Robert Ingersoll in his own time

1. A portrait of the famed anti-religious orator at middle age, circa 1880, taken by famed Civil War photographers Matthew Brady and Levin Handy. The Library of Congress title for the portrait is "Robert Ingersoll (The Infidel)":

2. A recording of Ingersoll -- of of the few -- on the subject of hope.

The prejudiced priest and the malicious minister say that I am trying to take away the hope of a future life. I am not trying to destroy another world, but I am endeavoring to prevent the theologians from destroying this. 

The hope of another life was in the heart, long before the 'sacred books' were written, and will remain there long after all the 'sacred books' are known to be the work of savage and superstitious men. Hope is the consolation of the world.

3. The New York Times on Ingersoll's courtroom defense of an ex-minister against allegations of blasphemy. C.B. Reynolds, chairman of the American Secular Union, had distributed pamphlets entitled "Blasphemy and the Bible," which said that the Bible was blasphemous in depicting God as a bloodthirsty monster. The news report was headlined "Blasphemy in New Jersey," and read:

For six months no topic was so interesting to the public as this. It monopolized attention at the stores, and became a fruitful subject of gossip in social and church circles. Under such circumstances it was to be expected that everybody who could spare time would go to court yesterday. Lines of people began to climb the court house hill early in the morning. At the hour of opening court the room set apart for the trial was packed, and distaffs had to be stationed at the foot of the stairs to keep back those who were not early enough. From nine thirty to eleven o'clock the crowd inside talked of blasphemy in all the phases suggested by this case, and the outsiders waited patiently on the lawn and steps and along the dusty approaches to the gray building.

Eleven O'clock brought the train from New York and on it Colonel Ingersoll. His arrival at the court house with his clerk opened a new chapter in the day's gossip. The event was so absorbing indeed, that the crowd failed entirely to notice an elderly man wearing a black frock suit, a silk hat, with an army badge pinned to his coat, and looking like a merchant of means, who entered the court house a few minutes behind the famous lawyer. That last comer was the defendant.

All was ready for the case. Within five minutes five jurors were in the box. [....] Colonel Ingersoll induced the Court to let him examine the five in the box and promptly ejected two Presbyterians.

Thereafter Colonel Ingersoll examined every juror as soon as presented. He asked particularly about the nature of each man's prejudice, if he had one. To a juror who did not know that he understood the word, the Colonel replied: 'I may not define the word legally, but my own idea is that a man is prejudiced when he has made up his mind on a case without knowing anything about it.' This juror thought he came under that category.

Presbyterians had a rather hard time with the examiner. 

4. Ingersoll, as represented on the cover of The Truth Seeker, the most successful freethought paper of the Gilded Age:

5. Robert L. Taylor, the Democratic Governor of Tennessee who once famously campaigned against his own brother, eulogizing the late Great Agnostic upon Ingersoll's death in 1899:

I saw him, like the serpent of old, worm himself into the paradise of human hearts, and by his seductive eloquence and subtle devices of sophistry inject his fatal venom, under whose blight its flowers faded, its music was hushed, its sunshine was darkened, and its soul was left a desert waste with the new-made graves of faith and hope.  

I saw him, like a lawless and erratic meteor without orbit, sweep across the intellectual sky, brilliant only in its self-consuming fire, generated by friction with the indestructible and eternal truths of God. 

That man was the archangel of modern infidelity, and I said: “How true is holy writ, which declares that the fool has said in his heart: ‘There is no God!’”

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The story behind Ben-Hur

One the most popular, most successful, most enduring Christian novels in American history, it turns out, was inspired by a man who made his career challenging, criticizing and arguing against religion.

At Slate, John Swansburg tells the story:

The train was bound for Indianapolis and the Third National Soldiers Reunion, where thousands of Union Army veterans planned to rally, reminisce, and march in a parade the New York Times would later describe as 'the grandest street display ever seen in the United States.' It was Sept. 19, 1876, more than a decade since the Civil War had ended. [General Lew] Wallace had grayed a bit, but still wore the sweeping imperial moustache he’d had at the Battle of Shiloh. 'Is that you, General Wallace?' the man in the nightgown asked. 'Won’t you come to my room? I want to talk.' 

