September-December 2023 TruthSeeker 150th

WORLD’S OLDEST MAGAZINE FOR FREETHINKERS FOUNDED BY D.M. BENNETT IN 1873

ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

The Truth Seeker subheading for several years beginning in 1903. DEAR READER,

“

T he T ru T h S eeker , at all events , is in for a year ’ s campaign , and we hope the intercourse with our readers may continue many years ,”

D.M. Bennett wrote on the front page of the premiere September 1873 issue. “Its publication,” he added, “is not entered into for the sole purpose of making money. We claim to be governed by higher motives and to be actuated by nobler impulses.”

D.M. Bennett and his wife Mary were the “we” living in Paris, Illinois when they published the first issue of The Truth Seeker. “Published by the Liberal Association of Paris, Ill” was prominently stated on the front page of their 8-page monthly. Unfortunately, the couple were the only Liberals in town. And four months later they moved to New York City where The Truth Seeker would be published for the next ninety years.

A century and a half later, we have come full circle. The “Association” includes your humble editor and The Truth Seeker’s creative director and imaginative designer, Francesca M. Smith.

In this, our 150th Anniversary Issue, we begin in the beginning with the first Truth Seeker — mostly written by D.M. Bennett

Since the publication has promoted science since 1873, we have an article about how religion shapes views on vaccines by Dr. Katie Corcoran, Bernard DiGregorio, and Chris Scheitle.

We couldn’t think of a freethought writer to profile in this issue more similar to D.M. Bennett than Joseph McCabe, the the ex-monk who spent twelve years in a Franciscan monastery. The Bennetts were also former devout Christians and members of the Shakers, a celibate religious sect.1 Historian and Joseph McCabe biographer Bill Cooke writes about the Catholic priest turned author-lecturer who hoped his epitaph to read: “He was a rebel to his last breath.”

In an excerpt from The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, renowned First Amendment attorney

Robert Corn-Revere revisits the rancorous rivalry between morals crusader Anthony Comstock and D.M. Bennett.2

Robert Ingersoll’s measured memorialization of Abraham Lincoln is the focus of a finely wrought essay by Justin Clark

From his new book Owning the Unknown, science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson explores atheism, agnosticism, and the idea of God.

In “Down to the River Jordan: The World the Enslaved Made,” Thomas Larson takes to task faith-based White Supremacists and the Florida Department of Education’s repugnant directive regarding the “personal benefits” of slavery.

We reprint tributes to Joseph McCabe and George Macdonald, the third editor of The Truth Seeker. Macdonald contributed an astonishing sixty-nine years of continuous writing for The Truth Seeker and was suitably described as “The Grand Old Man of Freethought.”

The Truth Seeker is the world’s oldest freethought publication and among only a half-dozen or so 19th-century American periodicals still in print.3 In its long and storied history spanning three centuries, it faced countless challenges and controversy. The Truth Seeker might have discontinued and faded into obscurity had it not been for James Hervey Johnson, a San Diego writer and subscriber since the 1930s. Mr. Johnson revered the publication’s historical significance and became the fifth editor in 1964.

Fortunately for freethinkers, The Truth Seeker and D.M. Bennett have received a much-deserved reprieve rather than ending up in the ash heap of history. Today, The Truth Seeker continues thanks to Mr. Johnson’s generous bequest and his commitment to the cause. TS

1. D.M. Bennett was a member of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (Shakers as they were commonly known) for thirteen years to the day. Mary Wicks was a Shaker for twenty two years.

2. In 2003, attorney Corn-Revere obtained the first posthumous pardon in New York history for Lenny Bruce. The comedian was convicted in 1964 for the same “crime” of obscenity as D.M. Bennett in 1879. After his unjust conviction, the editor of The Truth Seeker served eleven months in the Albany Penitentiary.

3. In 1873 Mrs. Bennett named The Truth Seeker and played a seminal role in its founding and during the first decade of publication in New York City. After D.M. Bennett’s death in 1882, Mary Wicks Bennett succeeded her husband and became one of the first female publishers during the 19th century –– and perhaps the only female publisher of an American periodical still in print.

