The Great Agnostic (11 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 forbidden 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Ingersoll's rejection of the idea that women were, by nature, intellectually inferior to men—an article of faith for most men and most women in his era—was another of his distinguishing characteristics as a humanistic freethinker. The dedications of many volumes in Ingersoll's collected works emphasize his high opinion of the capabilities of women: Volume I, “To Eva A. Ingersoll, My Wife, A Woman without Superstition”; Volume II, “To Mrs. Sue M. Farrell, in law my sister, and in fact my friend”; Volume XII, “To My Daughters, Eva and Maud, whose hearts have never been hardened, whose imaginations have never been poisoned, and whose lives have never been cursed with the dogma of eternal fire.” That Ingersoll was a family man who adored his wife and two daughters was well known, and his spotless domestic reputation—despite the best efforts of scandal-hungry reporters—frustrated those who wished to equate freethought with “free love.” Ingersoll's twentieth-century biographers failed to recognize, probably because most of them were writing before the emergence of the second wave of American feminism in the 1970s, that Ingersoll held a radical view of women's rights and wrongs that went far beyond the
suffragist movement of his time. In the battle over the subjugation of women, he sided with Stanton, who saw religion and centuries of religion-based law as the main cause of women's oppression, rather than with those who saw the vote itself as the ultimate remedy for all of women's ills. Like Stanton, Ingersoll viewed the franchise as necessary but not sufficient for women who wished to be not only the helpmates of men but the masters of their own lives. In this he resembled feminists of the 1970s and 1980s rather than the suffragists of his own time.

Before there were any reliable means of contraception, Ingersoll spoke about birth control as the precondition for women's liberation from servitude. He also understood that compulsory childbearing was used by both the church and individual men to stymie any other aspirations that women might possess. Ingersoll said emphatically, “Science must make woman the owner, the mistress of herself … must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will or will not become a mother.” Women could never be truly free as long as they were forced to rely on the self-control of men to avoid unwanted pregnancy. “This is the solution of the whole question,” Ingersoll emphasized. “This frees woman. The babes that are then born will be welcome. They will be clasped with glad hands to happy breasts. They will fill homes with light and joy.” Those who considered the very mention of birth
control obscene would be horrified by the possibility that women might choose whether to have children because involuntary motherhood guaranteed patriarchal control over all female behavior. Ingersoll correctly described the ethos of both men and women “who believe that slaves are purer, truer than the free, who believe that fear is a safer guide than knowledge, that only those are really good who obey the commands of others, and that ignorance is the soil in which the perfect, perfumed flower of virtue grows.”
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Ingersoll was well aware that women, as a group, were more religious than men, but, in sharp contrast to Victorian moralists who considered the female sex “purer” than the male, he attributed feminine religiosity not to woman's higher nature but to her lack of education and utter economic dependency on her husband. In his preface to the prominent freethinker and feminist Helen H. Gardener's
Men, Women and Gods
(1885), Ingersoll said flatly, “Woman is not the intellectual inferior of man. She has lacked, not mind, but opportunity. … There were universities for men before the alphabet had been taught to women. At the intellectual feast, there was no place for wives and mothers. Even now they sit at the second table and eat the crusts and crumbs. The schools for women, at the present time, are just far enough behind those for men, to fall heirs to the discarded; on the same principle
that when a doctrine becomes too absurd for the pulpit, it is given to the Sunday-school.” Even worse, in Ingersoll's opinion, was the tendency of many husbands to regard religious superstition as the guardian of their wives' fidelity and their daughters' chastity. “These men think of priests as detectives in disguise,” Ingersoll said, “and regard God as a policeman who prevents elopements.”
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