The Great Agnostic (7 page)

Grant's proposal that churches pay taxes went nowhere, but Republican efforts to bar any tax support for religious schools were more successful during Grant's two-term presidency. In 1875, as Speaker of the House, Blaine nearly succeeded in persuading Congress to pass a constitutional amendment—first suggested by James Madison during the debate over ratification of the Bill of Rights and recently proposed by President Grant—that would in effect have extended the First Amendment's establishment clause to the states. The Blaine amendment stipulated that “no state shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by school taxation in any State, for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund thereto, shall ever be raised under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised, or lands so devoted, be divided between religious sects or denominations.” The amendment passed the House 180
to 7 and fell just four votes short in the Senate of receiving the two-thirds majority required for presentation to the states for ratification. Sixteen states soon passed their own constitutional amendments forbidding aid to religious schools (they too were popularly known as Blaine amendments), and more than half of the fifty states now have similar laws that stand as a powerful barrier to the efforts of many religions to obtain taxpayer support, by the back door if not the front, for their schools.

Ingersoll himself was strongly opposed to public funding of any and all religious education, but there is little doubt that Blaine and much of the Republican WASP establishment was motivated as much by anti-Catholicism as by Madisonian constitutional principles. The Catholic Church—which benefited so much in the United States from the absence of a state-established religion—nevertheless wanted tax money for its schools. There was no federal aid to education of any kind at the time, so the political battle over tax support for religious education was fought solely at the state level. Protestants were still (though not for long) in charge of most big-city governments, and the old-line WASPs saw Catholic schools in particular as a threat to the assimilation of growing numbers of immigrants. Ingersoll supported the Blaine amendments not because he had a special animus toward Catholicism (although he considered the recently asserted
doctrine of papal infallibility even more ridiculous than most religious teachings) but because Catholicism was the only religion attempting to establish a large school system as an alternative to public education and lobbying for public funding. When Blaine finally won the Republican nomination in 1884, he did everything possible to distance himself from Ingersoll and his antireligious views, which were much more widely known than they had been in 1876.

As events unfolded, Blaine might have been better advised to distance himself from his orthodox supporters among the Protestant clergy. He lost the election because he lost New York State and is generally thought to have done so because one of his prominent Presbyterian backers, the Reverend Samuel D. Buchard, described the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Blaine had attended the speech, refused to disavow the remarks, and lost the state by only one thousand votes—a margin that might well have been provided by angry Irish Catholic voters in New York City. Ingersoll told reporters that he stayed out of the fray because he did not want to add fuel to the fire with his reputation as one who disdained all religion. In a letter to his brother-in-law and publisher Clint Farrell, he wrote that he pitied the six hundred Protestant ministers who had promised
Blaine “the support of Jehovah and Co.—I hate to have the old firm disappointed.”
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He also told reporters that one of the causes of Blaine's defeat had been his earlier campaign statement that “the State cannot get along without the Church” (which would seem to directly contradict the Republican candidate's early opposition to tax support for parochial schools).
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Ingersoll commented, “If I had been in politics at the time, I would have called a meeting that night to denounce him [Blaine], even though I had made fifty speeches before supporting him.”
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With the exception of the Blaine contretemps, Ingersoll's political oratory on behalf of Republican candidates rarely focused on church-state issues. Yet the press, especially newspapers affiliated with the Democratic Party, frequently used Ingersoll's involvement in Republican politics to attack the party of Lincoln. “The party which employs such agents to sustain its falling vitality had better die a quiet death,” the
New York Sun
commented after Ingersoll's endorsement of Blaine in 1876. “To give him praise, to circulate his worthless wit, is an outrage. The only office which the press ought to perform is to help exterminate such a moral pestilence or hang the mortal carrion in chains upon a cross beam.”
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Such reactions deterred future Republican presidents from appointing Ingersoll to any office that required Senate confirmation—even
if they had sought his oratorical support before being elected.