RELIGION

By Dr. Katie Corcoran, Bernard DiGregorio, and Chris Scheitle

Thomas Larson

Wilson

Charles Smith/Woolsey Teller

RELIGI N SHAPES VACCINE VIEWS – BUT HOW EXACTLY? Our analysis looks at ideas about God and beliefs about the Bible

By Dr. Katie Corcoran, Bernard DiGregorio, and Chris Scheitle

M any scientists and public health officials were surprised that large swaths of the public were hesitant or outright hostile toward coVid-19 Vaccines . “ i ne V er saw that co M ing ,” Francis Collins, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, commented in 2022. Even today, three years after the start of the pandemic, about 1 in 5 Americans have not received a single dose of any COVID-19 vaccine.

What could be the reason for such widespread vaccine hesitancy? When it comes to skepticism toward vaccines, religion is often cited as an important factor. As sociologists researching the role of religion in vaccine attitudes and behaviors, we have found that the religion-vaccine connection is significant, but much more nuanced than simple stereotypes assume.

Both religious life and vaccine views are complex. A person’s religion cannot be boiled down to just one thing. It includes an identity, a place of worship and a variety of beliefs and practices. Each of these components can have its own distinct effect on vaccine attitudes and behaviors.

Attitudes toward vaccines are complicated, as well. Someone’s feelings about vaccines in general might

differ from their feelings about one specific type of vaccine, for instance.

To help make sense of this complexity, we surveyed a representative sample of 2,000 U.S. adults in May 2021 about their religious identities, beliefs, behaviors and their attitudes toward a number of scientific issues, including vaccines. This sample included individuals across many religious traditions, as well as people who do not affiliate with any religion. However, Christians represented the bulk of the sample, given their larger share of the American population, and so our research focuses heavily on on their views.

BIBLE BELIEFS

One part of religious life that social scientists are often interested in is people’s views of the Bible. For example, does someone think of the Bible as the literal word of God; inspired by God, but not literally true; or as an ancient book of legends, history and moral codes that has no divine source?

When it comes to skepticism toward vaccines, religion is often cited as an important factor.

We found that respondents who see the Bible as either the “inspired” or “the actual word of God” were less likely to see vaccines in general – not the COVID-19 vaccine in particular – as safe and effective, compared with those who see the Bible as just a book of history and morality created by humans. All else being equal, those who said that the Bible is the literal word of God, for instance, scored 18% higher on our measure of general vaccine skepticism than those who see the Bible as having no divine source or inspiration.

Although such literalist views might be found at higher rates in particular religious traditions, such as evangelical Protestantism, we found that an individual’s religious tradition itself did not make much of a difference. An evangelical Protestant and a Catholic, for instance, would be predicted to have similar attitudes toward vaccines if they share the same view of the Bible.

In contrast, when we asked similar questions specifically about COVID-19 vaccines, we found that an individual’s religious tradition is what matters the most. Protestants — both those who identify as evangelical and those who do not — express more skepticism toward the COVID-19 vaccines than respondents from other religious traditions and nonreligious respondents.

GOD AND COUNTRY

In additional studies, we have attempted to identify the reasons for these patterns. That is, why does one’s view of the Bible or one’s religious tradition matter when it comes to vaccine attitudes and behaviors?

One factor could be Christian nationalism, which has been increasingly visible in the public sphere since Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. Christian nationalism is described by sociologists of religion Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry as an ideology that

One factor could be Christian nationalism, which has been increasingly visible in the public sphere since Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency.

advocates for the fusion of Christianity with American politics and public life.

For example, Americans who hold a Christian nationalist ideology tend to agree when surveys ask them whether the federal government “should declare the United States a Christian nation.” In our own survey, we found that individuals’ responses to that statement are strongly correlated with their willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

We asked for respondents’ level of agreement or disagreement with that statement on a 5-point scale. A 1-point increase in agreement meant someone was 17% less likely to have received or plan to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Although not exclusive to Protestants, adherence to Christian nationalist ideology is more prominent among this group — especially among its more conservative or evangelical traditions.

nother of our studies focused on how people view God. Our data showed that simply believing there is a God, or a higher power that supervises the world, does not make an individual less likely to have received the COVID-19 vaccine. On the other hand, believing that God can and will actively intervene in the world does make a difference. According to our analysis, with all else being equal, we would expect those with the lowest belief in an intervening higher power to be vaccinated, or intend to get vaccinated, 88% of the time. In contrast, we would expect those with the highest belief in an intervening higher power to be vaccinated, or intend to be, 73% of the time.

