TruthSeeker-Mark Twain issue

DEAR READER,

Mark Twain coined the term “Gilded Age” in 1873, the same year D.M. Bennett founded the Truth Seeker. It was an era of opulence and ostentation, but also a period of stark disparity between rich and poor.

The Gilded Age coincided with the beginning of the Golden Age of Freethought when women’s rights, Darwinism, and secularism clashed with longheld Christian conservative beliefs, and freedom of speech came under attack.

The D.M. Bennett Monument (on opposite page) is engraved with his humanitarian and philosophical principles. “Mr. Bennett had more than one idea and was the friend of all reforms,” his successor Eugene Macdonald wrote. “But he was preeminently a freethinker, using the term in its sense of opposition to Christianity. He was practically an atheist, though he sometimes expounded pantheism, declaring his philosophical adhesion to that belief.”

In his “A Pantheist Makes a Pilgrimage” piece, Ray Jason –– the Sea Gypsy philosopher –– praises the “secular saints” who shared their discoveries about the human condition. Professor of history David Contosta writes about racial justice and chronicles the campaign to save Abolition Hall in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.

Historian Nathan Alexander examines the influence that freethought had on Mark Twain’s opposition to imperialism. Mark Twain admired Robert Ingersoll and described The Great Agnostic as “an angelic orator;

the evangel of a new gospel, the gospel of freethought.” Author John Bird, however, accuses Mark Twain of plagiarizing Robert Ingersoll’s writing.

The ethically challenged Catholic church –– which has criminally covered up the crimes of pedophile priests for centuries –– is condemned in an article by Dr. Valerie Tarico

“Why We Must Defend Free Speech” is a compelling argument by Danish journalist Flemming Rose. D.M. Bennett knew a little something about defending free speech –– as does Paul Krassner. Our Contributing Editor has been fighting for free speech since founding the legendary Realist magazine in 1958. In 1967, Paul was a founder of the Youth International Party, or Yippies as he named them. He is the only person to win awards from both the Feminist Party Media Workshop and Playboy magazine. Paul Krassner also received an Uppie (Upton Sinclair) award from the ACLU for his lifelong dedication to freedom of expression.

“In the Beginning” is our first installment of a series of articles about the history of the world’s oldest freethought publication. We’ll do our best to provide an objective account of the tangled tale of the Truth Seeker while keeping in mind Albert Einstein’s admonition: “The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.”

D.M. BENNETT MONUMENT GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Why We Must Defend Free Speech

The modern dispute regarding the boundaries of free speech began with the Nuremberg trials of 1945–1946, in which 24 Nazis stood accused for their roles in the genocide of World War II. The trials established clear ties between the Nazis’ mobilization of the media, which in words and pictures had demonized and blackened the character of the Jews, and the subsequent Holocaust. Julius Streicher, former editor of the anti-Semitic tabloid Der Stürmer, was among those the tribunal condemned to death.

The judgment against him ran: In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution…. Streicher’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.

In that understanding of the origin of the Holocaust, the racist propaganda of the Nazis resulted in the extermination of the Jews. Without extensive freedom of speech in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 1930s, the Nazis would never have been able to carry out their hateful attacks on the Jewish community and may never have risen to power at all; the Holocaust could have been avoided. If evil words beget evil deeds, then forbidding evil words will lead to fewer evil deeds. It is a logic that has no empirical basis; yet that argument continues to drive advocates of wide-reaching constraints on the freedom of speech.

Nazi Germany was ruled by a tyranny of silence. As in the Soviet Union, or in George Orwell’s masterful novel 1984, the verbal hygiene of the totalitarian state was designed to ensure the development of the ideal society. Banning mention of certain things meant they would cease

to exist; language (or in this case, silence) became an instrument for creating the world in one’s own image. Thus blinded by Soviet ideology, even Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was at first unable to grasp what was happening as national separatist movements rose up to eventually condemn the Soviet Union to history’s scrap heap.

In the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic, insulting communities of faith—Protestant, Catholic, or Jew—was a punishable offense, commanding up to three years’ imprisonment. Incitement to class warfare or acts of violence toward other social classes was also prohibited by law. The Jewish community often sought the protection of that law to defend itself against anti-Semites, who countered, occasionally with success, with the claim that their attacks on Jews were not incitements to class hatred but were instead aimed at the Jewish “race,” thus not an offense.

Leading Nazis, such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted by the Weimar Republic for their anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. But those court cases served as an effective public-relations machinery for his efforts. The more charges he faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. On the occasions on which he was sent to jail, Streicher was accompanied on his way by hundreds of sympathizers in what looked like his triumphal entry into martyrdom. In 1930, he was greeted by thousands of fans outside the prison, among them Hitler himself. The German courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews.

Aryeh Neier, who fled the Nazis with his parents in 1939 and later became a well-known human-rights activist in the United States, invoked the wrath of many when in 1977, as leader of the civil rights organization the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he defended the right of a group of Nazi sympathizers to march on the Illinois town of Skokie, home to many East European immigrants who had survived the Holocaust. Years later, Neier reflected that the ACLU’s argument for defending even Nazis’ freedom of speech had come to be widely supported in the United States. He felt that was because after they won the right to demonstrate, the Nazis failed to gain

This is an excerpt (without footnotes) from The Tyranny of Silence by Flemming Rose (Cato Institute, 2014). Reprinted by permission from the author.

B y F lemming R ose

much attention, and the movement died soon afterward. The story serves as one illustration of the fact that the most effective means of combating Nazism was to defend the freedom of speech of the Nazis themselves.

“I could not bring myself to advocate freedom of speech in Skokie if I did not believe that the chances are best for preventing a repetition of the Holocaust in a society where every incursion on freedom is resisted,” Neier wrote in his book Defending My Enemy. Neier points to several examples during the Weimar Republic when efforts to restrict the free speech of the Nazis were counterproductive. In 1925, Adolf Hitler was prohibited by Bavarian authorities from speaking in public. The Nazis reacted by producing a poster of Hitler, with his lips sealed with tape on which was written, “Alone among 2 billion people of the world, he is not allowed to speak in Germany.” That propaganda image so enhanced Hitler’s popularity that the authorities felt obliged to lift the ban.

The widely touted claim that hate speech against the Jews was a primary cause of the Holocaust has no empirical support. In fact, one might as well argue that what paved the way for the Holocaust was the ban on hate speech, insofar as it handed Streicher and other Nazis a glorious opportunity to bait the Jewish community in the bully pulpit of the courtroom. For supporters of democratization of the Weimar Republic, a far more effective strategy would have been to address Nazi propaganda in free and open public debate. But in Europe between the wars, confidence in free speech was running low.

What the Weimar government failed to do was to safeguard its society against political violence, particularly politically motivated murders. Those who spoke out against Hitler and his supporters were not protected or defended; instead, they were abandoned to the mercy of Nazi violence, and in that climate, many elected to remain silent. Streicher’s and other Nazis’ Jew-baiting occurred in a society with no real freedom of speech, thus no possibility to counter the witch-hunt against the Jewish community. As Neier wrote, the history of the Weimar Republic “does not support the views of those who say that the Nazis must be forbidden to express their views. The lesson of Germany in the 1920s is that a free society cannot be established and maintained if it will not act vigorously and forcefully to punish political violence.” He continued: “Violence is the antithesis of speech. Through speech, we try to persuade others with the force of our ideas. Violence, on the other hand, terrorizes with the force of arms. It shuts off opposing points of view.”

That is the core issue. Words might offend or shock,

but they can be countered in kind. Words are a democracy’s way of dealing with conflict.

Agnès Callamard, executive director of the human rights organization Article 19, made a speech in 2006 that confronted that issue. She pointed out that constraints imposed on free speech with the intention of safeguarding minorities against hatred more often than not resulted in the most controversial voices of the minority being either silenced or imprisoned.

“Experience shows that restrictions on freedom of expression rarely protect us from abuses, extremism, or racism,” she said. “They are usually and effectively used to muzzle opposition and dissenting voices, silence minorities, and reinforce the dominant political, social, and moral discourse and ideology.”

As Neier wrote in the quarterly Index on Censorship, “Freedom of speech itself serves as the best antidote to the poisonous doctrines of those who try to promote hate.” And yet, 14 European nations have laws criminalizing Holocaust denial, and many more have adopted legislation against speech inciting hatred.

On December 10, 2005, International Human Rights Day, I took part in a panel discussion organized by Amnesty International and the Danish Institute of Human Rights under the banner “Victims of Free Speech.” That title was not intended as a joke. A number of those who took part believed that the Muhammad cartoons had left in their wake a trail of victims: the victims of free speech.

I found myself wondering for whom the human rights community would take up the cudgels next—victims of the welfare state, perhaps, or of liberal democracy? Victims of free education? Of gender equality? Or maybe even victims of religious freedom? When I suggested during the debate that by and large, in a society based on the rule of law, there could only be victims of crime, and that the idea that we could discuss “victims” of citizens who were exerting their statutory rights was therefore nonsense, I was answered with anger. An official representative of the Danish Union of Journalists branded the 12 Muhammad artists as “useful idiots for Jyllands-Posten.” At the time, several of the artists had been forced into hiding by death threats, but even their own professional organization didn’t mention their plight.

I pointed out that “victims of free speech” in the West— if we were to use that phrase—had to be those who had been murdered or exposed to violence because of their speech: people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Theo van Gogh, and Salman Rushdie. Five years on, we might add names such as Seyran Ates of Germany, Robert Redeker of France, Ehsan Jami of the Netherlands, Shabana Rehman of Norway,

On many occasions, proponents of a ban on an erotic book will claim that it is an inferior work, filth rather than literature, and that a ban is therefore a reasonable course of action.

Lars Vilks of Sweden, and Kurt Westergaard of Denmark, as well as many other Europeans. But that opinion was loudly booed by the progressive audience.

When I expanded the list of “victims of free speech” by adding dissident voices in dictatorships and others persecuted by totalitarian regimes, I was told that those were not victims of free speech, but of the arbitrary powers of the totalitarian state. Clearly, the audience and most of the panel wished to limit the business of “victims of free speech” to people who had taken offense to the drawings published by Jyllands-Posten. It was amazing to me that Amnesty International, the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the writers association PEN, and a former Danish minister of justice who also appeared on the panel apparently had lost all sense of proportion and had completely failed to distinguish between words and deeds.

In addition to his opinion that free speech was the best way to fight racist ideology, Poul Henningsen, the Danish author and freethinker, also opposed public decency laws that banned erotic literature and pornography. On that he won: Denmark became the first country in the world to lift a ban on pornography in the late 1960s. And although he was a Conservative, Denmark’s justice minister Knud Thestrup, who lifted the ban, had a very similar argument to Henningsen’s: the state should not dictate the morals of the individual, nor should it decide what he or she should have the right to read.

Henningsen also argued that law is temporary, a passing convention that at any time could be superseded by a new reality. Exiled Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provided a prominent example some four decades later: when communism collapsed, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia, was honored by the state, and saw his work republished after having been banned for almost 30 years. Václav Havel was elected president of a democratic Czech Republic after multiple terms of imprisonment. Nelson Mandela is a third example, and the shifting constraints on permitted speech aren’t only a feature of dictatorships. The West features countless examples, as more liberal views of sex have prevailed. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita was banned in France and Great Britain; John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was banned for a while in California. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and almost everything by Henry Miller are examples of works subjected to censorship in the United States on the grounds of alleged pornographic content. By 2010, all were freely available, many hailed as major world literature.

That change raises an interesting issue. On many occasions, proponents of a ban on an erotic book will claim that it is an inferior work, filth rather than literature, and that a ban is therefore a reasonable course of action. By

contrast, opponents of a ban often say that it is a work of literature; it is art; it is a good book; and it should therefore not be banned. One of my predecessors as culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, the literary critic Jens Kruuse, defended a novel by Agnar Mykle from censorship in 1957 by employing that line of reasoning: “A writer may concern himself with issues deemed indecent by the law in such a way as to raise them up out of the realm of indecency and onto a higher level.”

In other words, artistically acceptable speech should be granted wider freedom than speech the literary elite did not much care for. Thus, Norway’s Supreme Court acquitted Mykle on all charges of pornography because of the artistic merits of his book. But while Mykle’s supporters were still celebrating their victory at a famous Oslo watering hole, the same court ruled in favor of confiscating and banning U.S. writer Henry Miller’s autobiographical novel Sexus, on the grounds that the work was pornographic and devoid of artistic quality. Half a century later, literary experts would be inclined to highlight Miller’s art to the detriment of Mykle’s.

Anders Heger, a Norwegian publisher and author of a biography on Agner Mykle, believes that those cases continue to resonate today, when fundamental issues of tolerance and freedom within a democracy have been rendered topical by the Rushdie case and the Cartoon Crisis:

In legal, literary, and ideological terms, they are linked by the same principle, which says that freedom is more significant for such thoughts as are deemed ‘worthy’ than those which are not. Put differently: what I find to be art must be protected, and I am indifferent to all else.

Heger calls that a pitiful corruption of Voltaire: “I agree with what you say, and I will defend it regardless of what it may cost others.”

FLEMMING ROSE is a Danish journalist, author, and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Washington, D.C. Rose served as foreign affairs editor and culture editor at Jyllands-Posten He is an international advocate for freedom of speech and regularly travels around the world to speak on the subject. In 2015 Rose was awarded the prestigious Publicist Prize from Denmark’s national press club and received the Honor Award for defending free speech from the Norwegian Fritt Ord Foundation. His website is www.tyrannyofsilence.net.

Excerpted from The Tyranny of Silence by Flemming Rose. Copyright © Cato Institute, 2014. $14.95. ISBN-10: 1939709997, ISBN-13: 978-1939709998

All rights reserved. Download a copy of The Tyranny of Silence for $9.99 at: https://store.cato.org/book/tyrannysilence

The World’s Oldest Freethought Publication available online and around the world. Enhanced interactive features viewed accurately on any device. Innovative magazine trailers and half-hour programs from the American Freethought film series.

Recent issues and – in the future – three decades of the 19th century Truth Seeker will be available online.

thetruthseeker.net

MARK TWAIN, FREETHOUGHT, AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM

By NathaN G. alexaNder

“And so I

an anti-imperialist.

– Mark Twain, quoted in the New York Herald, OctOber 15, 1900

At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States turned toward empire. Since the nation’s founding, it had gradually enlarged itself by gobbling up more and more surrounding areas, but the end of the century was a time when Western powers were adding far flung territories to their growing empires. The United States was no different, annexing Hawaii in 1894 and fighting Spain in 1898, forcing them out of Cuba and in turn also acquiring the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. From there, the United States defeated the Filipinos in a war lasting from 1899 to 1902. Religion played an important part in justifying these imperial conflicts. President William McKinley, for example, said that the war against the Philippines came from a humanitarian desire to “civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos.

As with today, these foreign wars did not go unchallenged. Perhaps foremost among the critics of empire at this time was the famous novelist Mark Twain. Twain’s beloved novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are well-known, yet his political and religious views remain less so. Twain was a freethinker, something that impacted his views about politics. In particular, here I look at how his opposition to imperialism overlapped with his criticism of Christianity. This was also true for other freethinkers at this time as well.