Nevertheless, there is little question that Ingersoll's prominence in politics and in the courtroom won a broad audience for his skeptical religious views that he would not otherwise have attracted. Freethinkers had widely varying politics, and Ingersoll's Republican credentials were of little importance to them (especially since many of his positions, such as lifelong support for women's rights, were unpopular among the men who ran both parties). But there is no question that Ingersoll's reputation as a political and a courtroom orator piqued the interest of Americans who were
not
freethinkers, agnostics, or atheists but were interested in being entertained by a witty talker. Harry Thurston Peck, a stuffy and religiously orthodox classics scholar at Columbia University, may well have been right when he argued, after Ingersoll's death, that the Great Agnostic would probably have been ignored by respectable God-fearing folk if he had originally appeared on the national stage as a militant advocate of freethought rather than as a political orator. “Had he in the first place sought for widespread recognition as an opponent of Christianity, and of revealed religion, he would no doubt have gathered audiences; yet they would not have been precisely the same kind of audiences. … Hence it came about that instead of declaiming to the sort of
audiences that usually gather to applaud the wonted peripatetic infidel—a crowd of illiterate or half-educated men, of long-haired agitators and obscene fanatics—Colonel Ingersoll delivered his attacks on Christianity before audiences made up in part, at least, of intelligent, serious-minded men and women. The political partisan had won a hearing for the professional atheist.”
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Peck did not, of course, intend this observation as a compliment to the Great Agnostic; on the contrary, he considered Ingersoll's political and legal career a Trojan horse for his true vocation as an eviscerator of religion. In his reference to “long-haired agitators and obscene fanatics,” Peck was returning to a theme that first surfaced in the United States after the French Revolution, when the defenders of religious orthodoxy launched an attack on the secular Enlightenment ideals that played such an important role in the political philosophy of the founding generation. With their castigation of Thomas Paine in the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century, religious reactionaries attempted to equate the separation of church and state with the violent Jacobin period of the French Revolution.

By the end of the Gilded Age, which coincided with Ingersoll's death, both the champions of evangelical fundamentalism and the defenders of conventional WASP civil religion (Peck belonged in the latter category) were
beginning to link the freethought movement with anarchism, socialism, Bolshevism, and immigration—especially Jewish immigration. In the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War, the leaders of American freethought were almost entirely homegrown. There were few personal ties between the most prominent American freethinkers and the vibrant, education-hungry Jewish immigrant culture. Nevertheless, the Yiddish translations of Ingersoll's works indicate that there was an audience among working-class Jewish readers, especially second-generation immigrants, for a skeptical view of religion that included Judaism itself. Furthermore, the new immigrants from Russia and eastern Europe (like the earlier generation of German Jewish immigrants) strongly supported the freethought position on the separation of church and state. Just as strongly, they opposed tax support for religious schools—for the obvious reason that only in America, with its nonsectarian tax-supported schools, were Jews able to satisfy the hunger for education that had been frustrated throughout the Tsarist empire.