In addition, our data shows that belief in parareligious phenomena — including New Ageism, occultism, psychism and spiritualism — is also significantly associated with a reduced likelihood of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. We used a 5-point parareligoius belief scale, with a 1-point increase in an individual’s belief in parareligious phenomena being associated with a 40% decrease in the likelihood of having received a COVID-19 vaccine.

Once we accounted for higher rates of conspiratorial belief and distrust in science among respon-

dents who believe in parareligious phenomena, however, this vaccine gap was reduced. This suggests that those underlying factors help explain why more people who believe in parareligious phenomena are skeptical toward vaccines.

All of these studies demonstrate that he link between religion and vaccine attitudes is neither simple nor uniform. Public health campaigns that target faith communities would do well to keep this in mind.

DR. KATIE CORCORAN is Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University and received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington as well as an M.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in International Studies (Comparative Religion). Dr. Corcoran has published articles in journals such as Social Science Research, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Forum, the British Journal of Social Psychology, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Rationality and Society and recently published the book Religious Hostility: A Global Assessment of Hatred and Terror with Rodney Stark.

BERNARD DIGREGORIO is a Ph.D. Student in Sociology at West Virginia University and received his BA in sociology with a minor in computer science from Duquesne University in 2018, and his MA in sociology from West Virginia University in 2020. He currently works as a Graduate Research Assistant in the SOCA department. His broad interests include, but are not limited to, the sociology of religion, the sociology of mental health, crime and deviance, religious victimization, sociological theory, and group dynamics.

CHRIS SCHEITLE is Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. His research examines the social structure and dynamics of religion in the United States, with, a focus on religion and science, religious discrimination and victimization and, last, innovations in how religion is organized in the United States. Scheitle’s most recent book is Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think. He has been awarded four research grants from the National Science Foundation.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/us

In addition, our data shows that belief in parareligious phenomena — including New Ageism, occultism, psychism and spiritualism — is also significantly associated with a reduced likelihood of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.

TS

WORLD’S OLDEST MAGAZINE FOR FREETHINKERS FOUNDED

The survival of most religions depends upon their ability to suppress, destroy, or discourage human freedom. We have intelligence, truth, science, justice, honesty, and a desire for human advancement and happiness on our side.

J ames H ervey J o H nson

1901–1988

BY D.M. BENNETT IN 1873

Down to the River Jordan: The World the Enslaved Made

Before the Florida Department of Education issued its curriculum directive this past summer that slavery in the United States produced “personal benefits” for the enslaved in the form of a well-stocked resumé of trades, useful after Emancipation in 1863, the board members might have consulted a seminal document in the literature of the oppressed — Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.”

These days we’ve rightly exchanged the conditional designation, “slave,” for enslaved person. Fifty years ago, Davis prophesied this nominative shift; she cataloged how Black women resisted the shackles. Among the first scholars to gather the evidence, she argued that a woman (daughter, mother, wife) was equal to a man in undermining the slaveholder, surreptitiously and openly, at her peril. “If she was burned, hanged, broken on the wheel, her head paraded on poles before her brothers and sisters, she must have also felt the wedge of this counter-insurgence as a fact of her daily existence.”

Where did the woman’s skill in improvising defiance using wiles and deceit come from? Obviously,

By Thomas Larson

such resistance wasn’t taught by any master or wife and was not read to her from a chapter on treachery in the McGuffey Reader. Her refusal to kowtow lies in the organic ingenuity and duplicity oppressed people adopt. Any “personal benefit” was invented on the spot by and for her, her family, and her community.

According to Davis, here’s some of the devious tactics women parlayed against the master and his mistress: poisoning food and medicine with subtle folk remedies; fawning praise and obsequity to earn and undermine trust; caretaking children with moral instruction and compassion (in opposition to the depravity of their slaver parents); disrupting schedules and household tasks; pilfering, breaking tools, burning the oatmeal, fouling crops, slowing work details, exercising indolence, and exacting all sorts of domestic sabotage.

Some women rebelled outright. They started fires in homes and outbuildings as payback or as cover for revolts. They hid runaways and staffed escape routes. They coached children how to feign illness. And a few killed their babies, their beloveds, rather than have them endure a life of forced labor.