In general, American freethinkers’ thinking about imperial warfare shifted based on their nation’s enemy. Initially, freethinkers, including Twain, cheered on the American war against Catholic Spain, in Cuba and the Philippines, since this was thought to be a war of liberation against an oppressive power. The Americans’ fight against the Filipinos, however, was greeted with much less enthusiasm from American freethinkers, especially as the war took on a missionary character and reports of atrocities committed by American soldiers were brought to light. No longer was the United States the champion of oppressed peoples against the hated Catholic Spanish, but had become an oppressor itself, no different from any

other Christian power. The changing role of religion was thus critical to the way in which freethinkers responded to these conflicts.

Twain (whose real name was Samuel Clemens) was born in Missouri in 1835 and as a child attended a Presbyterian church with his mother, even though his father was probably a freethinker. Twain’s journey away from religion was not straightforward. Even as a young man, he harbored skepticism about the harsh brand of Christianity from his youth, but he devoted himself to Christianity in the 1860s, during the courtship of his wife, Olivia, who came from a religious family. While living in Connecticut in the 1870s, Twain developed one of the strongest friendships of his life with the Reverend Joseph Twichell. In the late 1870s, Twain appeared to confide to Twichell that he could no longer believe in orthodox Christianity. The two nonetheless remained close friends throughout the rest of their lives and Twain continued to attend Twichell’s church even as he drifted further from Christianity.

Albert Bigelow Paine’s early biography of Twain includes the text of a document Twain wrote sometime in the early 1880s, in which Twain wrote that while he believed in God, he did not believe that this god ever communicated to humans, meaning that the Bible was “imagined and written by man.” Twain also rejected the idea that God intervened in the world as well as the idea of eternal punishment. He left open the possibility of an afterlife, yet expressed indifference to the question. These views, Paine suggested, did not change during Twain’s final years. Indeed, from the 1890s until his death in 1910, Twain expressed increasingly negative and pessimistic views about humanity and religion. In some ways, this pessimism reflected his personal circumstances, including his financial hardships during the 1890s as well as the deaths of his daughter Susy in 1896 and his wife

am

I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

in 1904. This period resulted in the collection of irreligious essays called Letters from the Earth, written in the first decade of the twentieth century, but not published until 1962. By the end of his life, Twain had strayed far from Christian orthodoxy, even if he never openly declared himself a freethinker and kept some of his most critical views of religion unpublished.

Twain was influenced by the growing freethought scene at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly the most famous freethinker, Robert Ingersoll. Twain wrote glowingly about Ingersoll’s rhetorical prowess and, as the scholar John Bird argues in another article in this issue, Twain actually plagiarized many of Ingersoll’s ideas in his own irreligious writings. Even if one does not accept the charge of plagiarism in its entirety, it is clear that Twain owed much to Ingersoll. Twain never formally joined the freethought movement, but he was a subscriber to the Truth Seeker, according to George Macdonald. Macdonald also confirmed, on Twain’s death, that Twain was a fellow freethinker and that his views on religion were essentially the same as Ingersoll’s. It is not surprising there fore that Twain and other freethinkers’ views of imperialism contain many of the same themes.

At the time of the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Twain was living in Europe. Nonetheless he wrote in June 1898 to Joseph Twichell about his support for the war: “I have never enjoyed a war… as I am enjoying this one.” This was because the United States seemed to be fighting for Cuban freedom: “It is a worthy thing to fight for one’s freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man’s.”

Twain returned to the United States in October 1900

after having spent several years abroad. It was during this period abroad that Twain wrote Following the Equator (1897), an account of his travels through the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. In these writings, Twain was deeply critical of British imperial rule and expressed sympathy for the plight of the indigenous people. It was in this book that Twain quipped: “There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.” Here Twain appeared to question a clear racial hierarchy, with whites inevitably on top.

Even if he was critical of other Western nations’ disastrous attempts at bringing civilization, he could not yet imagine his own country in this same critical light. By the time Twain returned from his travels, Spain had been defeated. In an interview soon after his return, Twain recollected that he used to be “a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. … Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself?” In Twain’s view, the United States should liberate the Filipinos, who had been oppressed for 300 years, just as the nation had liberated the Cubans. The United States should “put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, [and] start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world.”

But after “carefully” reading the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war and which saw the United States purchase the Philippines from Spain for $20 million, Twain’s opinion changed: “I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.” More aggravating still was the provision ensuring the Americans would respect Spanish property rights, which meant that the country would “maintain and protect the abominable system established in the Philippines by the Friars.” The Catholic friars, who had long helped govern the country over the 300 years of Spanish rule, used their power to acquire large land-holdings, marking them out as prime targets for Filipino nationalists who denounced their corruption and political influence. Twain concluded by saying: “It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make these people free, and let them deal with their

Opening page AMERICAN EAGLE STANDING ON THE WORLD — ONE FOOT IN U.S.A., THE OTHER IN CENTRAL AMERICA. PUCK MAGAZINE, 1904. UDO J. KEPPLER, ARTIST. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Above SAMUEL CLEMENS, ALSO KNOWN AS MARK TWAIN, PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1906 BY FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON (1864-1952). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Opposite PHOTOGRAPH OF ROBERT G. INGERSOLL TWO MONTHS BEFORE HIS DEATH ON JULY 21, 1899.

own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Twain soon joined the Anti-Imperialist League, founded in 1898, and became a Vice President, serving from 1901 to his death in 1910. While the role was largely symbolic, Twain turned his pen in support of their cause. Among his published writings included “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), which imagined a satirical explanation about the necessity of imperialism to an uncivilized subject, the person in darkness referred to in the title. “A Defence of General Funston” (1902) meanwhile gave a tongue-in-cheek justification for American General Frederick Funston’s underhanded capture of the Filipino resistance leader Emilio Aguinaldo through feigning illness and surrender. Some of Twain’s most scathing criticisms of American imperialism were, however, left unpublished by Twain because he feared they were too controversial and, like some of his irreligious works, were only published after his death. In this, Twain differed from the other freethinkers discussed below, who felt no need for self-censorship.

Common to all Twain’s anti-imperialist writings was a belief that the United States’ ideals were being betrayed by their actions in the Philippines. Furthermore, the cherished values of citizenship and freedom of speech were being eroded by a stifling patriotism that sought to crush all dissent in the name of supporting one’s country regardless of the righteousness of its actions. While similar ideas were also put forth by other anti-imperialists,

of particular relevance here are the irreligious threads running through Twain’s anti-imperialist writings. As we saw, Twain’s initial disagreement with the Treaty of Paris was based partly on the issue of the Catholic friars in the Philippines, and this theme would re-emerge in other works. In Twain’s unpublished work, “The Stupendous Procession,” written in early 1901, Twain described a procession of symbolic figures representing various nations. The American procession included a “Fat Spanish Friar wrapped in the Treaty of Paris — labeled ‘This is Nuts for Us.’ Grouped about him, 16 recent children with wet-nurses. Banner, inscribed — ‘Under the Treaty-protection we can start our population-factories again.’” This is a reference to the common allegation that the friars fathered illegitimate children with Filipino women.

Twain’s dislike of the friars was part of a larger resentment of all missionary activity, in which, he thought, arrogant and obnoxious Christians forced their religion upon helpless people.

This is seen most clearly in “To The Person Sitting in Darkness,” which heavily criticized the Reverend William Ament, an American missionary to China. Following the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which was a violent uprising by the Chinese against foreign powers exploiting their country, Ament forcibly collected compensation for Western missionary losses during the conflict – compensation that ultimately totalled over thirteen times the value of the actual property lost. Twain pulled no punches against Ament, whose acts of extortion condemned “pauper peasants … and their women and innocent children to inevitable starvation and lingering death,

Twain was a freethinker, something that impacted his views about politics.

in order that the blood-money so acquired might be ‘used for the propagation of the Gospel’.”

Twain’s anti-imperialist writings also sought to emphasize that Christians were the ones behind the violent atrocities committed in the Philippines. Another unpublished essay condemned the “Moro Massacre” of 1906, in which, even years after the formal end of the war, several hundred Filipinos were killed by US forces in what was supposedly a battle, but left nearly everyone on the Filipino side dead. Repeatedly, Twain highlighted that the soldiers were Christian. In one place, he called them “Christian butchers”; in another, he mockingly noted that, given the almost 100 percent fatality rate for the enemy, “[t]his is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.”

“The War Prayer,” from 1905 but unpublished during his life, showed that religion mixed with nationalism could dull people’s moral senses. The work described how “in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.” Twain then described a

scene in which a stranger — declaring himself God’s messenger — entered the church and rebuked the preacher for praying for the victory of his own country. Such a prayer, the stranger said, had hidden consequences. The unspoken words of that prayer should really say, for example: “O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead.” Twain’s conclusion to the story gives the impression that the stranger’s speech was ultimately in vain and that patriotism was too great a foe to overcome: “It was believed afterwards, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”

Other freethinkers followed Twain’s pattern of initial support for the war against the Spanish, to opposition to the war against the Philippines. The “Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll supported the fight against Spain on behalf of the Cubans, even if he also had geopolitical interests in mind, in addition to his desire to spread American ideals. When asked in an 1899 interview whether he

FIGURE 1. WATSON HESTON CARTOON FROM THE TRUTH SEEKER.

Truth Seeker

favored expansion, Ingersoll replied, “Yes, I have always wanted more — I love to see the Republic grow.” He hoped that the Caribbean would in time belong to the United States, so long as the people there wanted it as well. As the United States and Spain grew closer to war, he declared that “all my sympathies are with the Cubans.”

While Ingersoll was typically the champion of the underdog, he had a further motivation for supporting the Cuban struggle against the Spanish, namely that Spain was a Catholic country which “has always been exceedingly religious and exceedingly cruel.” This was a sentiment shared by others. The Truth Seeker editor Eugene Macdonald said that because of the backwardness and religiousness of Spain, the war was “a battle

of the nineteenth century against the sixteenth.”

The initial fight to kick Spain out of the Philippines was seen in much the same light as that in Cuba: a fight on behalf of an oppressed people against a cruel, Catholic nation. A cartoon by Watson Heston, the resident cartoonist of the Truth Seeker, entitled “What Will Uncle Sam Do About It?,” encouraged American intervention in defense of the Philippines. The cartoon showed a primitive-looking Filipino, weighed down by a white Catholic friar strapped to his back, reaching out to Uncle Sam for help (figure 1).

Following the purchase of the Philippines in the Treaty of Paris of December 1898, there were a few months of peace before war broke out between the Filipinos and the

FIGURE 2. WATSON HESTON CARTOON FROM THE TRUTH SEEKER.

Twain never formally joined the freethought movement, but he was a subscriber to the , according to George Macdonald.

Americans. During this time, freethinkers imagined that the new territory might be transformed in a secular image. In this way, they mirrored Protestant missionaries, who similarly looked upon the Philippines as ripe ground for proselytizing. For example, T.B. Wakeman, a prominent freethinker, wrote in the Free Thought Magazine about the need for “the introduction of Liberal, scientific, and secular literature among those newly-awakened people as fast as they can learn to read.”

Robert Ingersoll too was eager to bring the benefits of secular civilization to the Filipinos, yet he was careful to point out that while he favored expansion, he did not support it without the consent of the subject people. The Philippines might have great economic value to the United States, but, as Ingersoll said, this was ultimately unimportant: “We must do right. We must act nobly toward the Filipinos, whether we get the islands or not. I would like to see peace between us and the Filipinos; peace honorable to both; peace based on reason instead of force.”

While Ingersoll had supported the fight in the Philippines against Spain, he reacted angrily to the outbreak of war against the Filipinos. For Ingersoll, territorial ac-

quisition had to be with the consent of the people, and this clearly failed his test. In an interview on February 20, 1899, two weeks after the start of the war, Ingersoll called it “a great mistake — a blunder — almost a crime.” Ingersoll insisted that “[w]e had no right to buy, because Spain had no right to sell the Philippines. We acquired no rights on those islands by whipping Spain.” On July 20, 1899, Ingersoll wrote to an Illinois newspaper: “It is true that I think the treatment of the Filipinos wrong — foolish. It is also true that I do not want the Filipinos if they do not want us. I believe in expansion — if it is honest.”

Ingersoll died a day later, before the fighting in the Philippines shifted from a conventional war to one based on guerrilla and counterinsurgency tactics later in the year. The subsequent years saw atrocities committed by American soldiers come to light. In particular, the use of scorched earth tactics, the indiscriminate killing of Filipino civilians, and the “water cure” method of torture, in which prisoners were forced to ingest large quantities of water, all became known among the American reading public. Had Ingersoll lived longer, it seems likely he would have criticized these actions in a similar manner to Twain.

FIGURE 3. RYAN WALKER CARTOON FROM THE TRUTH SEEKER.

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.

The editor Eugene Macdonald said that because of the backwardness and religiousness of Spain, the war was “a battle of the nineteenth century against the sixteenth.”

The “ethics” of the Catholic bishops? Freud had a name for that: REACTION FORMATION.

by Valerie Tarico

As Pennsylvania investigators worked to confirm up to 1000 cases of sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests, a panel of Catholic ethicist-theologians appointed by the bishops was also hard at work.

Like the Pennsylvania team, the panel serving the bishops sought to ensure that Church-affiliated institutions weren’t ignoring sexual evils. Good on them! you might think. They’re finally taking responsibility for the mess created by their obsession with priestly abstinence. You’d be wrong.

Bad, Bad Birth Control

The goal of the panel wasn’t to investigate, punish, heal or prevent child sex abuse. It was to ensure that Catholic-controlled healthcare systems don’t look the other way while doctors and other care providers offer contraception, vasectomies, tubal ligations, or abortions (or sexual transition care or death with dignity).

The panel concluded that the bishops must prevent these evils in any institution where they have a say, including secular hospitals that have been acquired by or affiliated with Catholic healthcare corporations. In the past, mergers between Catholic-owned and secular hospitals have sometimes carved out separate legal entities to allow continued provision of reproductive and end-oflife services that are prohibited by the religious directives governing Catholic healthcare “ministries.”

“The revised directives’ bottom line is that in any type of collaboration, everything the Catholic organization controls by acquisition, governance or management “must be operated in full accord with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.” Additional language bars the establishment of an independent entity to “oversee, manage, or perform immoral procedures.” —Harris

Meyer, Modern Healthcare

(As an aside, it should be noted that Catholic charities and hospitals mostly serve non-Catholic people. Further, they obtain less than five percent of their revenues from Catholic offering plates, the bulk coming from taxes and private insurance. It should also be noted that they provide less free care for poor people on average (2.8 percent in 2011) than do public hospitals (5.6 percent). Church control is largely an artifact of history and accumulated wealth.)

At this point in history, the irony of the bishops posturing as ethical authorities in matters of sexuality is lost on no-one but the bishops themselves. A New York Times article on care refusals in Catholic hospitals provoked over 400 comments expressing outrage from Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Have they no shame?

More Members, More Guilt, More Abuse

The Church has long sought to control sexuality and procreation, of course. Competitive breeding, sanctified by theologies that glorify childbearing, has been part of the Church’s expansion strategy since the origins of Christianity. “Women will be saved through childbearing,” promised Christianity’s most noted early misogynist, the Apostle Paul.

By the Middle Ages, the Virgin, Madonna, Whore trichotomy — a woman must be one of the three — was well ensconced, shored up by stories of virgin martyrs and saints. As for sexuality itself, what better marketing strategy for an institution selling absolution of guilt than to persuade people that most sexual desires and pleasures are sinful?