These new Americans almost certainly were not the people Peck had in mind when he talked about the “intelligent, serious-minded men and women” who continued to display a regrettable interest in Ingersoll's speeches. Peck was, no doubt, referring to Republican businessmen
who stood outside Ingersoll's lecture venues in New York for hours in hopes of obtaining a ticket, only to find that no one was willing to sell to scalpers at any price. He was referring to an eminently respectable audience in 1880 at Booth's Theater on East Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan, where, the
New York Times
reported disapprovingly, the audience consisted “half of ladies.”
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Or perhaps Peck was thinking of Mrs. Anna M. Brooks, a Texas rancher's wife who, in 1896, rode more than thirty miles on horseback to hear Ingersoll's “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child” in the town of Sherman (pop. circa 9,000). When Mrs. Brooks rode into town, she headed straight for Sherman's best hotel, where she was sure that the Great Agnostic would be staying. In the dining room, she introduced herself to Eva Ingersoll, who invited her up to her room to meet her husband. “We shook hands,” Mrs. Brooks reported in a letter to the national freethought publication the
Truth Seeker,
“and when I told him how far I rode through the mud to see him and hear him he said he would give me a pass to the lecture. I thanked him but told him I thought myself fortunate that I had already bought my seat in a good place. He said he was sorry I had been in such a hurry to pay out my money. … I gave Mrs. Ingersoll my recipe for biscuit.”
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In any case, it was difficult to portray a freethinker who reached out to audiences throughout the nation, and whose
fans included ranchers' wives bearing biscuit recipes, as an alien in thrall to threatening European philosophies. As the young historian Sidney Warren observed in 1943, “Ingersoll was as much a part of his native land as Bunker Hill, as the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln. He knew and liked his America, but unlike another fighting Bob—LaFollette of Wisconsin, who spent his time combatting the practical evils of modern society—Ingersoll devoted his efforts to long-range objectives, divorced from immediate economic and social issues. None of his efforts could possibly have been crowned with immediate success; hence the road which Ingersoll traveled was less likely to bring him current recognition and fame. But Ingersoll was satisfied that he was dealing with the fundamental principles of society, and that his labors were of basic importance.”
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Perhaps no episode in Ingersoll's career provides such a telling example of the melding of broad and elevated cultural aspirations with deeply American roots as the dedication speech he delivered on January 25, 1893, at a theater in Dowagiac, Michigan. The new theater and opera house was named in memory of the town's leading freethinker and employer, the felicitously named Philo D. Beckwith. On that night, workers from Beckwith's Round Oak Company, one of the largest manufacturers of stoves and furnaces in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
joined a crowd of nationally recognized artists, business leaders, and philanthropists who had traveled to the small town in southwestern Michigan for the dedication.

Beckwith was a paternalistic employer whose high wages and benefits, including the then-rare concession of sick pay, had protected Dowagiac from the increasingly violent labor clashes taking place in urban America throughout the 1880s—including, most notably, the bloody Hay-market Square affair in nearby Chicago in 1886, when an explosion of unknown origin prompted police to fire into a crowd demonstrating peacefully on behalf of an eight-hour workday, and seven officers, along with many more demonstrators, wound up dead. In his hometown, Beck-with attempted to promote freethought through educational programs designed to expose local residents to the ideas of those he considered the heroes of the human race. The theater dedicated by Ingersoll featured a wide variety of Beckwith's favorite freethinkers, writers, and artists in busts on the facade. Among the figures, carved in Lake Superior red sandstone, were Ingersoll, Paine, Voltaire, Susan B. Anthony, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Walt Whitman, Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Chopin. Ingersoll, speaking to the heterogeneous audience before him, described the theater as a “fitting monument to the man whose memory we honor—to one who, broadening with the years, outgrew the cruel
creeds, the heartless dogmas of his time—from religion to reason—from theology to humanity—from slavery to freedom—from the shadow of fear to the blessed light of love and courage.” Describing Beckwith as one “who believed in intellectual hospitality—in the perfect freedom of the heart and soul,” Ingersoll went on to pay homage to the men and women portrayed on the building's facade as exemplars of the achievements most prized by freethinkers. It was fitting, he said, that the monument to Beckwith should “be adorned with the sublime faces, wrought in stone, of the immortal dead—of those who battled for the rights of man—who broke the fetters of the slave—of those who filled the minds of men with poetry, art, and light.” Ingersoll praised Voltaire, “who abolished torture in France,” and Paine, “whose pen did as much as any sword to make the New World free.” Many of the writers most deeply admired by Ingersoll were honored on the facade—including Victor Hugo, “who wept for those who weep”; Walt Whitman, “author of the tenderest, the most pathetic, the sublimest poem that this continent has produced”; George Eliot, “who wove within her brain the purple robe her genius wears”; and “Shakespeare; the King of all.”
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