If the master tried to “take” her sexually, she viciously attacked him. Much written and oral testimony backs this up — the violence waged against carnal conquest, and the mental strain Black mothers faced when trapped between raising children (mulatto, maroon) and seeking favor or retribution with the “fathers.” This managing of her choiceless condition was often met by cruelty from a slaveholder’s wife who may have been raped herself.

A few historians before Davis (Herbert Aptheker was one) wrote of the skills at insurgency developed by U.S. slaves. Today, we recognize how resistance was practiced by women, their opportunities perhaps more available than the men’s — in the field, in the house, on the underground railroad, and in the domestic survival of an enslaved family.

But these things are hardly what the Florida educators mean by “personal benefits.” No, theirs is a policy fashioned by authoritarian conservatives — white nationalists gaslighting history — as racial propaganda. They are speaking to parents who think “fairmindedness” is in order when teaching American slavery to their children; they, the right wing, will play any (perverse) race card to rehabilitate the slavers and refuel the South’s Lost Cause.

Some contemporary white apologists seek to redefine slavery as an “issue” of a well-meaning rabble whose forebears designed the practice and weren’t that bad or even all bad. Human slavers must have some back-pocket redemption built into their patronage. Surely, there were kind masters here and there, a doting mistress of home and hearth, who taught an enslaved woman to read, to ride a horse, to decorate a supper table, to treasure keepsakes, to sew nightgowns, and to speak the King’s English. Surely.

Isn’t it true that such benevolence meant real human progress? Florida’s fair-minded argue that eventually freed Africans were given tenant farming as a means of moneyed indenture. Though the advance was very slow, the manumitted did receive schooling, literacy, gun rights, the vote for Black men, as well as segregated public accommodations, including toilets, transportation, hotels, swimming pools, parks, plus their own towns and business districts (leaving aside the Tulsa race massacre of 1923 that destroyed Black Wall Street). And the most astonishing consequence of working people to the bone: Africans in the South-

ern states, birthed a world-renowned artistic child — blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, soul — which we now regard as the core of American music. Surely, some of these developments were positive, even though Jim Crow laws stalled progress for more than a century with legal challenges and political violence.

Such logic of the Trumpian, Orwellian, revisionist variety, which enables suffering and dilutes its involvement, is fuzzy, full of holes, and a source, for me, of sardonic humor.

Of course, the pedophile priest was nice to his altar boy at first. Of course, a kind hangman granted a last sumptuous meal to the leader of a slave rebellion. Of course, Primo Levi’s captors in Auschwitz used his expertise as a PhD. chemist in an on-site lab producing synthetic rubber, though his luck was not shared by most of the 1.1 million, his fellow prisoners, who were murdered in that camp alone. And, of course, poets and proletarians chained to walls in gulags during Stalin’s Great Terror from 1936 to 1937 confessed to themselves, in unison, “Now, during my show trial, detention, and torture, isn’t there an opportunity here for me to learn some survival skills?”

2

It’s purely specious, with or without sarcasm, to to claim that the extremes of suffering produce noble outcomes. And yet the assertion has a pedigree. Rudyard Kipling wrote that the British absorption of the nonwhite races into the Empire was the “White Man’s Burden.” In the poem, he lectures England’s conscripted imperialists to “Send forth the best ye breed / To serve your captives’ need, / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” How incongruous a contrast of the Native’s character: a fiendish being lodged in an untutored child.

Dinesh D’Souza, the Indian American heir of Kipling’s call and rightwing agitator, once told me that he thanked God for India’s subjugation because he was taught Western Civilization by the mannered overlords, not to mention lessons in the glorious English language. If D’Souza’s belief was commonly held in In-

Opposite “SLAVES WAITING FOR SALE, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA” 1861 PAINTING BY EYRE CROWE (1824-1910) PD-US, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

Fifty years ago, Davis prophesied this nominative shift; she cataloged how Black women resisted the shackles.

dia, then revolts against the British occupiers would have arisen by those who wished to keep English rule. Check the pacifist resistance of Gandhi: staying part Brit wasn’t part of his agenda.

And yet, while freeing a nation of its political abusers may have been one solution, it hardly explains the mind-manacles of Christian conversion particularly in the American South. There, bondage was designed, in part, as a religious mission to save the vulnerable souls of the inferiors, before and after Emancipation.