The Church’s antagonism to contraception (it allows sex for pleasure) and abortion (it enables women to refuse childbearing) and trans care (it garbles the carefully-delineated theology of gender binary) all can be seen as extensions of two age-old institutional objectives: more members and more guilt. Problem is, the second of those — the guilt — worked a bit too well, so well that it backfired, creating a culture of secretive, abusive sexuality.

Why Such Warped Priorities?

You might think that excising this festering socially-transmitted infection, making amends to victims, and transitioning to a married priesthood that recognizes the range of healthy human sexualities might be a full-time focus for the Catholic hierarchy right now. So, why have the bishops decided that now is the time to instead double down on judging such contrived sexual sins as using or inserting an IUD, or terminating an ill-conceived pregnancy, or getting the snip, or removing an unwanted uterus? Sigmund Freud would have had an answer for that. He might have called it reaction formation.

Freud would have said that the Catholic hierarchy’s shame and guilt and outright horror at their inability to suppress their own sexuality has lead them to try even harder at controlling the sexual and reproductive lives of others.

Most people are familiar with Freud’s concept of defense mechanisms, including, for example, denial (I do not have a problem), repression (I can’t remember), and projection (the problem isn’t me, it’s you). Reaction formation is part of the same list, but often less understood. Here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia definition: Reaction formation (German: Reaktionsbildung) is a defense mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. . . . Where reaction-formation takes place, it is usually assumed that the original, rejected impulse does not vanish, but persists, unconscious, in its original infantile form. . . . . In a diagnostic setting, the existence of a reaction-formation rather than a ‘simple’ emotion would be suspected where exaggeration, compulsiveness and inflexibility were observed.

The concept of reaction formation offers one hypothesis about why the Catholic hierarchy is willing to go to such extremes to suppress and control the sexuality of people who aren’t part of that hierarchy, whether through refusing medical services or through propagating harmful myths and stereotypes about sex that affect many of us

Freud had a lot of ideas about child development and the human subconscious that have turned out to be wrong. (Even a science as squishy as psychology is self-correcting over the course of a hundred years.) But what’s interesting about this particular situation –– the problem of the bishops and their sexual obsessions — is that Freud developed his hypotheses about human nature in precisely the kind of situation that Catholic dogmas have created: a culture that is highly repressive of sexuality, one that layers on rituals and rules in an intricate system of proprieties aimed at distancing us from our animal nature. In Freud’s case this system was the European culture of the Victorian era. But the parallels make his analysis particularly relevant when it comes to making sense of the inside-out, upside-down “ethical” priorities of the Catholic bishops.

Just Say No

Part of being psychologically healthy is learning to recognize when other people are putting their stuff on you, and learning to say no–kindly when possible, but firmly. The Catholic bishops need to be told that their sexual hang-

ups are not ours and that they cannot force their harmful theologies on the rest of us, especially not on the public dime, and especially not in healthcare systems that disguise their religious affiliations and where we may be sent unknowingly

When we are sick or injured and seeking care, we are vulnerable, especially at the beginnings and endings of life. We must be free to make important and even sacred decisions according to the dictates of our own conscience with support from people we know and trust. It’s time to ask the bishops to leave our bedrooms and hospital rooms.

VALERIE TARICO is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society have been featured at sites including The Huffington Post, Salon, The Independent, Free Inquiry, The Truth Seeker, The Humanist, AlterNet, Raw Story, Grist, Jezebel, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Subscribe at ValerieTarico.com.

“PEDOPHILE PRIESTS LINE-UP” ANGEL BOLIGAN, EL UNIVERSAL, MEXICO CITY CAGLECARTOONS.COM

The Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll Connection:

freethought, borrowed thought, stolen thought

EARLY IN MARK TWAIN’S Pudd’nhead Wilson, the narrator mentions that Judge Driscoll

. . . was president of the Freethinkers’ Society, and Pudd’nhead Wilson was the other member. The society’s weekly discussions were now the old lawyer’s main interest in life. Pudd’nhead was still toiling in obscurity at the bottom of the ladder, under the blight of that unlucky remark which he had let fall twenty-three years before about the dog. . . . Judge Driscoll could be a freethinker and still hold his place in society because he was the person of most consequence to the community, and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions. The other member of his pet organization was allowed the like liberty because he was a cipher in the estimation of the public, and nobody attached any importance to what he thought or did. He was liked, he was welcome enough all around, but he simply didn’t count for anything.

(942-943)

Judge Driscoll and Pudd’nhead Wilson were very lonely freethinkers in Dawson’s Landing, but freethinking, a reliance on empirical proof as evidence for belief, as opposed to faith or supernatural evidence, was an important intellectual movement in America in the second half of the 19th century. In her recent book, Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby asserts, “The period from, roughly, 1875 to 1914 represents the high-water mark of freethought as an influential movement in American society.” Given those dates, we might think of this time as the age of Mark Twain, but in terms of the freethought movement, it was the age of Robert Ingersoll. Widely-known in his time, celebrated as a skilled orator, wildly popular as a lecture speaker and writer, vilified by the religiously or -

thodox as “The Great Agnostic,” Ingersoll has now been nearly forgotten. But from 1876, when he burst on the national political scene with his “Plumed Knight” speech nominating James G. Blaine for president, to his death in 1899, Robert Ingersoll was undoubtedly the most influential American public figure in the battle between religious thought and rational, scientific doubt. He was also one of the most influential writers on Mark Twain’s thought, especially on Twain’s late writings about religion. That influence has been recognized, but not as fully as it deserves. Especially in his late works, after he had read Ingersoll’s complete works, Mark Twain was influenced greatly by “The Great Agnostic.” In fact, a fuller examination shows that Twain was not only influenced by Ingersoll, but that he borrowed ideas, phrasing, and even exact words so heavily that he is most certainly guilty of extensive plagiarism. Much has been written about Twain’s turn to pessimism and darkness in his last decade, often decried as bitterness and despair, but increasingly recognized as evidence of philosophical honesty and depth. His extensive borrowing reveals that what many have seen as philosophical honesty is actually intellectual dishonesty of a high order. That evidence calls for a new reading of many of Twain’s late, mostly unpublished works, most notably “Letters From the Earth.”

My title gives recognition to Thomas Schwartz’s 1976 article in American Literature, “Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll: The Freethought Connection.” Schwartz very ably and fully recounts Mark Twain’s knowledge of and admiration for Robert Ingersoll, beginning with the November night in 1879 when both were speaking at the

An examination of Twain’s and Ingersoll’s writings on orthodox religion will show how deeply indebted Mark Twain was, not only to Robert Ingersoll’s ideas, but often to his actual words.

TheTruthSeeker

soon after Twain’s death in 1910, an article entitled “What Was mark Twain’s Religion?” in , the leading freethought publication of the time, closely associated with Ingersoll, who was a constant contributor, stated that Twain had been a long-time subscriber, and that he had renewed his subscription just months before his death.

Grand Banquet of the Re-Union of the Army of the Tennessee, at Chicago’s Palmer House, with Grant and other notables in attendance. Mark Twain’s speech, the last of a long night of speeches, was “The Babies,” which brought the house down. But as Schwartz details, it was Robert Ingersoll’s speech that captured Twain’s admiration. He wrote to his wife Livy soon after the event, expressing his admiration for Ingersoll and calling Ingersoll’s speech “just the supreme combination of English words that was ever put together since the world began.” A few days later, he wrote to William Dean Howells, saying “Bob Ingersoll’s speech . . . will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears.” In early December, he wrote a letter to Ingersoll, praising his speech and asking for a clean copy of it to read to the young ladies at the Saturday Morning Club. Ingersoll wrote back, praising “The Babies,” and including not only the speech but also a copy of his 1878 collection, Ghosts and Other Lectures. Twain responded immediately with thanks and appreciation: “I am devouring them — they have found a hungry place, and they content it & satisfy it to a miracle. I wish I could hear you speak these splendid chapters before a great audience.” When Ingersoll died in 1899, Twain wrote to Ingersoll’s niece this touching — and quite heartfelt — message: “Except for my daughter’s, I have not grieved for any death as I have grieved for his. His was a great and beautiful spirit, he was a man — all man from his crown to his foot soles. My reverence for him was deep and genuine; I prized his affection for me and returned it with usury.”

Schwartz goes on to show the influence that Ingersoll had on several of Twain’s works, including The Prince and the Pauper, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee, and What Is Man? But Schwartz relies only on what he knew for a certainty Twain had read of Ingersoll’s works: Ghosts and the other lectures in that volume, and the

Previous page PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPH OF SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) CIRCA 1902. CHARLES E. BOLLES (1847-1914) PHOTOGRAPHER, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL (1833-1899).

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN , ONE OF TWAIN’S BOOKS INFLUENCED BY INGERSOLL.

debate between Ingersoll and Judge Jeremiah S. Black, published in The North American Review, which Twain followed avidly, even sending Ingersoll a letter congratulating him on his “victory” over Black. However, good evidence exists that Twain knew Ingersoll’s work much more fully. As Schwartz acknowledges, soon after Twain’s death in 1910, an article entitled “What Was Mark Twain’s Religion?” in The Truth Seeker, the leading freethought publication of the time, closely associated with Ingersoll, who was a constant contributor, stated that Twain had been a long-time subscriber, and that he had renewed his subscription just months before his death. Even more importantly, Mark Twain almost certainly owned the 12-volume 1900 Dresden edition of Ingersoll’s Works, as evidenced by Twain’s letter of December 20, 1900, replying to a Connecticut man named Griswold who had apparently offered Twain a full set of the books: “I shall be very glad indeed to have the Dresden edition of my old friend’s books, in my library at this house. I knew him twenty years, and was fond of him, and held [him] in as high honor as I have held any man living or dead.”

Although Alan Gribben lists only Ghosts as among books Twain owned in Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, he notes the Griswold letter, saying that Twain’s copies of the complete works have disappeared. In The Mark Twain Encyclopedia article on Ingersoll, Mary Minor Austin states that there is evidence Clara Clemens concealed the fact of her father’s ownership of the complete works; although I cannot corroborate the late Professor Austin’s evidence, the charge is certainly plausible, given Clara’s efforts to protect Twain’s reputation after his death, and given the controversial standing of Ingersoll in the early 20th century.

Thomas Schwartz laid the foundation for the freethought connection between Twain and Ingersoll, but I want to build on that foundation by operating on the assumption that by 1900, Mark Twain had Ingersoll’s complete works, and that in his last decade, when he wrote his most vitriolic attacks on religion, he relied heavily on Ingersoll. Several critics have acknowledged Twain’s debt to Ingersoll; Gregg Camfield, in The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, asserts that Twain had the Ingersoll Dresden edition and “gleaned many of Ingersoll’s ideas for his late works.” But

I am going further. An examination of Twain’s and Ingersoll’s writings on orthodox religion will show how deeply indebted Mark Twain was, not only to Robert Ingersoll’s ideas, but often to his actual words. Plagiarism is a serious charge, but I believe that the evidence will show that the charge is valid. I present this evidence and leave it readers to decide for themselves. In any case, as critical attention to Mark Twain’s late work continues and as examination of his religious views enjoys a much-needed renaissance, the Twain-Ingersoll freethought connection deserves closer scrutiny.

Twain’s “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice” was written in 1890 but not published until 1923 in Europe and Elsewhere. He attacks Christianity for its support of slavery and for its belief in witches. “In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them,” he writes. He goes on to excoriate the history of slave trading in England and America, noting that in both countries, the pulpit was a stalwart supporter of the right to hold slaves, joining the procession toward freedom only “at the tail end.”

The same with witches, saying that the church, authorized by scripture, “worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.” But, he continues, “then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch — the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything.” As with slavery, “The witch text remains; only the practice has changed.”

Attacks on the church’s role in slavery and witch persecution are a staple of Ingersoll’s lectures, with developed arguments on the subjects in Ghosts (1877), which we know for a certainty that Twain read — and marked; in the North American Review debate with Black, which

we know Twain followed with interest; and in several other lectures. From the Ingersoll-Black debate: “But the believer in the inspiration of the Bible is compelled to declare that there was a time when slavery was right — when men could buy, and women could sell, their babies.” As Twain had done, Ingersoll comments on the change that has come with the passage of time: “He must maintain that Jehovah is just as bad now as he was four thousand years ago, or that he was just as good then as he is now, but the human conditions have so changed that slavery, polygamy, religious persecutions, and wars of conquest are now perfectly devilish.”

In “Ghosts,” Ingersoll makes several points about witchcraft and its biblical sanction: “All the believers in witchcraft confidently appealed to the Bible. Their mouths were filled with passages demonstrating the existence of witches and their power over human beings. By the Bible they proved that innumerable evil spirits were ranging over the world endeavoring to ruin mankind.” He continues a few pages later: “From the malice of those leering and vindictive vampires of the air, the church pretended to defend mankind. Pursued by these phantoms, the frightened multitudes fell upon their faces and implored the aid of robed hypocrisy and sceptered theft.” These passages come from a book that Twain, by his own admission, “devoured.”

The blazing words of the aged stranger in Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer” (1905) are no doubt familiar to most of his readers:

God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused, and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you

THE GODS, AND OTHER LECTURES BY ROBERT G. INGERSOLL. PUBLISHED BY C.P. FARRELL, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1879.

Racial Justice and the Campaign

to Save Abolition Hall

few miles northwest of Philadelphia lies what was once the little crossroads village of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, named for the local Quaker meeting of the same name — and now a flourishing suburban community. There, at the corner of Germantown and Butler Pikes, stands a cluster of buildings belonging to the Corson family, whose members played a heroic role in the fight against American slavery. These structures are among the few remaining, authentic sites that testify to the dedication and courage of men and women who risked their lives, their liberty, and their livelihoods to rid this nation of the scourge of slavery. The same set of buildings later served as the home and studio of artist Thomas Hovenden, the most famous genre painter in the United States at the time of his death, whose best known work is the Last Moments of John Brown, now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Because of the momentous events that unfolded at Plymouth Meeting, these properties were among five separately listed structures when the larger Plymouth Meeting Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, the first such district in Pennsylvania. They are also part of a Local Historic District, created ten years earlier by adjoining Plymouth and Whitemarsh Townships in accordance with Pennsylvania enabling legislation. The Corson properties comprise a mid-eighteenth-century residence, an early nineteenth-century stone bank barn, and what later generations came to call Abolition Hall. Sadly, the approximately eight acre parcel behind these iconic structures — the remainder of a much larger farm — is now under consideration for a dense residential development. There are current plans to place several dozen new townhouses close against these historic buildings, erasing what remains of a rural landscape that

gives critical context to the property and that will make it difficult to access this historic site whose future use is yet unclear. An option to buy the property was triggered by the death in 2012 of Nancy Corson, whose heirs have decided to sell it.