Robert Ingersoll, also a veteran of Shiloh, was now the nation's most prominent atheist, a renowned orator who toured the country challenging religious orthodoxy and championing a healthy separation of church and state. Wallace recognized him from earlier that summer, when he'd heard Ingersoll, a fellow Republican, make a rousing speech at the party's nominating convention. Wallace accepted his invitation and suggested they take up a subject near to Ingersoll’s heart: the existence of God. Ingersoll talked until the train reached its destination. 'He went over the whole question of the Bible, of the immortality of the soul, of the divinity of God, and of heaven and hell,' Wallace later recalled. 'He vomited forth ideas and arguments like an intellectual volcano.' The arguments had a powerful effect on Wallace. Departing the train, he walked the pre-dawn streets of Indianapolis alone. In the past he had been indifferent to religion, but after his talk with Ingersoll his ignorance struck him as problematic, 'a spot of deeper darkness in the darkness.' He resolved to devote himself to a study of theology, 'if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another.' 

But how to go about such a study? Wallace knew himself well enough to predict that a syllabus of sermons and Biblical commentaries would fail to hold his interest. He devised instead what he called 'an incidental employment,' a task that would compel him to complete a thorough investigation of the eternal questions while entertaining his distractible mind. A few years earlier, he'd published a historical romance about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to modest success. His idea now was to inquire after the divinity of Christ by writing a novel about him.

It took four years, but in 1880, Wallace finished his incidental employment. He called it Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It’s one of the great if little known ironies in the history of American literature: Having set out to win another soul to the side of skepticism, Robert Ingersoll instead inspired a Biblical epic that would rival the actual Bible for influence and popularity in Gilded Age America—and a folk story that has been reborn, in one medium or another, in every generation since.

There may be something of a revival of interest in Wallace and his post-bellum Bible epic.

A conference at Rutgers last month featured some serious scholars inquiring into Ben-Hur, including Ed Blum, Brooks Holifield and David Reynolds. I've found surprising little on Ben-Hur, especially when compared to the amount of scholarship that has been done on the best-selling Christian novel immediate preceding Wallace's work, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I'm interested because Ben-Hur regularly serves as a point of comparison for commentary on the success of Left Behind. At the height of its popularity in 2001, for example, there was one copy of the ninth volume of the Left Behind (the most-sold volume) for every 95.2 Americans. In 1912, when a new printing of Ben-Hur was the largest single printing in American history to that point, there was one copy per 95.3 Americans.

A lot of the comparisons are pretty vague, though, and only make generalizations about how popular Ben-Hur actually was. There's even less information generally given about how it was sold, how it was received, and so on.

Swansburg has done some helpful research, though, and put together key information about the 19th-century best seller:

Ben-Hur wasn't an immediate success. Sales were slow for the first few months as the book absorbed mixed reviews. With its story of a noble prince endeavoring to save his family and restore his good name (winning the heart of a humble but beautiful Jewess in the process), the novel resembled the romances Wallace had loved as a child, which had long since fallen out of critical favor. With its chariot race and sea battle, it shared something with the dime novels then enjoying wide popularity but no literary esteem. Always a lover of the bold stroke, Wallace had written out his final manuscript in purple ink, a color his critics would have found apt for some of the novel’s loftier passages.

Yet what the critics dismissed the reading public soon came to love. Tracking book sales in the 19th century is an inexact science, but the Morsbergers, Wallace's biographers, estimate that Harper Brothers sold a million copies of the novel between 1880 and 1912; in 1913, Sears, Roebuck ordered a million more, at the time the largest book order ever placed. James David Hart's The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (1950) cites a study conducted in 1893, which found that only three contemporary novels were held by more than 50 percent of public libraries. Ben-Hur was first among them, present in 83 percent of the collections surveyed. (The other two were Little Lord Fauntleroy and Ramona.) 'If every American didn't read the novel, almost everyone was aware of it,' Hart concludes.