The history of enslavement in the United States is chockablock with people who cited the Bible’s assertions that the “peculiar institution” was moral and divinely ordered. Jefferson Davis said, “Slavery was established by decree of Almighty God. It is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation.” As if that’s all it took to legitimize owning humans! Most slaveholders justified the system via Leviticus, where, it’s claimed, Jews have the “right” to own people like property and to free them, at will, for good deeds, or to keep them and their progeny forever. The Apostle Paul, Augustine, and St. John Chrysostom each taught that when bondsmen and bondswomen obeyed their masters, they were obeying God. Whether their subjects believed in that God or not was irrelevant.

In the New Testament, 1 Timothy 6:1-2, we find the enslaved repositioned as servants, a class distinction: “Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort.” 1 Timothy 6 goes on to say that such intentions are fundamental to Christ’s teachings. Louis W. Cable in his essay, “Slavery and the Bible,” noted that in Matthew 10:24-25, “Jesus not only reminds slaves that they are never above their master, he, actually, recommends that they strive to be like him.”

I find the language in 1 Timothy 6 (King James version) to be especially revealing: For one, the phrase “his doctrine be not blasphemed” suggests that Christian doctrine had been blasphemed, countered by unbelievers. (We are speaking of a master/servant system, of “slaves” in Judah, nearly 2,000 years ago.) Note, too, that servants should accept the masters but only if the masters evince belief in a vengeful God and a redemptive Christ. Thus, in another hypocrisy, if the believing masters are saved, then they are brothers to the enslaved, who will “partake of the [masters’] benefit.”

There’s that nasty little word again, reshaped by Florida’s Department of Education for public-school consumption: The white man’s burden is to Christianize the indigenous — for their benefit. Force-feed them the master’s religion. Attach their conversion to the gift of brotherhood. And brotherhood does not dissolve bondage but gathers the benighted person into Christ’s mercy. Forget about their earthly tribulation. Body and soul are saved. The result is, faith-based White Supremacists still insist that Black history in the New World is less about African Americans’ legal freedom and more about their salvation from sin.

This “fake news” about “freedom” is among the greatest paradoxes in human history. To make enslaved people accept a religion that promises liberation (“When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, the walls come a-tumbling down”) based on a mythical guide Southern deplorables used to justify slavery. Barred from learning to read, Africans were given Bible lessons orally by White ministers — tales of faith-based liberty from “the talking book,” as it was called by those who couldn’t read and yet gleaned some succor from the telling. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a truly fair-minded author lingers on the contradiction between Christian manipulation and compassion of which the latter he could abide.

What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.

How should we think about Douglass as well as the enchained masses who find value in Christ’s message? Was the adoption of its tenets slow, practical, superstitious? Why take on any doctrine favored by the slavers?

Some contemporary white apologists seek to redefine slavery as an “issue” of a wellmeaning rabble whose forebears designed the practice and weren’t that bad or even all bad.

Did the stories of Christ’s goodwill fill a moral longing?

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, thought “Negroes” were temperamentally docile; they relished like infants the story of Jesus as a lamb who fought against the wolves. Douglass valued Christ as a harbinger of nonviolence; Stowe accepted that Black woe was assuaged by worshipping a person who had suffered as they had. Both positions have been central to Black liberation for centuries. To what degree this new system of thought, enlivened by fables and folklore, arose from psychological indoctrination or choiceless participation or genuine faith is hard to say.

Christianizing Africans took its sweet time. First, the West African traditions had to be wiped out, during or after the Middle Passage; Igbo, Yoruba, and Ashanti sects, which were quite diverse, withered for three reasons: they were forbidden to practice their former rituals; they were exhausted on their “given” day of rest, nursing wounds and hunger; and they were often coerced to convert or else endure further hardship.

As we’ve seen, the enslaved needed spiritual guidance as much as their masters did. A level playing field? Hardly. (When a few white Christians woke up and conceded that the cruelty of bondage far outweighed its salvational hocus-pocus, the abolitionist movement was born.)

Over a couple generations, the assembly of worship service and political meeting grew, though the latter was universally feared by the masters. According to the writings of Henry Louis Gates and William Barber II, secretive religious assemblies might parrot revolts described in the Bible, for one, the Moses-led escape by the Israelites from Egyptian captivity: “Tell all the pharaohs to / Let my people go.” In the previous century, the less radical and quieter congregations became the Black church — a place where song would give cover for discussions about uprisings, metaphorically loud yet politically muted. The Black church and Emancipation intersected at just the right time.