Members of the Corson and neighboring Maulsby families, related through marriage, starting helping slaves to escape to freedom as early as the 1810s, well before the term Underground Railroad was coined about two decades later.1 As such, they were part of a wider regional network that can be explained by both geography and religion. Geographically, Philadelphia and surrounding Southeastern Pennsylvania were just north of the Mason-Dixon Line which separated them from slave-holding Maryland. In large part because of this proximity and because Pennsylvania had decided in1780 to gradually abolish slavery, Philadelphia had the largest free black population of any city in the North, many of whom organized early on to assist their brothers and sisters fleeing slavery. In addition, members of the Religious Society of Friends, more commonly known as Quakers, who had strong beliefs in justice and equality, opposed slavery very early in Pennsylvania. Some of them became leading abolitionists as well as participants in the Underground Railroad. These included members and attenders of the Plymouth Monthly (Quaker) Meeting located diagonally across the road from the Corson homestead.2

Despite the opposition to slavery in Philadelphia and surrounding Southeastern Pennsylvania, there were many in the area who despised the abolition cause and who considered African Americans as inferior beings. Their opposition was so intense that in May 1838 a large mob attacked and burned to the ground an abolitionist meeting place in Philadelphia called Pennsylvania Hall just three days after it was completed. Those helping slaves to escape not only risked the ire of local residents, but also of being arrested and punished for violating the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Constitution had included a Fugitive Save clause that allowed slave owners to pursue runaways into other states and to recapture September – December 2018 |

Their opposition was so intense that in May 1838 a large mob attacked and burned to the ground an abolitionist meeting place in Philadelphia called Pennsylvania Hall just three days after it was completed.

and take them back into bondage. The recent Fugitive Slave law was part of the larger Compromise of 1850 that attempted to deal with North-South disputes over the newly annexed territory in the West resulting from the Mexican-American War. In order to appease the slave states, the law provided stiff penalties for anyone helping slaves to escape, namely six months in prison and a fine of $1,000 (worth approximately $31,000 in 2018).

Understandably, those associated with the Underground Railroad worked as much as possible in secrecy, one explanation for the term “underground.” The term was also a reference to bewilderment at the way runaways seemed to disappear as if they had gone underground, since they were hidden during the day and were transported from one place to another under cover of darkness. The other part of the name — “railroad” — was a play on the relatively new form of rail transportation that suggested names for those operating the hidden network: Persons who guided runaways were called “conductors,” the various stops along the way were “stations,” and those who provided for fugitives at stops were known as “station masters.”3 George Corson (18031860) operated one of these stations on his property at Plymouth Meeting, where he, his wife (Martha Maulsby Corson), and other family members concealed runaways on their farm. They also fed and when necessary clothed them, administered as best they could to sicknesses and

wounds, and offered emotional support before the next leg of their long and dangerous journey. From the Corson place, runaways were conducted to adjoining Bucks County and from there they crossed into New Jersey where they continued up through New York State and, if all went well, they crossed into the safety of Canada. They were now free, since in 1833 the British parliament had abolished slavery throughout the empire to which Canada still belonged.

William Still, a successful free black businessman in Philadelphia, who was also a conductor on the Underground Railroad and chair of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, kept meticulous records which he published in 1872. Of Corson, he wrote,

There were perhaps few more dedicated men than George Corson to the interests of the oppressed anywhere. The slave, fleeing from his master, ever found a home with him and felt while there that no slave hunter would get him away until every means of protection should fail. He was ever ready to send his horse and carriage to convey them on the road to Canada, or elsewhere towards freedom.4

According to brother Hiram Corson, George was a man “who knew no fear when in the right.”5

In addition to operating a station on the Underground Railroad, George Corson grew concerned about attacks by pro-slavery mobs on churches and Quaker meeting

Opening page ONLY THREE DAYS AFTER THE DEDICATION CEREMONIES, PENNSYLVANIA HALL WAS SET ON FIRE BY AN ANTI-ABOLITIONIST MOB.

RIght CORSON STONE BARN (ON LEFT) NOW CONVERTED INTO A RESIDENCE, AND (ON RIGHT) FRONT OF FORMER CARRIAGE SHED WITH ABOLITION HALL ABOVE. PHOTO BY SYDELLE ZOVE, 2018.

Opposite HISTORICAL MARKER AT ABOLITION HALL, ERECTED IN 2000 BY THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA.

houses in the area that hosted abolitionist speakers and discussions. The Quaker meeting at Plymouth, fearful of being accosted by such mobs, closed its doors to additional anti-slavery gatherings. In response, Corson decided to build a second story above his carriage shed on his farm across the road where abolitionists could come together without endangering the meeting house. Completed in 1856, the space above his shed, which came to be called Abolition Hall, could seat about 200 people. In the words of William Still, “His home was always open to entertain the anti-slavery advocates. . . .”6 According to an account in the 1884 History of Montgomery County, Corson had,

Determined to build a hall, over which he could have control [on his own private property]. He made quite a large one and furnished it well with seats, warmed and lighted at his own expense. . . . We can see how convenient it was for the lecturers to make his house their temporary home. As time wore on, more and more neighbors and friends were attracted

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

to the meetings to hear the eloquent and earnest men and who pictured the atrocities of slavery.7

Among the famous abolitionists who spoke in Corson’s hall were Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Lucretia Mott, and William Lloyd Garrison.8 These assemblages continued for the next four years, until Corson’s death in 1860. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to experience the joy of Lincoln’s freeing the slaves three years later in 1863.

George’s brother Hiram, a medical doctor who was also active in the local abolition movement, later wrote that they often received harsh treatment from those who opposed their efforts: “Those thirty years or more spent in advocacy of rights and justice to the slave was no holiday picnic. The vilest abuse was heaped upon us; and threats of violence and a resort to boycotting [our businesses] was used.”9

A short generation later, in 1881, George Corson’s daughter Helen (1846-1935) returned to live in the family home following her marriage to Thomas Hovenden (1840-1895).10 Both of her parents had died by then, but she had grown up on memories of the family’s devotion to the abolitionist movement. Helen had met Hovenden in France, where they had both had gone to study art. The two settled into the old house on the corner and set up a painting studio in what had been Abolition Hall, adding a large window to the rear to capture the north light. Fittingly, given the site’s anti-slavery history, Hovenden’s most famous work remains The Last Moments of John Brown (1882-1884). In 1859 Brown and his band of followers had attempted to break into the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia (then Virginia) with a plan to seize guns and give them to slaves who would hopefully rise up and fight for their freedom. Brown was captured and sentenced to death by hanging. Hovenden, who visited Charles Town, Virginia, where the hanging took place and who read numerous newspaper accounts of the event, depicts the dramatic moment as Brown is walking down the wooden steps of the jail on his way to the gallows. Brown pauses to kiss the forehead of a child whose young African America mother holds him up as the boy reaches out his little hand towards Brown’s neck, an event that did not actually occur but that appears in the painting as a blessing and a promise that the little boy will someday be free.11 For models Hovenden turned to neighbors and members of Helen’s family, as was his

Among the famous abolitionists who spoke in Corson’s hall were Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of ), Lucretia Mott, and William Lloyd Garrison.

habit during all the years at Plymouth Meeting. According to family tradition, it was Helen who posed as the mother holding out her child to Brown.

Five years after completing the John Brown painting, Hovenden exhibited a work that referenced a hoped-for reconciliation between North and South. The scene is a cozy middle-class home in Gettysburg just after the epic three day battle there in July 1863. Entitled In the Hands of the Enemy (1889), he depicts a Union soldier bandaging the leg of a wounded Confederate as the family members of this Union home look on with tender solicitude.

Hovenden also painted a number of genre scenes featuring African American families who lived in or around their village. His favorite was entitled Their Pride (1888), the focal point of which is a stylishly dressed young black woman standing in the middle of a room and looking in a hand mirror as she tries on a new hat. Surrounding and looking up at her admiringly are her parents and a younger brother. The furnishings in the room reflect a middle-class aura of comfort as a sign of the family’s upward expectations.

Hovenden’s wife Helen, who was an accomplished artist and photographer, painted a canvas that she called Uncle Ned and his Pupil (1881). Given the name, one might initially assume it was the sort of condescending theme that would soon become familiar from the Uncle Remus stories which were published the same year as the painting. However, in Helen’s painting the teacher — “Uncle Ned” — stands out as a kindly authority figure

who is passing on his knowledge to a younger generation. Posing as Uncle Ned was probably a local resident named Samuel Jones, whom the Hovendens often used as a model.

Another favorite topic for Thomas Hovenden were local craftsmen whose occupations would soon fall victim to growing urbanization and industrialization. Among these paintings are A Village Blacksmith 1882), The Cabinetmaker (1888), and The Traveling Clock Mender (1893). The latter is an especially compelling scene of an itinerant craftsman who goes from house to house to clean, oil, and repair the mechanical clocks of that day. In the painting the elderly clock mender has taken apart a family time piece and laid out the workings on a wooden table, except for a gear that he holds up between his thumb and forefinger to inspect it visually. Two children, for whom the Hovendens’ son Thomas, Jr. and daughter Martha have posed, look on with fascination from opposite ends of the table.12

Picking up the theme of changing times is another of Hovenden’s masterpieces, Breaking Home Ties (1890). The staging for the picture was the front room of their home. Represented in the painting are three generations of a family, who have just finished breakfast. At the center of the room a mother has placed her hands in blessing on her son’s shoulders, probably in his late teens, as a man on the far side of the room is carrying the boy’s luggage in a large carpet bag toward the back door of the house. His sisters, grandmother, and even the family dog

RIght “BREAKING HOME TIES” BY THOMAS HOVENDEN, 1890.

Opposite “LAST MOMENTS OF JOHN BROWN” BY THOMAS HOVENDEN, 1882-84.

look on in sadness. The boy who is clearly leaving the family farm for the opportunities of the city, gazes off beyond his mother, no doubt fearing that he is about to cry. The painting, now a prized acquisition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was a sensation when exhibited at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, doubtless because so many individuals and families had experienced similar partings. It remains a powerful, iconic scene a century and a quarter later for anyone who has left for college or a new job far from home—as well as for loved ones who have witnessed these scenes.

When Hovenden died in 1895, newspapers throughout the country, including the New York Times, reported his passing with glowing obituaries. Nevertheless, his fame began to fade within a few years as less representational forms of painting gained prominence, but his

star has risen again in recent years because of his great skills as an artist and because of the insights that his works offer into an earlier time that is still recognizable. The Hovenden house and George Corson’s Abolition Hall behind it remain as testaments to a remarkable family whose lives and works are at the center of the American experience. They deserve to be preserved in ways that can inspire present and future generations. It is all well and good to read or hear about such issues in school or in books, but there is no substitute for standing in the very places where history was made.

The lessons that Abolition Hall and the Underground Railroad have to teach about combatting racial oppression are especially pertinent today: at time when the President of the United States inflames racial and ethnic grievances; when the manager of a Starbucks coffee shop in Philadelphia calls the police on two African-American men who were merely waiting for another member of their party to show up before ordering; and when immigration authorities, with the president’s knowledge and permission, tear children from their parents’ arms who have come across the border seeking asylum, an act not unlike, in its horror and emotional devastation, the ripping of children from slave mothers and fathers who were being sold to another master.

In order to preserve and defend these historic properties in Plymouth Meeting, a group of local residents have formed the Friends of Abolition Hall, an unincorporated association. Since the buildings themselves are protected by the local historic district, they cannot be demolished. In order to do so, the first step would be a certificate of appropriateness from the local Historic Architectural Review Board (HARB). However, this board is only advisory to the township Board of Supervisors in the case of Whitemarsh Township, where the Corson property is located, and it is the supervisors who are empowered to make a final decision about a historic property. Then there is always the danger of “demolition by neglect”—a situation wherein a present or future property owner might purposely allow a structure to decay and then claim that it must be demolished in the name of the community’s

The lessons that Abolition Hall and the Underground Railroad have to teach about combatting racial oppression are especially pertinent today: at a time when the President of the United States inflames racial and ethnic grievances.

health, safety, and welfare, or claim economic hardship such that he or she cannot afford to repair the property.

Ideally, the Friends of Abolition Hall would like to see preserved all the land making up the remnant Corson farm around and behind the historic buildings. Indeed, it can be argued that the National Register designation intended to include the land as well as the buildings, but such protection would apply only if federal funds or regulations, such as environmental rules and/or guidelines, were applicable. If these situations do not in the end apply, the Friends of Abolition Hall seek to broker a compromise that sets aside as much land as possible as a buffer to the historic structures, perhaps by using public open space funds. Later, the organization wishes to participate in identifying viable uses for the buildings and grounds. At the time of this writing, the fate of these extraordinarily properties lies with the various commissions and governing boards of Whtitemarsh Township. The Friends and the scores of residents who support their efforts are determined to use every legal means to save a precious piece of our nation’s life and future promise.

DAVID R. CONTOSTA is Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. He is the author of more than 20 books ranging in subject from urban ecology to the history of American politics, religion, and foreign

policy, in addition to several biographical studies. His most recent publications are Rebel Giants: The Revolutionary Lives of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin and America’s Needless Wars: Cautionary Tales of US Involvement in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Iraq. At present David is writing a book about the American presidency, along with collaborating on a documentary film about Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Valley. He has lectured at universities in China and South Korea and is a frequent speaker before academic and civic groups. Professor Contosta provided on-camera commentary in the American Freethought film series funded by the James Hervey Johnson Charitable Educational Trust.

1 Hiram Corson, The Corson Family (Philadelphia: H. L. Everett, 1906), 112-117. See also Hiram Corson, “The Plymouth Group” in The Abolitionists of Montgomery County (Norristown, PA: Historical Society of Montgomery County, 1900), 41-43. Hiram Corson, M.D. (1804-1896) was a brother of George Corson and a founding member of the Plymouth Meeting Abolition Society. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, which opened in 1850 as the second medical school in the world to train women as medical doctors and to award them the M.D. degree. His Quaker beliefs in equality extended to women as well as to African Americans.

2 On the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, see Charles L. Blockson, The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania (Jacksonville, NC: Flame International, Inc., 1981), 9-32. Blockson also devotes a chapter in his book to Underground Railroad activities Montgomery County (pages 39-51) where Plymouth Meeting is located. Helpful, too, is Nilgun Anadolu Okur, “Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, 1830-1860,” Journal of Black Studies 25(5) May 1995: 537-57.

3 A good general history of the Underground Railroad is Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. (New York: Harper Collins, 2005).

4 William Still, Underground Railroad: A Record (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 721. On Still and his activities there is Larry Gara, “William Still and the Underground Railroad,” Pennsylvania History 28 (1961), 33-44.

5 Hiram Corson, Abolitionists of Montgomery County, 41-43.

6 Still, Underground Railroad, 721.

7 Theodore Weber Bean, “The Corson Family,” in History of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Evarts and Peck, 1884), 1036-37.

8 Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 2000.

9 Hiram Corson, quoted in Blockson, Underground Railroad, 45.

10 An excellent account of this artist is Anne Gregory Terhune, Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Also well worth consulting is the catalog of an extensive exhibit of Hovenden’s works at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum marking the centenary of his death, Thomas Hovenden: American Painter of Hearth and Homeland (Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Museum, 1995). The catalog contains essays by Anne Gregory Terhune, Suylvia Yount, and Naurice Frank Woods, Jr.

11 For a discussion of the fictitious story of Brown kissing the child, see Terhune, Hovenden, 136-37.

12 Martha Maulsby Hovenden (1884-1941) would go on to study sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Art Students League in New York. Her best known works are the relief panels that she designed for the George Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

In the

D.M. Bennett began his publishing career while the country was going through the worst depression it ever experienced.

Beginning

The T ru T h S eeker –– foun D e D B y D.M. Bennett in 1873 –– is the world’s oldest freethought publication and one of the longest running periodicals in America. The only magazines which have been published longer –– and publicly available –– are Harper’s, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and The Nation.

DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818-1882) and his wife Mary, were former devout members of The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or Shakers as they were commonly known. Bennett was a prominent member of the celibate communitarian society for 13 years and worked as an herbalist, physician and ministry-appointed scribe, recording “divinely inspired” messages during the Era of Manifestations, the Shakers‘ decade-long period of intense spiritualistic revival.

When the revival subsided, some of the younger members lost their religious fervor, including Bennett and his future wife Mary Wicks, a schoolteacher with whom he eloped in 1846. Although their apostasy and marriage was a shocking event for the Shakers –– and the couple –– the Bennetts maintained friendly relations with the Shakers for the rest of their lives. “Shakers are industrious, frugal and honest people,” Bennett declared. “And so far as religion is concerned they probably have an article that is as practical, as useful and as sincere as any in the world.”

For the next 27 years the Bennetts moved around the country and invested in various business ventures, owned drugstores and successfully marketed “Dr. Bennett’s Family Medicines.” During this period, Bennett read about Darwinism and purchased the “infidel” books of Voltaire and Thomas Paine. In 1850, Bennett read Paine’s The Age of Reason and found Paine’s cogent argument against Christianity and the Bible “unanswerable.” Paine’s book transformed the devoted Christian (who prayed twice daily and at meals) into becoming a freethinker or infidel, as unbelievers were known at that time. After reading Paine’s Age of Reason. Bennett was convinced that Christianity was “the greatest sham in the world.”

In 1870, D.M. Bennett accepted a contract to operate a drugstore in Paris, Illinois. The Bennetts moved to Paris, but he remained in the drugstore for only about fifteen months before getting back into the seed business. Bennett planted fifty acres for cultivation the first year and seventy-five the second year. The combination of

extremely dry weather and an “unharmonious” partnership with Christians, however, spelled disaster. Although his goal was met, he lost $2,000 on the endeavor. “We feel that they have cruelly wronged us to the extent of a few thousand dollars and two years’ hard toil,” Bennett wrote. These “supporters of orthodoxy,” he concluded, were “staunch believers in the ‘Holy Book’ and have at least carried out one portion of it with us, we were a stranger and ‘they took us in.’”

In 1873, Bennett got into a debate with the local clergymen in the Paris, Illinois newspaper over the efficacy of praying for rain. After the Christian editor refused to print Bennett’s “infidel” letters expressing his opinion that prayer was useless, the Shaker-turned-freethinker decided to publish a monthly periodical with the intent of giving equal voice to Liberals, Free Religionists, Rationalists, Spiritualists, Universalists, Unitarians, Friends, Infidels, Free Thinkers, and in short all who dare to think and judge for themselves.” He listed fifty possible names and showed them to Mary. She selected ––The Truth Seeker.

Dr. Bennett, as he was known, was a prolific writer. He wrote nearly the entire first issue. The Bennetts (The Liberal Association of Paris, Illinois) printed 12,000 copies of the eight-page newspaper. “We have no creed or dogmas to ask others to subscribe to,” he stated on the first page of the September, 1873 issue. Their mission was to provide an open forum for readers “whether they are with us or opposed to us…”

The seasoned entrepreneur had made and lost several small fortunes before he founded The Truth Seeker. Although subscriptions were slow to come in, The Truth Seeker received several complimentary notices. Bennett was especially encouraged by a letter from Morris Altman, a successful Manhattan merchant. Altman –– who had planned to publish his own freethought periodical –– wrote:

207 E. 45th Street, New York, Sept 9, 1873

Just received your first number. Think highly of it. Call it a first rate paper. Enclosed is my subscription. Send it regularly. I take all liberal papers, as they are needed—the more the better. The tone of The Truth Seeker is high and sound.

Keep it so. Yours, & co., M. Altman

Morris Altman (1837-1876) was the founder of the M. Altman & Co. department store. He and his younger

“His [Bennett’s] heart and his pocket were always open. I know whereof I speak. He never refused to help another for the sake of keeping a dollar in his own pocket.”

brother Benjamin –– B. Altman & Co. –– were the sons of Jewish immigrants from Bavaria. Morris Altman was an innovative and humanitarian employer. He provided seats for his female clerks, shortened their hours, and closed his Sixth Avenue store early on Saturdays. George Macdonald –– a Truth Seeker editor –– described Altman as strikingly handsome and fondly remembered the dapper retailer who “wore his clothes and his high hat so well, and flashed across his pleasant smile to us printers . . . with a bow as polite as he could have made anywhere.”

But the reception for the freethought monthly was not all sweetness and light. The novice publisher and his “little sheet” soon incurred the wrath of the ministry. After receiving two free sample copies of The Truth Seeker in the mail, an Illinois clergyman complained:

Sir—You will please keep your infamous, blasphemous, low slang, and slanderous sheet at home; thou enemy of all righteousness; thou child of the Devil. Wilt thou not cease to pervert the right way of the Lord. –– J. W. Riley

Despite receiving annoying “Come to Jesus” letters and condemnatory criticism and “regardless of snarling dogs and growling wolves,” Bennett fully intended to persevere and “fearlessly pursue the even tenor of our way.”

In late 1873, Bennett traveled to New York City and

spent two weeks investigating the metropolis as a possible home for his new enterprise. The first person he visited was Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812-1886). Andrews was an individualist, anarchist, reformer, and abolitionist who was in the vanguard of the emancipation of slaves in America. Andrews was a brilliant philosopher, pioneer sociologist, lawyer, doctor, and a master in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Andrews brought shorthand to America. A philosophical anarchist, Andrews published the first translation in America of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. (Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for President of the United States and Andrews served as her speechwriter and philosophical guru). “Other men were known as factors in reforms,” The Truth Seeker reported; “Andrews was the reform itself.”

D.M. B ennett B egan his pu B lishing career while the country was going through the worst depression it ever experienced. It was the beginning of the Gilded Age, a period of opulence and ostentation. But it was also an era of stark disparity between rich and poor. A time when railroads went bankrupt, unemployment was raging, and nearly a thousand papers went out of business. In 1873 the American stock exchange crashed for the first time, sparking a recession that would last five long years and

Opening page DEROBIGNE MORTIMER BENNETT AND MARY WICKS BENNETT, CIRCA 1873 Below STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS (1812-1886) , VICTORIA CLAFLIN WOODHULL (1838-1927)

cause the seventh decade of the nineteenth century to be called the black seventies. During Bennett’s stay in Gotham, Andrews described the downside of a move to the big city with two and a half million people and five hundred newspapers vying for readership:

My spiritual sight wasn’t sufficiently open to see in that plain countryman the qualities that made D.M. Bennett what he proved to be subsequently; and while he consulted me, while he told me what he came here for, and what he intended to do, I think I said quite as much to discourage him as to encourage him. I painted the difficulties. I had known hundreds of instances of similar earnest and honest efforts to start this and that and the other enterprise in behalf of reform, almost all of which had sunk into nonentity; and I didn’t sense in Mr. Bennett any special power that was going to make him the exception. I had to learn subsequently, by experience, what, if I had had more intuition, I might have known then.

Bennett used the Andrews’s home for his headquarters and it is where he did his writing. When Andrews was asked years later why the editor of The Truth Seeker came to see him, he responded:

Well, the only reason was that for thirty-five or forty years past in New York, I have been in a certain sense a sort of rallying point for radicals and enthusiasts and cranky people of all sorts; my house has always been a sort of cross between a hotel and a university and, somehow or other, I have been known not only in this country, but abroad, so that pretty much everybody of the so-called cranky type that arrived in New York found out where Stephen Pearl Andrews lived, and generally reported pretty early.

Initially, the couple considered moving to Terre Haute, where the paper was first printed. They also considered Toledo, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Louisville. After he and Mary gave considerable thought to each location, they decided that New York was the place. “It is the metropolis of our country,” Bennett asserted, “the great center and headquarters for trade, commerce, interchange for the industries of nations, and why should it not be also for progressive and advanced ideas?” There were five hundred newspapers published in New York in 1874, but Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was the only other freethought periodical in Manhattan and it was not a strict liberal periodical. “The harvest is truly great,” his business sense told him, “but the laborers are few.” And since both he and Mary were natives of the Empire State, it seemed a little like “returning home.”

The following year the Bennetts relocated to New York. Morris Altman introduced Bennett to Eugene M. Macdonald, a young printer. (Altman provided support and purchased full-page merchandise advertisements in The Truth Seeker.) Bennett hired Eugene Macdonald to print the January 1874 issue of The Truth Seeker. Macdonald’s office at 335 Broadway (corner of West Broadway and Worth Street) became the publication’s first home in New York. Bennett proclaimed Broadway: “the greatest street in the world.”

Eugene Macdonald’s mother was a Civil War widow with two sons. She knew and admired Horace Greeley, the brilliant editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley ––whose career began modestly –– became the country’s most famous newspaper editor. Hoping the same for Eugene, Mrs. Macdonald decided to place him (at the age of thirteen) in a printing office “almost against his will,” she later recalled.

Left EUGENE AND GEORGE MACDONALD Opposite WOODHULL & CLAFLIN’S WEEKLY, JANUARY 3, 1874.

Age of Reason

Eugene Macdonald’s mother became concerned after learning that her son used his credit to buy the type needed to print Bennett’s Truth Seeker journal. The widow was initially worried and thought that Mr. Bennett “might be an honest man, or he might not,” since they had previous experience with both kinds. Her first impression of the “editor,” whom she found sitting with bag and baggage in their office beside the stove with an unshaven face, unkempt hair, and unpolished shoes, was that he looked more like an elderly farmer and “the farthest possible from a literary man.” Her anxiety vanished, however, as soon as Eugene introduced them to each other. “One glance at his kindly, genial face, which spoke so plainly the native goodness of the man,” she later recalled, “and a load was lifted from my heart.” Mrs. Macdonald was impressed with his “unimpeachable honesty” and “unwavering fidelity” to his own convictions. Her first thought was “My boy has found a father.” She later characterized her first impressions as “almost” prophetic because the two became more like “an elder and a younger brother.”

Mrs. Macdonald described Bennett as “a shining example” of Beecher’s “man of the future,” an individual “so well-born that they do not need to be born again.” And she found his generosity another of his foremost traits. “His heart and his pocket were always open. I know whereof I speak. He never refused to help another for the sake of keeping a dollar in his own pocket.”

George E. Macdonald followed in his brother’s footsteps and less than two years later began his apprenticeship with The Truth Seeker. He started as a printer’s devil (assistant) and worked his way up to proofreading, printer, foreman, and editor-publisher in 1909. George Macdonald would spend over a half-century associated with the publication.

At fifty-five, Bennett was still an incredibly vigorous man and described as a “dynamo of nervous energy,” awaking routinely at four o’clock and working until 11 pm — eighteen to twenty hours a day — seven days a week. Mrs. Macdonald recalled a time when he fell out of his chair and onto the floor from exhaustion, as if dead. After being revived, the editor went home and rested a few hours only to return and start working again. “Not a full-blooded man was Bennett,” George Macdonald observed, “nor of the sanguineous temperament, but pal-

lid, with a translucent skin; his flesh not very solid nor his physique rugged.” Bennett had a deformed foot and walked with a limp. He dressed in a loose gray suit without a tie. Although Bennett was not a man of humor, his eyes twinkled and he was “one who liked to poke the boys in the ribs and crack a joke. No man I ever saw could smile so genially or better appreciate the witticisms of the press.” Regarding Bennett’s success, Macdonald opined: He owed the popularity he achieved partly to circumstance, and more to his simple and honest nature, his industrious hand, his capable head, and his courageous heart. His success was all earned and genuine, for he had none of the tricks, either of speech or pen, that deceive the unwary, nor resorted to the “skillful digressions” which appeal to the passions or stir the emotions of the unthinking. He was a likable man and it did not embarrass him to be praised.

Doctor Bennett “possessed such a facility as a penman” (a pencil, in his case), George Macdonald noted, that he could have easily filled the entire journal every week with his own articles. He always used worn-out lead pencils that the Macdonald brothers suspected were thrown away by the clerks. The editor’s writing style was verbose and he was enamored with trios of words, e.g., “dogmas, superstitions, and errors,” “cruelties, wrongs,

After reading Paine’s , Bennett was convinced that Christianity was “the greatest sham in the world.”

THOMAS PAINE ENGRAVING BY WILLAM SHARP (1749-1824) FROM A PORTRAIT BY GEORGE ROMNEY (1734-1802).

© RODERICK BRADFORD 2016

and outrages,” “persecuted, tortured, and burned,” and so on. Bennett’s love for phrases of triplets is apparent in the title of his first book, The World’s Sages, Infidels, and Thinkers, or the revised and enlarged second edition, The World’s Sages, Thinkers, and Reformers. Some of his contributors also used verbal triplets in an attempt to either follow his style or join the editor in paying homage to the author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

NEW YORK PUBLISHING

In the history of American publishing, New York played a pivotal role. In the nineteenth century, Park Row in lower Manhattan was known as newspaper row. It was home to the great papers; famous publishers and editors; James

Gordon Bennett of The Herald; New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley; Joseph Pulitzer of The World; and Henry Raymond, founder of The New York Times. Manhattan was also home to 470 churches and the nation’s most successful and influential evangelical Christian publisher, The American Tract Society.

There are parallels between today and the Gilded Age. Due to the popularity of the press and the increasing use of illustrations, individuals –– for the first time –– became recognizable to the general public and they attracted attention. It was a period when celebrity and controversy sold newspapers.

The Truth Seeker’s move to New York –– where it would remain for nearly a century –– coincided with the dawn of the culture wars in America. It was an era when

freedom of the press came under attack. Two years before D.M. Bennett moved to New York, women’s rights leader and publisher Victoria Woodhull was arrested by purity crusader Anthony Comstock for exposing an adulterous affair of America’s most famous minister, Henry Ward Beecher.

the gilDe D age –– a terM coineD By Mark twain –– was an era of personal journalism. Famous editors like Horace Greeley not only reported the news, but influenced and shaped public opinion. “Greeley says” was the preface to quotations in his New York Tribune newspaper.

D.M. Bennett’s journalism was not only personal, it was highly provocative and blasphemous. “The Truth Seeker was Bennett,” one of his successors stated, ”and in advertising himself he advertised the paper.”

Inspired by Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Bennett targeted revealed religion and particularly Christianity. The editor amused freethinkers and infuriated Christians with his “Open Letter to Jesus Christ.” While the columns of the mainstream press were filled with favorable articles praising pastors, Bennett routinely exposed the hypocrisy, immoral and criminal behavior of Christian clergymen.

In September of 1875, The Truth Seeker became a sixteen-page semi-monthly. That year Bennett began a widespread distribution of liberal books, tracts, and pamphlets. Robert G. Ingersoll’s Oration of the Gods was reprinted. The first book published by The Truth Seeker was William McDonnell’s freethought novel Heathens of the Heath.

