Truth Seeker

While Ingersoll died before the brutal realities of the war could be fully realized, other freethinkers took up criticism after his death. If freethinkers were initially supportive of the prospects of a (secular) civilizing mission, they soon came to realize – like Twain – that such a prospect was fraught with problems, not least because Christians would inevitably take the lead at reform.

During the war, some Americans patronizingly suggested that the nation had a duty to uplift the supposedly backward Filipinos, dubbed “our little brown brothers.” Imperialists also interpreted Rudyard Kipling’s poem, the “White Man’s Burden,” written on the onset of the war with the Philippines, as calling for whites to take up the burden of civilizing the backward nations of the world. Freethinkers were highly critical of such sentiments and mocked the idea of a white man’s burden. Because freethinkers found so much to dislike about their own society, largely due to its Christian nature, they were skeptical of arguments about the innate superiority of the United States. Watson Heston, who as we saw above was initially supportive of American intervention in the Philippines, was quick to deploy his artistic talents against the idea of the white man’s burden. In one cartoon, he depicted a white man in a foreign land, who was barely able to carry the various packages strapped to his back — the literal white man’s burden, in this case — which were labeled, for example, “Preacher Salaries,” “Nunnery,” “Faith,” and “Religion.” The Filipinos in the scene meanwhile look unimpressed by the man’s offerings (figure 2).

Anti-imperialists also published a number of satirical takes on Kipling’s poem. One such came from Charles G. Brown in the Free Thought Magazine. The poem described how “Uncle Sam, who felt the burden / Of the white man on his shoulders,” freed Cuba from the grip of the Spanish, “But the Cubans now are asking / Uncle Samuel, not the Spaniard / For the freedom they fought for, / For the freedom that was promised.” The same situation occurred in the Philippines. The United States defeated Spain and purchased the islands, “But the wicked Fili- pinos / Would not ratify the bargain; / What they fought for was their freedom, / Not a formal change of masters.”

As the war against the Filipinos turned into a counterinsurgency operation, a host of atrocities followed. For freethinkers, these atrocities often went hand-in-hand with missionary evangelism. A cartoon by Ryan Walker, who briefly replaced Heston as the cartoonist for the Truth Seeker, showed a group of Christian missionaries arriving on an island by boat, while on the shore a Filipino man was forced down by two soldiers, with one wearing a sign that said, “water cure.” The caption below read: “The Little Brown Man: If I embrace the religion those Holy Men are bringing with them, I wonder how long before I will get to be as gentle and civilized as these philanthropists that have got hold of me now” (figure 3).

Twain and his fellow freethinkers were, of course, ultimately unsuccessful at turning the tide against the imperialist goals of their country. Their numbers were too small to have an influence at the ballot box and their iconoclastic arguments were too unpalatable for most Americans. Still, the importance of these anti-imperialist arguments lies in the fact that they pointed the way to a path not yet widely trekked: one that questioned the innate superiority of Christian American civilization and the resulting right to rule over other nations.

NAtHAN G. ALeXANDer is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He is currently completing a book about atheists and race in the United States and Britain in the nineteenth century.

An expanded version of this article was first published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in July 2018.