Willam Barber II has labeled this congress of joy and sorrow, the “freedom church.” In an essay written for Four Hundred Souls, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, he notes that the first Black Baptist churches in America emphasized less “the individual’s decision to recognize their need for God’s grace and accept Christ for themselves” and more “a freedom church that interrupted the lies of racism.”

Early on, church members avoided branding white men for those lies (though their guilt was obvious) and switched to allegories of subterfuge and redirection to make their case. To iterate Davis’s point, Black women sharpened the resistance with domestic deceitfulness.

A freedom church engendered African musicians to reset the rhythms of European song to accompany work and worship, and with such art stressed the solidarity of the group over the salvation of the individual. Freedom church was like a conference of revolutionaries who also sang and danced. Fighting the “lies of racism” with worship, music, and call-and-response sermons was not a benefit of slavery and the Whites’ two-faced religion. Rather, it was an indigenous creation of Black culture, which, sui generis, bore a kind of internal genius (which Jews knew in Europe for centuries) for building lasting

The history of enslavement in the United States is chockablock with people who cited the Bible’s assertions that the “peculiar institution” was moral and divinely ordered.

institutions — of churches and hymns and texts and choirs, grounded in ecstatic vocal expression from W.E.B. DuBois to Maya Angelou, from Nina Simone to John Legend — in rough likenesses to their overlords. To what end? To fit into the dominant American church-going culture, to sweeten it and to undermine it.

To conclude: We cannot say slavery is essential to a redeemed, and redeemable, Western identity. Some sins are forgivable; human bondage, the crime of crimes, is not. The world that forced slavery into existence and the world that arose in opposition is succinctly characterized by Toni Morrison: “The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamor of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt.”

Which is to say: It’s the psychological and physical damage endured by captured Africans, child laborers, the disabled, the uneducated, the short-lived, over generations, that fosters those by-any-means-neces

tive human resourcefulness of a wide range of insurgents who fought with hand and mind what Angela Davis defines as “male supremacist structures.”

Is this what Florida officials are educationally avoiding because it explains the historical mission of male-imposed slavery, which, like a redoubt on the coast, must be guarded at all costs? Imagine a curriculum built on the benefits accrued by Black women, by a Black community, and a Black freedom church. In short, it would be the story of how enslaved persons took responsibility, built agency, and freed themselves — no thanks to Whites. Which reminds me of a core tenet in the Republican and Floridian mindset: You, stuck in poverty and despair, pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps!

Journalist, book/music critic, and memoirist THOMAS

LARSON is the author of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry (Swallow Press), The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease (Hudson Whitman), The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ (Pegasus Press), and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Swallow Press). He is a twenty-five-year staff writer of San Diego Reader, an editor at Wandering Aengus Press, and a former faculty member in the Ashland (Ohio) University MFA Program. He works privately with authors on nonfiction manuscripts.

Photo by Casey Horner@Unsplash.com

WATSON HESTON EDITORIAL CARTOON ON FRONT PAGE TRUTH SEEKER, DECEMBER 14, 1892.

DOES GOD EXIST?

Maybe That’s the Wrong Question

By Robert Charles Wilson

Why did Bible stories, presented as fact, feature so many of the hallmarks of fantasy — miracles, apparitions both demonic and angelic, covenants negotiated with cosmic powers?

I was a week away from my thIrteenth bIrthday when I f I rst attended a church funct I on voluntar I ly and without the company of my parents. It was a Wednesday night in December, the weather in the Toronto suburb where we lived was cold and getting colder, and I walked the three blocks from our house to the local Baptist church at a brisk pace, pausing only once or twice to kick at the crusts of ice that had begun to congeal on curbside puddles.

I wasn’t ordinarily enthusiastic about church or anything connected with it. I managed to sit through Sunday services without complaining — usually — but I had resisted Sunday school so often and so vocally that my parents finally let me skip it altogether. But this occasion was different. What had lured me out into the chilly night was the promise of a display of ultraviolet fluorescence.