D.M. Bennett reprinted Viscount Amberly’s controversial Analysis of Religious Belief and sold The Elements of Social Science, and important birth control book by George Drysdale. Bennett was one of the first booksellers in America to furnish readers with Helen P. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu ”spiritual dictionary.” For three years the enterprising ed-

itor popularized the Darwinian discoveries with extracts from Ernest Haeckel’s The Doctrine of Filtration, or Descent Theory. In 1876, The Truth Seeker became a weekly, and D.M. Bennett published his book The World’s Sages, Infidels, and Thinkers

The columns of The Truth Seeker were open to anyone who wanted to express their opinions on religion. Serialized debates between Bennett and clergymen were popular in the paper. As a child, Bennett was a devout Christian and had faithfully memorized twenty to thirty verses of the New Testament each week in order to recite them for his Sunday school teacher. At 14, he joined the Shakers and spent thirteen years as a prominent member of the celibate Christian sect. Bennett knew the Bible.

In 1877, Reverend G.H. Humphrey challenged Bennett to a series of debates which ran for six months and published in a 533-page book “Hear both sides, and then decide“ is on the first page of Christianity and Infidelity: The Humphrey— Bennett Discussion.

The Bennett-Teed Discussion was another debate series which ran for several weeks and published in a book. Cyrus Teed, or the Prophet Cyrus or “Koresh” as he alternatively called himself, was a hollow-globe theorist who believed that he was the new messiah. Teed was an eclectic physician who published a daily paper called the Herald of the Messenger of the New Covenant. He later founded his Koreshan colony in Florida and published the Flaming Sword, a magazine to promote his nonsensical cosmology. Bennett found Teed’s system of geology preposterous. But it was the religious fanatic’s ludicrous

proposition that “Jesus Christ is not only divine, but is the Lord God, Creator of Heaven and Earth” which the editor termed: “Teed-ious.”

He [Bennett] owed the popularity he achieved partly to circumstance, and more to his simple and honest nature, his industrious hand, his capable head, and his courageous heart.

Right HORACE GREELEY (1811-1872), EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE Opposite PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE AT PARK ROW, NEW YORK, NY., 1868. FAR RIGHT AND BELOW IS THE SIGN FOR THE REVOLUTION , FOUNDED BY SUSAN B. ANTHONY AND ELIZABETH CADY STANTON IN 1868. BELOW THAT IS THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN OFFICE.

In the nineteenth century it was customary for American clergymen to travel abroad and write an account of their journey for the congregations at home. D.M. Bennett was the first freethought editor to travel to Europe and publish his unorthodox views on a myriad of subjects, but mostly –– religion.

D.M. Bennett began documenting his journey as soon as he set sail for the ten-day voyage across the Atlantic. His letters –– which chronicled his ten week visit to Europe –– appeared weekly in The Truth Seeker and were later published in a book, An Infidel Abroad

A decade earlier, Mark Twain had written a travel book called The Innocents Abroad which was his best-selling book during his lifetime. Twain’s unbelief and his contempt for the religious displays and activities in Europe and the near East came through quite clearly to discerning readers of The Innocents Abroad. Twain, however, was a famous author which made his irreverent observations more acceptable than Bennett’s blasphemous letters from Europe.

Bennett’s An Infidel Abroad, however, was popular. But in an effort to reach a wider audience, the enterprising editor eventually changed the title to A Truth Seeker in Europe after learning that some readers wanted to lend the book to Christians who “almost shudder at the name Infidel.”

During the Centennial summer of 1876, D.M. Bennett was shocked and deeply saddened by the untimely death of his close friend and benefactor Morris Altman at the age of thirty-nine. The editor wrote: “He was a warm friend of The Truth Seeker, and more than once has he rendered us aid in the time of need.”

Had it not been for Morris Altman’s friendship and generosity during those first few years in Manhattan, the former Paris, Illinois seed farmer’s “little sheet” –– as he called The Truth Seeker –– may have died on the vine.

( t his is the first install M ent in a series of T ru T h S eeker history articles to coMMe Morate the 200th anniversary of D.M. Bennett’s Birth on DeceMBer 23, 1818.)

Truth Seeker

by Ray Jason

sat on the stone foundation of Thoreau’s tiny cabin next to Walden Pond and marveled at his 19th century journals. They are so full of wisdom that still resonates 150 years later. But my joy at being on that hallowed shoreline was tempered by my awareness that nowadays his message is but a muted rustling of leaves in a distant forest. His insistence on the need for humanity to stay connected to Nature and to be suspicious of the glories of Man is even more vital today than it was in his era.

While seated in the garden of the house where Walt Whitman was born, I could still feel his colossal lust for Life a dozen decades after his death. The ecstasy and spontaneity and curiosity that saturated both his poetry and his daily wanderings are in such contrast to the lives of the modern multitude. There is so much to be learned from the immediacy with which he embraced the world. But instead, our contemporary cyber-blindness has substituted screen-to-screen “connecting” for faceto-face living.

During my Key West years, I spent many a pleasant afternoon at Hemingway’s home pondering the paradox-

es so dominant in both his work and his life. His rugged, rough-and-tumble image was always at odds with his sensitive explorations of bravery and honor and loyalty. This dichotomy translated into some powerful writing. But in our pampered modern world the artist who blends intellect and courage is an endangered species.

As a lover of the Sea and of the risks and glories of the Wide Waters, I naturally found my way to Jack London’s house. Unfortunately, it is but a foundation for the home, since the magnificent structure was destroyed in a fire (of suspicious origins) just before he was about to move into it. The tragedy of that loss was also reflected in the shortness of his life. Jack was profoundly aware of the fragility of Life as is exemplified in one of his famous quotations: “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” His lust for both deeds and words was a powerful influence on my formative years. He was so emblematic of what is real and genuine. It must be difficult for young people these days to find such inspiration when they are surrounded by so much that is artificial and fraudulent.

My heroes do not score touchdowns or lead armies or star in movies. Instead, those in my Pantheon think deeply and dream elegantly and write poetically. They are secular saints, who tried to decipher the mysteries of the human condition and who shared their discoveries with all of us. Out of reverence for their quests, I have tried to visit some of the places that were crucial to their personal and artistic development.

... besides the metastasized culture, Jeffers also took issue with the two great Goliaths of human societies ––The Church and The State.

ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887-1962) AT HAWK TOWER IN CARMEL, CALIFORNIA.

But one sacred site had evaded my exploration for a very long time. It was Tor House, where Robinson Jeffers had created his superb but largely forgotten poetry. Unlike the others mentioned here, he did not purchase or commission his home –– he built most of it with his own hands. During the construction of the modest, British Isles style cottage, he apprenticed himself to the stone mason that he had hired.

He erected the other buildings in his small compound with his own hands and basic tools. He would haul large granite rocks from the edge of the sea below his property up the steep hill on a horse-drawn sled. Then he would shape and cement them into structures that will probably endure even the most horrific destruction of humanity. As he once described this skill in a poem, he had the ability to make “stone love stone.” More importantly for me, he had the genius to make word love word.

I first encountered Jeffers in a college creative writing class. My professor was the most inspirational teacher that I ever had. He made literature burst from the page with radiant energy and beauty. And as the one and only

composition teacher in my life, he gave me some extremely wise counsel. He advised me to “write for just two people –– yourself and an unknown reader one hundred years from now.”

This teacher, whose name was Matthew Mc Sorley, loved Robinson Jeffers not just for his poetic brilliance, but also for his personal incorruptibility. Jeffers was the darling of the literary world in the 1930s and was even featured on a cover of TIME magazine. But his refusal to cheerlead for World War II was denounced by the artistic establishment. The rest of his career was a sad, lonely battle against literary orthodoxy.

His refusal to surrender to the System was very appealing to me. In an era where modern poetry seemed like indecipherable word riddles full of codes and references that only insiders could understand, Jeffers was accessible. His poetry was straightforward and almost stark-like the brooding coastline that so inspired him. In those days, the windswept shore where he lived and worked was almost untouched by the hand and menace of humankind.

The reason that it took me so long to make my pilgrimage to this shrine of Pantheism, was because after it was converted into a museum it was only open to visitors on the weekends. And because my experience in Vietnam had convinced me to veer away from the so-called Real World as much as possible, I found myself leading the most counter-culture of lives –– as a San Francisco street juggler. So, I was always working on the weekends.

But finally, in the autumn of 2015, I stepped foot on that hallowed ground with mild trepidation. That’s because I feared that the anticipation might outweigh the visitation. It did not! From the garden gate the curve of the planet was clearly visible. This reminded me of Robinson’s image of the Pacific Ocean as an enormous blue eye gazing out into the infinite. The hawks still circled overhead as living symbols of the wildness that Jeffers found so lacking in civilized man. And the rough granite stones of the buildings stood unflinching and bold –– as enduring as he hoped his poetry would remain as the decades thundered past.

When the tour was concluded we were permitted to linger for a while in this modest but magnificent compound. I immediately climbed to the top of Hawk Tower and tried to ponder more deeply some of the lessons that I had learned from this man’s poetry and philosophy.

It was startling how relevant his major messages remain even 50 years after his death. And it was tragic to recognize how the modern world has

ignored his counsel. He termed his personal philosophy “Inhumanism.” Essentially, he argued that Humankind is too infatuated with its own self-acclaimed glories. He warned that as we sever ourselves from Nature we amputate our connection to that larger essence that birthed us and shapes us and tempers us.

Imagine the fury that might arise from him these days as he witnesses the masses dedicating their lives to watching and driving around in and talking to machines. He railed against an un-culture of rampant Materialism that seemed crass and meaningless and ignoble to him. And that was before the arrival of pay-for-view “cage fights” and the Kardashians and pre-teen beauty pageants.

But besides the metastasized culture, Jeffers also took issue with the two great Goliaths of human societies –– The Church and The State. He exposed and assailed them with a bold brilliance that earned him enemies in high and low precincts. But he was unwavering in his commitment to revealing the Truth –– even if it drove him into an internal exile.

There are quite a few photographs of Robinson Jeffers staring out to sea from the parapet of the tower that he built with his own hands. His gaze is somber and stoic and steel-eyed.

He was frequently accused of misanthropy ––– of dislike for the human species. But I have read much of his work, and I believe that his view of humanity was a mixture of sadness and despair and sympathy. He realized that his attempts at guidance were but a fool’s errand. He knew in his heart of hearts that the same species that had blessed us with Mozart had also cursed us with the Mushroom Cloud.

RAY JASON continues to live aboard and wander about in his small but beautiful sailboat. He strives to live a life of RATAWI, which is his acronym for Reading And Thinking And Writing Inspirationally. http://theseagypsyphilosopher.blogspot.com

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF THE LORDS OF WAR

by Ray Jason

1. Thou shalt not notice that those of us who start the wars never fight and die in the wars –– and neither do our families and our friends.

2. Thou shalt never describe War with words like “despicable,” “sick” and “repellant,” but shall instead use only approved words such as “heroic,” “glorious” and “necessary.”

3. Thou shalt overlook the core Truth that War is the deliberate murder of innocent people with whom you have no grievance and who have done you no harm.

4. Thou shalt disregard the fact that “The War to End All Wars” failed to do so, and that, in fact, within 20 years it spawned the most deadly and vicious war in history.

5. Thou shalt ignore the fact that the vast majority of the victims of modern warfare are not soldiers, but are helpless civilians –– and you must understand that this savagery towards women and children is for “The Greater Good.”

6. Thou shalt not be disturbed by the realization that throughout all of history so much human energy and ingenuity has been dedicated to finding more powerful and efficient ways of butchering one another.

7. Thou shalt encourage your children to play violent video games, to applaud during war movies and to honor the flag even if it is drenched in blood –– failure to do so might decrease the supply of faceless cogs in the War Machine.

8. Thou shall not be outraged that The Masters of War reap obscene profits during all three stages of conflict –– the Preparations, the Execution and the Rebuilding ––since we risk our fortunes and our reputations, whereas you merely risk your lives.

9. Thou shalt realize that although every type of weapon that has ever been developed was eventually used in war, those of us with our hands on the levers of power, would never use Thermonuclear Weapons –– even though the secret bunkers that we have built blatantly contradict this.

10. Finally –– and most importantly –– thou shalt never awaken from the trance of Patriotism and Religious Zealotry and suddenly understand that without your insane willingness to kill and die, all war would immediately cease. And above all thou shalt never think or speak the words “Hell no –– We won’t go!!!”

Opposite page TOR HOUSE, CARMEL, CALIFORNIA. PHOTO BY CELESTE DAVISON. Left RAY JASON AT TOR HOUSE, 2015.

invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

He concludes in the next paragraph: “When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it.” Compare Ingersoll’s ideas — but also his words, his diction, and his sentence construction, especially the repeated “if” clauses — in a lecture from 1898, “Superstition”: If we thank him for sunshine and harvest we should also thank him for plague and famine. If we thank him for liberty, the slave should raise his chained hands in worship and thank God that he toils unpaid with the lash upon his naked back. If we thank him for victory we should thank him for defeat. Only a few days ago our President, by proclama-

tion, thanked God for giving us the victory at Santiago. He did not thank him for sending the yellow fever. To be consistent the President should have thanked him equally for both.

Ingersoll’s conclusion seems to sum up Twain’s overall argument in “The War Prayer”: “Man should think; he should use all his senses; he should examine; he should reason.”

Over the course of his career, Ingersoll constantly attacked the idea of free moral agency and independent opinion, stances that look very similar to Twain’s railing against “the moral sense.” In “A Lay Sermon” (1886), Ingersoll proposes this idea:

I want you to remember that everybody is as he must be. I want you to get out of your minds the old nonsense of “free moral agency;” and then you will have charity for the whole human race. When you know that they are not responsible for their disposition, any more that for their height; not responsible for their acts, any more than for their dreams; when you finally understand the philosophy that everything exists as the result of an efficient cause, and that the slightest fancy that ever fluttered its painted wings in the horizon of hope was as necessarily produced as the planet that in its orbit wheels about the sun — when you understand this, I believe you will have charity for all mankind — including even yourself.

In “The Gods” (1872), Ingersoll writes, “Man has no ideas, and can have none except those suggested by our surroundings.” In his famous 1896 lecture, “Why I Am An Agnostic,” he goes even farther: “For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are moulded by our surroundings. Environment is a sculptor — a painter.” Twain’s condemnations of the Moral Sense and the Damned Human Race are so numerous that a listing of

“MARK TWAIN,” AMERICA’S BEST HUMORIST. ILLUSTRATION IN PUCK MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 16, 1885. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

them would fill a small book, but several passages from “What Is Man?” (1906) show just how similar his ideas are to Ingersoll’s. In his philosophical dialogue between a Young Man and an Old Man, the Old Man talks about human nature in a way that closely resembles Ingersoll’s pronouncements: “Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, COMMANDED, by exterior influences — solely. He originates nothing, himself — not even an opinion, not even a thought.” When the Young Man asks, “Where did I get my opinion that this which you are talking is all foolishness?” the Old Man replies, “It is a quite natural opinion — but you did not create the materials out of which it is formed. They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the hearts and brains of ten centuries of ancestors. Personally you did not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made. . . . . Later, the Old Man comments on the overriding force of training: “[A]ll training is one form or another of outside influence, and association is the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him. They train him downwards or they train him upwards — but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time.” Since Twain’s late philosophical writings were published nearly a half century ago, much critical attention has been paid to his growing pessimism and despair, attitudes usually attributed to his financial losses and to the deaths of those close to him; at least some of those attitudes — and his ideas and his phrasing of them — should properly be attributed to his earnest reading of Robert Ingersoll.

In June of 1906, Twain devoted four days to explosive autobiographical dictations about God and the Bible, ideas so controversial that, as he wrote to Howells at the time, they “will get my heirs and assigns burnt alive if they venture print this side of 2006 A.D. — which I judge they won’t. . . . The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir, when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited.”