Hopefully there will be more work done on this novel and its place in American history soon.

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A theory of famous and forgotten atheists

In the New York Times, in a review of Susan Jacoby's new book on Robert Ingersoll, there's a proposed theory of famous and forgotten atheists, and of why they're famous or forgotten. It's not clear if the theory is Jacoby's or the reviewers' (presumably it's Jacoby's), but this is the theory:

There have been atheists and religious doubters throughout history, but the ones who remain famous after their deaths tend to have been equally famous for something else as well; otherwise, people most notable for their bravery in the face of religious conservatism have to be celebrated by a population equally brave, and that is often too much to ask.

Is this true?

Besides the problem of the question of the definition of "atheist" and whether there have been those "throughout history," and how "atheist" and "religious doubter" are being mushed together, is this true?  Is there really any way to divide public religion-doubters in such a way as to predict their permanence, their public memory?

The model for the remembered atheist/religious doubter that is being proposed here would apparently be Thomas Paine; Ingersoll's the model of the forgotten atheist. Paine had the "something else" of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But then, it's not like Ingersoll did nothing but doubt at the religious. He fought in the Civil War. He had an active political career.

Maybe it's just the vagueness of "something else as well" I am having a problem with. It seems very unclear what this wouldn't apply to.

Did Ayn Rand do something else? Probably that's how her other political and artistic efforts would be thought of here, though she might not have accepted those distinctions separating her philosophy from everything else. Did Madalyn Murray O'Hair do something besides atheist activism? It wouldn't seem so, but surely she counts as one who's remained famous. Emma Goldman could fit into the Paine model of an atheist who's remembered but who's "equally famous for something else." What about Marcet Haldeman-Julius? She did lots of other things besides doubt, but isn't particularly remembered, I don't think.

Besides, isn't it because one is remembered that multiple aspects of one's life and work are remembered?  Not the other way around.

The proposed theory of why remembered atheists are remembered elides over the many complications of the functions of discourses that publicly preserve a memory. In place of a more nuanced explanation for why some public figures remain that way after death and others do not, it slides into talk of "celebration" and "bravery." Which is to say, it into a case for a kind of hagiography.

The proposed theory seems like it's going to be a historical argument, an interesting explanatory device. But then it  seems like it turns out to be really something else entirely.

This is my concern with Jacoby's history of American freethinkers, and why I'm skeptical about her book on Ingersoll.

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What happened to Robert Ingersoll?

Susan Jacoby wonders why the 19th century's "Great Agnostic" Robert G. Ingersoll was more or less forgotten to history. One theory she suggests: it was liberals' smug confidence in their victory over fundamentalism after the Scopes trial. 

Jacoby writes:

Ingersoll's collected works were published within a few years of his death [in 1899] by his brother-in-law C. P. Farrell, who owned the Dresden Publishing Company (named for Ingersoll’s birthplace in upstate New York). The Great Agnostic remained a well-known, frequently cited figure into the 1920s, not only because many of his friends and enemies remained alive but also because his writings were still thought to be capable of corrupting American youth. 

The memory of Ingersoll faded swiftly, however, after the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which pitted the leading spokesman for religious fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, against Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous criminal lawyer and an equally famous agnostic, who had been strongly influenced by hearing Ingersoll’s speeches in the 1870s and 1880s.

Jacoby has a biography of Ingersoll coming out in 2013.

I'm slightly suspicious of the question, here. There's an assumption that it's odd or abnormal for Ingersoll's presence to have faded or have been forgotten, an assumption that goes to support Jacoby's thesis about Ingersoll's significance without making an argument for his importance.

There is an interesting question here, though. To what extent did the "victory" in the Tennessee court house, as understood by those who were critical of religion, as represented by them to themselves, change the shape of skeptical arguments and the development of the atheistic cause?

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