Two Sundays ago I had spotted an announcement in the mimeographed bulletin tucked into the pews next to the Bibles and the hymn books. The subject was

something about gospel stories for children and teens, but it was the line promising “a glow-in-the-dark black light presentation” that caused my own eyes to light up. I was a precocious reader, already fascinated by anything related to science, and lately I had been reading about the physics of light, possibly in one of Isaac Asimov’s science guides for general readers. And although there was much I didn’t understand, I had successfully grasped the concept of ultraviolet light — that is, light of a frequency beyond the visible spectrum, a kind of light human eyes can’t see. And I knew UV light would cause certain dyes to fluoresce in glowing, gaudy colors. This was the mid-1960s, a few years before black-light Jimi Hendrix posters became a fixture in the bedrooms of suburban teenagers, and I was determined to see the phenomenon for myself, even if it came at the price of a sermon.

I bounded up the church stairs, left my winter jacket on a peg in the cloak room, and followed a trail of handmade signs to a meeting room off the main chapel

where folding chairs had been set up in front of an easel. A pair of amiable adults — maybe the resident Sunday school teachers; I didn’t recognize them — glanced at the wall clock and eventually introduced themselves to the gathered multitude, about a dozen adolescents including myself. Most of the attendees were around my own age, and only a few seemed enthusiastic about what was to come. But we dutifully took our seats when we were asked to.

The doors were closed. The presentation began. Disappointment immediately set in. Propped on the easel

al terms: a cosmic being makes contact with Earth by sending an emissary disguised as a human child. It was a neat enough idea. It reminded me of a John Wyndham paperback I had recently read, Village of the Damned, in which aliens plant their hybrid offspring in the wombs of unsuspecting women in a small English town — though this version would have to be called Village of the Blessed. The premise was good, I thought, although the Gospel narrative that followed from it was more than a little confusing. But I wasn’t here for the storytelling. I was here to see the world made incandes-

was a flannel board. Flannel boards, also called flannelgraphs, were visual aids then (and apparently still) popular with evangelical Sunday schools. The board was covered with a swatch of fuzzy cloth to which fabric cutouts of Bible characters could be affixed for the purpose of illustrating a story. Tonight’s story, unsurprisingly, was the Nativity. For several interminable minutes the two youth evangelists escorted a slightly threadbare Joseph and Mary from one palm-tree-and-donkey miseen-scène to the next. No black light. I was on the verge of raising an objection — false advertising! — until we reached the manger, the star, the wise men from the east. That was when a girl at the back of the room was delegated to turn off the overhead lights.

One of the teachers switched on a UV source mounted over the easel, and the Star of Bethlehem promptly lit up like a plum-colored supernova. So did the manger, the holy family, the magi, their gifts; so did various loose threads, dust specks, and stitched hems on our shirts and shoes. The woman at the flannelgraph wore a hairband that radiated a blue glow like an icy halo.

I knew how this worked. Energetic but invisible UV photons struck chemical compounds in the dyed fabric like incoming ordnance, causing the atoms to kick out new photons at a lower, visible energy level. The result was this wonderfully ghostly coral-reef radiance. The Nativity story itself was infinitely less interesting, familiar not just from church but from school pageants and the Christmas specials that aired on television every year around this time. I was already a science fiction reader, though not a particularly sophisticated one, and I understood the Nativity in science-fiction-

cent by invisible radiation.

And so it was, though it ended all too soon. The overhead lights were switched on. The flannelgraph morphed back into a low-rent Sunday-school prop. The woman with the radiant hairband took a seat, and the man who had helped her narrate the story smiled and asked whether we had any questions.

I raised my hand. He nodded at me.

I stood up. “Bees,” I said, collecting my thoughts.

“Bees?”

“Did you know they can see ultraviolet light? Bees, I mean. They have eyes that can see ultraviolet light. It helps them find flowers.”

Someone giggled. The teacher thanked me for that interesting information and looked pointedly for another raised hand. I sat back down, blushing. All this was followed soon enough by an invitation to commit our lives to Christ.

Altar calls inevitably made me uncomfortable, whether in church or at the climax of the Billy Graham rallies my parents watched on TV. I didn’t understand them. The smiling adult standing at the flannel board seemed well-intentioned, but it was as if he wanted me to sign a contract I hadn’t read or buy a product I wasn’t sure I wanted. So I slumped in my chair, hoping not to be noticed, and when that tactic failed I pled the necessity of a bathroom call, rescued my jacket from the cloakroom, and escaped into the December night.