On June 19, he begins by noting God’s true nature:

In the Old Testament His acts expose His vindictive, unjust, ungenerous, pitiless and vengeful nature

constantly. He is always punishing — punishing trifling misdeeds with thousandfold severity; punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their rulers; even descending to wreak bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and lambs and sheeps and bullocks, as punishment for inconsequential trespasses committed by their proprietors. It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading, by contrast.

Again, Ingersoll makes this point repeatedly: in “Some Reasons Why” (1881); in “About the Holy Bible” (1894); in “The Foundations of Faith” (1895); and in “Why I Am an Agnostic” (1896), where he writes,

He was so saving of mercy, so extravagant in murder, so anxious to kill, so ready to assassinate, that I hated him with all my heart. At his command, babes were butchered, women violated, and the white hair of trembling age stained with blood. This God visited the people with pestilence — filled the houses and covered the streets with the dying and the dead — saw babes starving on the empty breasts of pallid mothers, heard the sobs, saw the tears, the sunken cheeks, the sightless eyes, the new made graves, and remained as pitiless as the pestilence.

The ideas are similar, but so are the tone and even the delivery.

On June 20, Twain comments on all bibles’ lack of originality:

Each borrows from the others, and gives no credit, which is a distinctly immoral act. Each, in turn, confiscates decayed old stage-properties from the others, and with a naive confidence puts them forth as fresh inspirations from on high. We borrow the Golden Rule from Confucius, after it has seen service for centuries, and copyright it without a blush. When we want a Deluge we go away back to hoary Babylon and borrow it, and are as proud of it and as satisfied with it as if it had been worth the trouble. We still revere it and admire it, today, and claim that it came to us direct from the mouth of the Deity; whereas we know that Noah’s flood never happened, and couldn’t have happened. The flood is a favorite with Bible makers. If there is a Bible — or even a tribe of savages — that lacks a General Deluge it is only because the religious scheme that lacks it hadn’t any handy source to borrow it from.

Over the course of his career, Ingersoll constantly attacked the idea of free moral agency and independent opinion, stances that look very similar to Twain’s railing against “the moral sense.”

In “Some Mistakes of Moses” (1879), as he does elsewhere, Ingersoll notes the commonality of flood stories in various cultures, including Egypt, India, Greece, and American Indians. “At one time,” Ingersoll writes, “the Christian pointed to the fact that many nations told of a flood, as evidence of the truth of the Mosaic account; but now, it having been shown that other accounts are much older, and equally reasonable, that argument has ceased to be of any great value.”

On June 23, Twain again questions the Biblical notion of God, specifically the idea that God is moral:

Do we also know that He is a moral being, according to our standard of morals? No. If we know anything at all about it, we know that He is destitute of morals — at least of the human pattern. Do we know that He is just, charitable, kindly, gentle, merciful, compassionate? No. There is no evidence that He is any of these things — whereas each and every day, as it passes, furnishes us a thousand volumes of evidence, and indeed proof, that he possesses none of these qualities.

Ingersoll asks a similar set of questions in one of his last lectures, 1899’s “What Is Religion?”:

If this God exists, how do we know that he is good? How can we prove that he is merciful, that he cares for the children of men? If this God exists, he has on many occasions seen millions of his poor children plowing the fields, sowing and planting the grain, and when he saw them he knew that they depended on the expected crop for life, and yet this good God, this merciful being, withheld the rain. He caused the sun to rise, to steal all moisture from the land, but gave no rain. He saw the seeds that man had planted wither and perish, but he sent no rain. He saw them slowly devour the little that they had, and saw them when the days of hunger came — saw them slowly waste away, saw their hungry, sunken eyes, heard their prayers, saw them devour the miserable animals that they had, saw fathers and mothers, insane with hunger, kill and eat their

shriveled babies, and yet the heaven above them was as brass and the earth beneath was as iron, and he sent no rain. Can we say in the heart of this God there blossomed the flower of pity? Can we say that he cared for the children of men? Can we say that his mercy endureth forever?

Considering the likelihood, the near certainty, that Twain had read Ingersoll’s complete works by this time, the correspondence is striking, especially the repetition of rhetorical questions.

Twain’s most focused and developed ideas about God, the Bible, and religion are found in “Letters From the Earth,” written in 1909 but not published until 1962. “Letters From the Earth” also shows the most borrowing from Ingersoll. A comparison of some passages will show just how extensively Twain relied on Ingersoll, not only for ideas, but in several cases for much more, including passages that are clearly lifted almost directly.

Twain makes this point in the second letter about the composition of heaven:

The inventor of their heaven empties into it all the nations of the earth, in one common jumble. All are on an equality absolute, no one of them ranking another; they have to be “brothers;” they have to mix together, pray together, harp together, hosannah together — whites, niggers, Jews, everybody — there’s no distinction. Here in the earth all nations hate each other, every one of them hates the Jew. Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. He really does. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks that if he were only there he would take all the populace to his heart, and hug, and hug, and hug!

Ingersoll had made a similar point in 1884’s “Orthodoxy,” commenting on a revivalist in St. Louis who would not allow blacks and whites to sit together:

The question was whether in these revivals, when they were trying to rescue souls from eternal torture, they would allow colored people to occupy

MARK TWAIN IN HIS GOWN (SCARLET WITH GREY SLEEVES AND FACINGS) FOR HIS D. LITT. DEGREE, AWARDED TO HIM BY OXFORD UNIVERSITY.

seats with white people; and that revivalist, preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ, said he would not allow the colored people to sit with white people; they must go to the back of the church. These same Christians tell us that in heaven there will be no distinction. That Christ cares nothing for the color of the skin. That in Paradise while and black will sit together, swap harps, and cry hallelujah in chorus; yet this minister, believing as he says he does, that all men who fail to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ will eternally perish, as not willing that a colored man should sit by a white man and hear the gospel of everlasting peace.

When Twain wrote “Letters From the Earth” in 1909, he had almost certainly been in possession of Ingersoll’s complete works for nine years, and the echoes of Ingersoll’s thoughts and even his phrasing seem too close to be coincidental. Twain, not writing for publication, is more graphic than Ingersoll — “whites, niggers, Jews, everybody” — but the harping and praise singing are the same.

In Letter V, in his comments about the contradictions of the Biblical creation story, Twain compares astronomical facts about the distance of stars from earth with the Genesis story of them all being created the same day, concluding that, “For three hundred years, now, the Christian astronomer has known that his Deity didn’t make the stars in those tremendous six days; but the Christian astronomer does not enlarge upon that detail. Neither does the priest.” In “About the Holy Bible” (1894), Ingersoll had made the same point about the conflict between science and religion:

For centuries the church insisted that the Bible was absolutely true; that it contained no mistakes; that the story of creation was true; that its astronomy and geology were in accord with the facts; that the scientists who differed with the Old Testament were infidels and atheists.

Now this has changed. The educated Christians admit that the writers of the Bible were not inspired as to any science. They now say that God, or Jehovah, did not inspire the writers of his book for the purpose of instructing the world about astronomy, geology, or any science. They now admit that the inspired men who wrote the Old Testament knew nothing about any science, and that they wrote about the earth and stars, the sun and moon, in

accordance with the general ignorance of the time. It required many centuries to force the theologians to this admission. Reluctantly, full of malice and hatred, the priests retired from the field, leaving the victory with science.

Twain continues his skeptical run through the Old Testament with the story of Adam and Eve, again pointing out the absurdity and contradictions of the story: He made a man and a woman and placed them in a pleasant garden, along with the other creatures. They all lived together in harmony and contentment and blooming youth for some time; then trouble came. God had warned the man and the woman that they must not eat of the fruit of a certain tree. And he added a most strange remark: he said that if they ate of it they should surely die. Strange, for the reason that inasmuch as they had never seen a sample of death they could not possibly know what he meant.

Ingersoll had questioned the story in “Orthodoxy”: Is there an intelligent man or woman now in the world who believes in the Garden of Eden story? If you find any man who believes it, strike his forehead and you will hear an echo. Something is for rent. Does any intelligent man now believe that God made man of dust, and woman of a rib, and put them in a garden, and put a tree in the midst of it? Was there not room outside of the garden to put his tree, if he did not want people to eat his apples? If I did not want a man to eat my fruit, I would not put him in my orchard.

Both Twain and Ingersoll question the justice of God punishing all of Adam and Eve’s descendants for their sin. Twain comments extensively on God’s main punishment:

Disease! that is the main force, the diligent force, the devastating force! It attacks the infant the moment it is born; it furnishes it one malady after another: croup, measles, mumps, bowel-troubles, teething-pains, scarlet fever, and other childhood specialties. It chases the child into youth and furnishes it some specialties for that time of life. It chases the youth into maturity; maturity into age, and age into the grave.

Ingersoll had written on this topic in 1884, again in “Orthodoxy”:

A comparison of some passages will show just how extensively Twain relied on Ingersoll, not only for ideas, but in several cases for much more, including passages that are clearly lifted almost directly.

According to this, just as soon as Adam and Eve had partaken of the forbidden fruit, God began to contrive ways by which he could destroy the lives of his children. He invented all the diseases — all the fevers and coughs and colds — all the pains and plagues and pestilences — all the aches and agonies, the malaria and the spores; so that when we take a breath of air we admit into our lungs unseen assassins; and, fearing that some might live too long, even under such circumstances, God invented the earthquake and volcano, the cyclone and lightning, animalcules to infest the heart and brain, so small that no eye can detect — no instrument reach. This was all owing to the disobedience of Adam and Eve.

Ingersoll continues his list of diseases and agonies for two more pages.

The story of Noah contains even closer correspondence between the two writers. Both comment on the absurdity

of God destroying what he had created, an all-knowing creator who created beings that he knew would go bad. Ingersoll especially objects to the destruction of innocent animals. When Twain comments on the absurdity and impossibility of collecting all the pairs of animals, calculating that “of birds and beasts and fresh-water creatures he had to collect 146,000 kinds; and of insects upwards of 2,000,000,000 species” (899), he was echoing a passage from Ingersoll’s “Some Mistakes of Moses”:

Of the birds, Noah took fourteen of each species, according to the 3rd verse of the 7th chapter, “Of fouls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female,” making a total of 175,000 birds. . . .There are at least sixteen hundred and fifty-eight kinds of beasts. Let us suppose that twenty-five or them are clean. Of the clean, fourteen of each kind — seven of each sex — were taken. These amount to 350. Of the unclean — two of each kind, amounting to 3,266. There are some six hundred and fifty kinds of reptiles. Two of each kind amount to 1,300. And lastly, there are of insects including the creeping things, at least one million species, so that Noah and his folks had to get of these into the ark about 2,000,000,000.

That repetition of “2,000,000,000” strikes me as a bit more than coincidence, although I suppose they could have independently taken the number from the same book. I propose a more likely book that Twain took his number from: Ingersoll’s book.

They compare the Old and New Testaments, and both come down harder on the supposedly more benevolent New Testament for its introduction of hell and eternal punishment. Both call the Bible a bad influence on the young, Twain specifically pointing out that all young Christian children learn masturbation from the Bible, Ingersoll demurring to be specific about the filth of the Good Book, saying, “I do not even wish to call the attention of my readers to these things, except in a general way.”

Twain seems to have drawn from Ingersoll in several other passages, but one long passage from the end of “Letters From the Earth” provides the best evidence of his borrowing and the clearest case of outright plagiarism. Twain quotes at length from the 31st chapter of the book of Numbers, the story of the children of Israel’s vengeance on the Midianites, when God commanded them to kill all the males, capture all the women and children, kill all

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARK TWAIN IN FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT, BEING THE STORY OF THE TRUTH SEEKER, WITH THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ITS THIRD EDITOR BY GEORGE E. MACDONALD. VOL.ll, NEW YORK, THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY, 1931.

the male children and “every woman that hath known man by lying with him. . . But all the women-children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” Twain comments on the unfairness of God’s decrees, but focuses on this last group:

The heaviest punishment of all was meted out to persons who could not by any possibility have deserved so horrible a fate — the 32,000 virgins. Their naked privacies were probed, to make sure that they still possessed the hymen unruptured; after this humiliation they were sent away from the land that had been their home, to be sold into slavery; the worst of slaveries and the shamefulest, the slavery of prostitution; bed-slavery, to excite lust, and satisfy it with their bodies; slavery to any buyer, be he gentleman or be he coarse and filthy ruffian.

Turning to Ingersoll, in “Some Mistakes of Moses,” published in 1879, we find this passage:

If the Bible be true, God commanded his chosen people to destroy men simply for the crime of defending their native land. They were not allowed to spare trembling and white-haired age, nor dimpled babes clasped in the mother’s arms. They were ordered to kill women, and to pierce, with the sword of war, the unborn child. “Our Heavenly Father” commanded the Hebrews to kill the men and women, the fathers, sons and brothers, but to preserve the girls alive. Why were not the maidens also killed? Why were they spared? Read the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, and you will find that the maidens were given to the soldiers and the priests. Is there, in all the history of war, a more infamous thing than this. Is it possible that God permitted the violets of modesty, that grow and shed their perfume in the maiden’s heart, to be trampled beneath the brutal feet of lust? If this was the order of God, what, under the same circumstances, would have been the command of the devil? When, in this age of the world, a woman, a wife, a mother, reads this record, she should, with scorn and loathing, throw the book away. A general, who now should make such an order, giving over to massacre and rapine a conquered people, would be held in execration by the whole civilized world. Yet, if the Bible be true, the supreme and infinite God was once a savage.

There — Twain quoting from the same Bible chapter as Ingersoll, drawing the same conclusion, focusing on the same horrible detail. That parallel is a clear-cut case of

plagiarism, but if the reader wants to think it was mere coincidence that they both chose the same chapter of the Bible independently, consider the modern parallels that follow in both men’s writing. Twain concludes by looking for a parallel in human history and finds it in a recent event: an 1862 massacre by Indians in Minnesota. Twain asks us to “consider this incident”:

Twelve Indians broke into a farm house at daybreak and captured the family. It consisted of the farmer and his wife and four daughters, the youngest aged fourteen and the eldest eighteen. They crucified the parents; that is to say, they stood them stark naked against the wall of the living room and nailed their hands to the wall. Then they stripped the daughters bare, stretched them upon the floor in front of their parents, and repeatedly ravished them. Finally they crucified the girls against the wall opposite their parents, and cut off their noses and their breasts. They also — but I will not go into that. There is a limit. There are indignities so atrocious that the pen cannot write them. One member of that poor crucified family — the father — was still alive when help came two days later.

Now you have one incident of the Minnesota massacre. I could give you fifty. They would cover all the different kinds of cruelty the brutal human talent has ever invented.

Here is the parallel Ingersoll drew between the Biblical massacre and a recent one:

A little while ago, out upon the western plains, in a little path leading to a cabin, were found the bodies of two children and their mother. Her breast was filled with wounds received in the defence of her darlings. They had been murdered by the savages. Suppose when looking at their lifeless forms, some one had said, “This was done by the command of God!” In Canaan there were countless scenes like this. There was no pity in inspired war. God raised the black flag, and commanded his soldiers to kill even the smiling infant in its mother’s arms. Who is the blasphemer; the man who denies the existence of God, or he who covers the robes of the Infinite with innocent blood?”

