweth was not in Cincinnati that June evening to hear Ingersoll’s speech in person, she likely read about it in the days and weeks that followed. Alice determined to learn more about this fascinating man who shared her agnosticism and whose powerful oratory catapulted him from Illinois lawyer to national celebrity.

  BUOYED BY THE SUCCESS of the “Plumed Knight” speech, Ingersoll embarked upon his first national lecture tour, beginning in Missouri in April 1877, where Alice may have had occasion to see him. Women often outnumbered men at Ingersoll’s lectures and tickets cost 50 cents, so Alice could easily have attended one or more of his lectures during the 1877 and 1878 seasons, events that regularly drew crowds by the thousands. And she surely followed his tour in the papers, which often provided front-page coverage and printed long excerpts from his talks.3

  Ingersoll had become famous for his convention speech, but Americans did not buy tickets to hear him talk politics. Men and women flocked to hear Ingersoll describe his secular worldview, which offered listeners a new way to understand the world and their place in it. As a Union soldier, Ingersoll had become transfixed by the omnipresence of death and convinced that the only thing that mattered was the here and now. Ingersoll’s signature saying was: “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 happy.” To mothers, fathers, siblings, and widows who lost loved ones in the Civil War and who found diminishing comfort in the prospect of reuniting with them in the afterlife, Ingersoll gave permission to reframe grief into the joy of living. His most sought-after talks criticized Christian orthodoxy, earning him the nickname “the Great Agnostic.”

  Ingersoll’s thoughtful countenance, quick wit, and congenial manner warmed audiences, but Alice sensed a deeper connection to the Great Agnostic, himself the son of a minister. Ingersoll’s most popular address during his 1877–1878 lecture tour was “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child.” In this two-hour-long barnstormer, he critiqued slavery and tyranny of all sorts, especially anything that prohibited independent thought. This speech also contained a section called “The Liberty of Woman.” Here, Ingersoll proclaimed his belief in the equality of women and the importance of egalitarian marriage. He decried stingy husbands, grumpy husbands, and husbands who acted as if they were the “boss” of their wives. Ingersoll also ventured to suggest that husbands got these pernicious ideas about marriage from an old book that taught that women were an afterthought of creation, taken from a man’s rib to be his helper. “As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights,” Ingersoll thundered, “she will be the slave of man.”4

  As Alice sat in torpid exile, ruminating on her fate and what had befallen her in Sandusky, Ingersoll’s words offered a beacon. The freethought movement appealed to her because it was here that she found people rationally discussing the restrictions of patriarchal marriage and the sexual double standard, putting words to inchoate feelings she had about her experiences. Indeed, freethinkers were more or less the only people openly talking and writing about marriage and sex in the late 1870s, so if Alice looked for reading material to help her understand her plight, she would have found her way to freethought publications, including The Truth Seeker, Freethinkers Magazine, and Lucifer the Light-Bearer.

  MEANWHILE, Charles Smart continued on in his official duties as Ohio Commissioner of Common Schools, in spite of increasing calls for his resignation. In July 1877, newspapers reported on Smart’s appearance at the state teachers’ convention, where he delivered his report on Ohio’s contributions to the 1876 centennial celebration in Philadelphia. More than 1,000 teachers were in attendance, but according to news reports, “the commencing of Smart’s paper was followed by a general exodus of the audience,” leaving just “forty-six persons, including the presiding officer, six reporters, a boy, and the speaker remaining.” Smart “exhibited considerable vexation, and remarked that it would have been better for the association if he had stayed away.”5 His colleagues agreed.

  Later that month, Smart narrowly lost the Democratic Party nomination for school commissioner to a Confederate veteran named J. J. Burns. Apparently, being a secessionist was better than being an adulterer.6 Earlier that year, Smart had also been removed from the Ohio Centennial Commission and denied his salary for having served on it.7 In January of 1878, Smart approached the Ohio State Legislature to demand $3,000 in back pay. Outraged by Smart’s temerity, Isaac Mack editorialized that if the state granted this stipend, the taxpayers should revolt because “Smart did not devote half his time to the duties of his office, and whatever extra work he claims to have done could have been done by himself while he was playing sweetness to pretty school mistresses.”8 Smart never received his money.

  Smart later recalled that he would not undergo the “persecution and annoyance” he suffered as school commissioner “for the best salary in America.” For what he attributed to his controversial views about high school reform, he “was mocked, assailed in the press, among the people, among public officials, lied about, almost worried out of my life. If I hadn’t been a great big fellow, with lots of animal life and
fight in me, I’d have gone crazy.”9

  Rather than attempt to refurbish his reputation, Smart left Ohio altogether. He announced that he had accepted a job as Michigan State Agent for the Equitable Life Assurance Society.10 No doubt, this position had been arranged for him by one of his prominent friends in the Democratic Party; a man with connections, even a disgraced one, always had options. A man had “open to him many avenues of happiness, many paths to honorable employment,” Alice would later write. “If he fails in one there is still hope. If he misses supreme happiness in marriage he has still left ambition, labor, study, family.” But for women, church teachings and social customs allowed but one option. As long as the church “made [woman] believe that she could bring to this world nothing of value but her capacity to minister to the lower animal wants of man, so long did it force upon her that single alternative—or starvation.”11 Smart may have been humiliated, but he did not starve.

  Newspapers reported that Smart’s family would accompany him to Detroit, but Love and their two daughters remained in Ohio. The 1878 Detroit City Directory listed him as “Colonel C. S. Smart, Manager of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S.”12 While there is no evidence that Smart served in the Civil War (or that he was a colonel in anything), Civil War service was an important marker in postbellum business and politics, much like service in the Second World War was in the twentieth century. For the rest of his life, Smart went by Colonel Smart, C. S. Smart, or C. Selden Smart. Such a subtle change allowed him to distance himself from the disgraced Commissioner Charles Smart of Ohio.

  ANOTHER ASPECT of Smart’s fresh start in Detroit involved ramping up his relationship with Alice Chenoweth. The couple appear to have begun living together in Detroit and telling people that they were married (Michigan friends later recalled meeting Alice during this period). There is no listing for Alice in the 1880 census or in the Detroit City Directory, but family records from that time reference “Mrs. Alice Smart of Detroit.”13 The 1880 federal census enumerated Smart living with his family in a boarding house in Gallipolis, Ohio, though he appears to have just been passing through because his job remained in Detroit. Alice may not have known it, but Smart occasionally visited his family in Ohio and in Florida, where his wife brought their daughters in hope of curing Iva’s sciatic neuralgia.14