Perhaps Mark Twain could have singled out the story of the Midianites without heaving read Ingersoll on the same Bible story, but drawing a subsequent parallel to Indian savagery surely lies beyond the realm of coincidence. It is, as Twain would say, a sockdolager.

In Mark Twain’s defense, several arguments should be made. Ingersoll himself was influenced by other writers, and both he and Twain were greatly influenced by their reading of Thomas Paine.

In Mark Twain’s defense, several arguments should be made. Ingersoll himself was influenced by other writers, and both he and Twain were greatly influenced by their reading of Thomas Paine. Also, before Twain had ever heard of Ingersoll, he had already begun to develop his skeptical ideas about the Bible and orthodox Christianity. He wrote a long letter to his fiancé Olivia Langdon just before their marriage in 1870, outlining his doubts about the biblical account of creation in light of new discoveries in astronomy and geology, and later that year, two years before Ingersoll wrote “The Gods,” Twain wrote an unpublished piece, “God of the Bible vs. God of the Present Day,” in which he presents in miniature many of his arguments in “Letters From the Earth” and the autobiographical dictations: the biblical god’s pettiness, cruelty, unfairness, and vindictiveness, and his ignorance of astronomy, geology, and of science in general. He also cites the absurdities of the Adam and Eve and Noah stories. In a sense, his late ideas were already present, and it might be argued that he and Ingersoll were merely developing the same lines of thought. Such an argument, though, would have to overlook much evidence that suggests not only influence of ideas but also heavy borrow-

ing of those ideas, including phrasing.

Another argument about the late writings is often made in Twain’s defense: that he was protecting his “brand,” his name, and that many of the late skeptical writings remained intentionally unpublished for that purpose. His brand was his livelihood, and his heretical writings would damage him financially as well as personally. And at this late stage of his life, he was also thinking about his heirs, especially his youngest daughter Jean, hoping that royalties from his works would continue to provide an income for her after his death. For a number of reasons, he chose to conceal the depth of his skepticism.

Yet before him lay the example of Robert Ingersoll, who revealed his skepticism in public for over a quarter of a century, on the lecture platform, in books, in magazines, and in newspapers. Ingersoll was vilified, yes, but he was also recognized as the greatest orator of his age, drawing huge crowds all over the country to his lectures (managed by James Redpath, Twain’s manager for a time), earning up to $7,000 per appearance. Twain recognized his own hypocrisy and admitted (privately) of man’s lack of culpability for his actions in an autobiographical dictation of June 25, 1906: “We all know perfectly well — though

we all conceal it, just as I am doing, until I shall be dead, and out of reach of public opinion — we all know, I say, that God, and God alone, is responsible for every act and word of a human being’s life between cradle and grave.” Compare that to Ingersoll’s words from 1877 in “The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child”:

I have made up my mind to say my say. I shall do it kindly, distinctly; but I am going to do it. I know there are thousands of men who substantially agree with me, but who are not in a condition to express their thoughts. They are poor; they are in business; and they know that should they tell their honest thought, persons will refuse to patronize them — to trade with them; they wish to get bread for their little children; they wish to take care of their wives; they wish to have homes and the comforts of life. Every such person is a certificate of the meanness of the community in which he resides. And yet I do not blame these people for not expressing their thought. I say to them: “Keep your ideas to yourselves; feed and clothe the ones you love; I will do your talking for you. The church can not touch, can not crush, can not starve, cannot stop or stay me; I will express your thoughts.”

I think it highly likely that Mark Twain had read those words, and that he had the evidence of Robert Ingersoll’s resolve before him as a silent rebuke to his own lack of intellectual courage — a harsh claim, to be sure, but I think a just one, given the extent of Twain’s borrowing from Ingersoll and his unwillingness to emulate Ingersoll’s public pronouncements.

Twain often acknowledged that he “borrowed,” that all writers do, but it seems clear to me that his use of Ingersoll goes way beyond mere borrowing. If we did it, if our students did it, we would call it what it is: plagiarism. I recall vividly the wicked thrill I got when I first read “Letters From the Earth” as an undergraduate; had I known then that Mark Twain was stealing these ideas, indeed many of these very words, from a contemporary writer and thinker, my opinion of him would surely have been lessened. If my accusations are accurate, we need to engage in a revision of critical opinion of “Letters From the Earth,” as well as many other late writings.

In effect, Mark Twain intended to hide his late works for one hundred years, or longer, purportedly to protect

his name, his image. But perhaps he also delayed publication to obscure his deep debt to Robert Ingersoll. Had he published, for example, “Letters From the Earth” in the first decade of the 20th century, many people would have immediately recognized the extent of his borrowing from Ingersoll. I am not suggesting he made a bet that, one hundred years later, he would be remembered and celebrated and that Robert Ingersoll would be largely forgotten. But that is the way it has worked out.Perhaps someone will find Twain’s copies of Ingersoll’s complete works, which would prove the case I am arguing. But I believe the proof is already evident.

Over forty years ago, in Mark Twain and the Bible, Allison Ensor wrote these prescient words: “Obviously something drastic happened in Twain’s thinking about Christ between 1878 and the attacks of 1906 and 1909 which we have reviewed.” That “something drastic” certainly includes Twain’s reading of Ingersoll, beginning in 1879, and lasting until Twain’s death. Ensor’s 1969 book paved the way for an overdue re-examination of Twain’s religion and spirituality in a number of recent books. The argument continues, but regardless of how we label Mark Twain’s religious attitudes, he was clearly a freethinker, although the freedom of his thought comes with a price: a large and unacknowledged debt to Robert Ingersoll, the most noted freethinker of his — and Mark Twain’s — time. Robert Ingersoll deserves overdue payment through fuller scholarly recognition of his great influence on Mark Twain’s late writings. Much has been written about the influence on Twain’s ideas by William Lecky, Hippolyte Taine, and Thomas Paine. To that list must be added another name: Robert Green Ingersoll. “My reverence for him was deep and genuine; I prized his affection for me and returned it with usury,” Twain wrote to Ingersoll’s niece after the death of The Great Agnostic. Perhaps in that use of the word “usury” we get a sense of just how much Mark Twain recognized that he owed — and never fully paid — his departed friend.

This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.

The Mark Twain Annual, Vol. 11, 2013, pages 42-61. © John Bird, Emeritus Professor of English Winthrop University.

John Bird is Emeritus Professor of English at Winthrop University. He is the author of Mark Twain and Metaphor (University of Missouri Press, 2007) and is a past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America.

His [Twain’s] brand was his livelihood, and his heretical writings would damage him financially as well as personally.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARK TWAIN BY WILLIAM VAN DER WEYDE. COURTESY OF THE INSTITUTE FOR THOMAS PAINE STUDIES AT IONA COLLEGE IN NEW ROCHELLE, NEW YORK.

D.M. Bennett Pardon Campaign

D.M. BENNETT (1818-1882) was pronounced guilty for violating the Comstock Law in New York on March 21, 1879. “The trial of Dr. Bennett for sending obscene matter through the mails is one of the most important of the day,” declared The New York Sun. The judge’s ruling, a Washington Capitol newspaper reporter opined, “surpassed anything of the sort since Pontius Pilate, and would make it dangerous to mail a Bible or a copy of Shakespeare to anyone.”

On June 5, 1879, the editor of The Truth Seeker was fined $300 and confinement at hard labor for thirteen months to be executed in the Albany Penitentiary. (A twelve-month sentence would have allowed the 60-yearold writer to remain incarcerated in New York City where friends and family could have visited.) “There was malice in that thirteen-month sentence,” wrote future Truth Seeker editor George Macdonald. The judge also denied D.M. Bennett’s request to have the sentence deferred until the Supreme Court could hear the case.

D.M. Bennett was imprisoned for mailing Cupid’s Yokes, a polemical pamphlet written by free-love advocate Ezra Heywood which promoted women’s rights and criticized Anthony Comstock and puritanical obscenity law. As an American citizen––and a passionate opponent of censorship––Bennett believed that he had the right to challenge the ill-defined Comstock Law and sell the pamphlet.

D.M. Bennett’s conviction and imprisonment became a cause célèbre for freethinkers and free-speech advocates. Authors, abolitionists, physicians, reformers, scientists and suffragists supported Bennett’s fight for freedom of the press. A petition with more than 200,000 names—the largest petition campaign of the 19th century––was sent to President Rutherford B. Hayes asking for a pardon for the elderly editor.

D.M. Bennett languished in the Albany Penitentiary where, despite suffering from the stigma attached to selling alleged

“obscenity” and near death from harsh prison conditions, he managed to write numerous unrepentant letters published in The Truth Seeker and later compiled in a book.

Robert G. Ingersoll––The Great Agnostic— tried to persuade his fellow Republican to pardon the gravely ill editor. The eminent attorney provided the president with a list of New York booksellers who openly sold the ubiquitous pamphlet. According to his presidential diary, Hayes was already aware that Cupid’s Yokes was sold “by the thousand” at bookstores.

On his annual spring visit to observe prison conditions at Albany Penitentiary, the Attorney General’s Acting Commissioner, C.K. Chase, informed Bennett that Attorney General Devens, and every man that was prominently connected with the government had pronounced his imprisonment a “gross outrage.” Chase added, “Yes, that is just the way it is; every man I know of connected with the government is in favor of your liberation, except the president, and him alone. The fact is, Bennett, the church is too strong for you; that influence has secured the cooperation of the president, and it is too strong for you.”

Chase was correct, “every man” was in favor of Bennett’s liberation. But not

the First Lady who was lobbying her “Ruddy” in the White House. Lucy Hayes––a devout Methodist known to have considerable influence over her husband— received advice from her pastor and a long petition from Sunday school students opposing a pardon. “There is great heat on both sides of the question,” Hayes wrote in his diary. “The religious world are against the pardon, the unbelievers are for it.”

The author of Cupid’s Yokes, Ezra Heywood, who had also been convicted and imprisoned, received a pardon from Hayes, yet the president refused to pardon a man who merely sold it.

On March 27, 1892—a decade after D.M. Bennett’s death—Hayes confessed in his diary: “I was never satisfied, as I would wish with the correctness of the result to which I came chiefly in deference to the courts. ‘Cupid’s Yokes’ was a freelove pamphlet of bad principles, and in bad taste, but Colonel Ingersoll had abundant reason for his argument that it was not, in the legal sense, ‘an obscene publication.’”

We firmly believe that D.M. Bennett deserves to be unequivocally exonerated for mailing a pamphlet which he did not write and was not obscene. Therefore, we are mounting a posthumous pardon campaign for the founder of The Truth Seeker.

When the innocent is convicted, The court is condemned.

American Freethought Documentary Series

American Freethought Documentary Series

AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

The four-part miniseries probing America’s atheist, freethought, and humanist heritage from the American Revolution to the 1930s. Produced by Roderick Bradford in association with the Council for Secular Humanism. Tom Flynn, Executive Producer. Funding provided by the James Hervey Johnson Charitable Educational Trust and the Center for Inquiry. Four DVDs (223 minutes) $39.99 and $49.99 for Blu-Ray.

The four-part miniseries probing America’s atheist, freethought, and humanist heritage from the American Revolution to the 1930s. Produced by Roderick Bradford in association with the Council for Secular Humanism. Tom Flynn, Executive Producer. Funding provided by the James Hervey Johnson Charitable Educational Trust and the Center for Inquiry.

Four DVDs (223 minutes) $39.99 and $49.99 for Blu-Ray. Send check or money order to roderick Bradford, P.O. Box 178213, San Diego, CA 92177 or pay with to rodbradford@gmail.com

Send check or money order to Roderick Bradford, 6655 La Jolla Blvd., #20, La Jolla, CA 92037 or pay with to rodbradford@gmail.com

www.AmericanFreethought.TV

www.AmericanFreethought.TV

“Rod Bradford’s film on the development of the American Freethought movement and Thomas Paine’s seminal role is a comprehensive, accurate, and illuminating work, masterfully told.”

“Rod Bradford’s film on the development of the American Freethought movement and Thomas Paine’s seminal role is a comprehensive, accurate, and illuminating work, masterfully told.”

– Gary Berton, Secretary of the thomaS Paine national hiStorical aSSociation

www.thomaSPaine.orG

D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker

D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker

THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE FOUNDER OF THE TRUTH SEEKER

DEROBIGNE MORTIMER BENNETT (1818-1882) was nineteenth-century America’s most blasphemous publisher and free-speech martyr. Based on original sources and extensively researched, this in-depth biography offers a fascinating glimpse into the turbulent Gilded Age. Bradford follows Bennett’s evolution from a devout member of the Shaker religious sect to an outspoken “infidel” during the dawn of the culture wars in America. He chronicles the circumstances that led to Bennett’s historically significant New York obscenity trial, his unjust imprisonment, and the monumental petition campaign for a pardon that went all the way to the White House. The cogent voice of the Truth Seeker and its preeminent position in the flourishing freethought movement is revealed along with Bennett’s association with authors, abolitionists, birth-control pioneers, suffragists, and spiritualists.

DEROBIGNE MORTIMER BENNETT (1818-1882) was nineteenth-century America’s most blasphemous publisher and free-speech martyr. Based on original sources and extensively researched, this in-depth biography offers a fascinating glimpse into the turbulent Gilded Age. Bradford follows Bennett’s evolution from a devout member of the Shaker religious sect to an outspoken “infidel” during the dawn of the culture wars in America. He chronicles the circumstances that led to Bennett’s historically significant New York obscenity trial, his unjust imprisonment, and the monumental petition campaign for a pardon that went all the way to the White House. The cogent voice of the Truth Seeker and its preeminent position in the flourishing freethought movement is revealed along with Bennett’s association with authors, abolitionists, birth-control pioneers, suffragists, and spiritualists.

“Roderick Bradford reintroduces a significant nineteenth-century reformer whom mainstream historians have unfairly neglected. D.M. Bennett was the most influential liberal publisher during America’s Golden Age of Freethought. Displaying a masterful command of the historical material, Bradford deftly rescues the memory of D.M. Bennett, truly an American none of us should forget.”

“Roderick Bradford reintroduces a significant nineteenth-century reformer whom mainstream historians have unfairly neglected. D.M. Bennett was the most influential liberal publisher during America’s Golden Age of Freethought. Displaying a masterful command of the historical material, Bradford deftly rescues the memory of D.M. Bennett, truly an American none of us should forget.”

— tom flynn, editor, Free InquIry maGazine and The new encyclopedIa oF unbelIeF

— tom flynn, editor, Free InquIry maGazine and The new encyclopedIa oF unbelIeF D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker. Hardcover, 412 pages. $30.00 (Signed by author upon request.) Send check or money order to Roderick Bradford, 6655 La Jolla Blvd., #20, La Jolla, CA 92037 or pay with to rodbradford@gmail.com

D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker. Hardcover, 412 pages. $30.00 (Signed by author upon request.) Send check or money order to roderick Bradford, P.O Box 178213, San Diego, CA. 92177 or pay with to rodbradford@gmail.com

Subscribe to The Truth Seeker

order to Roderick Bradford, 6655 La Jolla Blvd., #20, La Jolla, CA 92037. or pay with to rodbradford@gmail.com

www.thetruthseeker.net

– G ary B erton , S ecretary of the t homa S P aine n ational h i S torical a SS ociation

thoma SPaine or G