Snow had started to fall. Fat, perfect snowflakes danced to gusts of wind, made gauzy circles around streetlights, blurred the lenses of my glasses. The bees had all gone wherever bees go in winter, but I wondered

I was already a science fiction reader, though not a particularly sophisticated one, and I understood the Nativity in science-fictional terms: a cosmic being makes contact with Earth by sending an emissary disguised as a human child..

what a bee might see on a night like this. What I had said was true: bees and many other insects are sensitive to ultraviolet light, and flowers that have evolved to attract pollinating insects often display patterns invisible to human eyes. (I imagined petals lit up in luminous grids, like cities seen at night from an airplane.) Did crystals of snow, too, scatter light in colors beyond purple? Was this blanket of monochromatic whiteness, for some other creature, a glittering rainbow?

I was happy enough with the evening, though it taught me I shouldn’t entirely trust announcements in church bulletins. Whatever the intentions of the smiling and soft-spoken youth evangelists who conducted the session, I had been granted at least a quick glimpse of the world beyond its visible limits, a token of a realm not ordinarily available to human senses. (It didn’t occur to me then that the evangelists might have described their faith the same way.)

But the event left other questions in my mind, more troubling ones. Why did so many people want me to hold a certain opinion about God, and to declare that opinion publicly? Why did Bible stories, presented as fact, feature so many of the hallmarks of fantasy — miracles, apparitions both demonic and angelic, covenants negotiated with cosmic powers? What exactly was I being asked to believe, and why did it matter? I didn’t mind singing along with the hymns on Sunday — or at least mouthing the words and pretending

— but if someone were to ask the question directly, how would I answer it? Did I believe in God? Or was I that unmentionable thing, an atheist? *

No one knows when the existence of God was first asserted or denied, but the question has probably been asked about some conception of a divine being for as long as human beings have had the capacity to ask it. Most if not all of our familiar religious faiths began as rebellions against or amendments to earlier orthodoxies and priesthoods, which means that atheism — in the broadest sense of the rejection of some particular conception of a divine being — is inseparable from the history of religion and arguably just as venerable.

The pharaoh Amenhotep IV came to power in Egypt around the year 1351 BC, at a time when Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty was the ancient Near East’s dominant cultural and military power. The kingdom he inherited was blessed, or burdened, with a wildly diverse system of polytheistic beliefs. Egyptians of the day worshipped a confusing pantheon of deities — Isis, Anubis, Osiris, among many others — whose priesthoods competed for the patronage of the powerful and the wealthy. Amenhotep’s reign began conventionally enough, but after five years on the throne, he made the decision to consolidate power in a wholly radical way: by establishing a new religion with himself as its divine head. He changed

A BUST OF AMENHOTOP IV / AKHENATEN IN THE LUXOR MUSEUM, EGYPT. PAUL MANNIX AND MUNTUWANDI, CC-BY-2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

Akhenaten, we might say, had placed himself in a relation of atheism to these prior gods.

his pharaonic name to Akhenaten, elevated the relatively obscure sun god Aten to a central place in his cosmology, ordered shrines to Aten built in various Egyptian cities, and began construction of an entirely new capital, Akhetaten, at an uninhabited spot on the Nile halfway between Cairo and Luxor — today a dusty archeological site called Amarna, where the limestone and mudbrick ruins of the ancient city bake in summer heat that regularly approaches 40 degrees Celsius. And in the ninth year of his reign, at the apex of his power, Akhenaten declared Aten to be not just the greatest of the gods, but the only god. He further declared that he himself was Aten’s son and that Egyptians would henceforth worship Aten by way of worshipping Akhenaten.

“The history of ancient Egypt,”the historian Anne Applebaum has written, “looks, from a great distance in time, like a monotonous story of interchangeable pharaohs. But on closer examination, it includes periods of cultural lightness and eras of despotic gloom.” A statue preserved in the Egyptian Museum of Cairo makes the youthful Akhenaten appear benign, even amiable — but that’s what court artists are hired for. In fact, his reign was gloomily despotic by almost any definition. At Akhenaten’s command, according to historian Jonathan Kirsch, “the shrines and temples of rival deities were closed, the rituals of worship were suppressed, the statues that symbolized the other deities were shattered, and their

names and images were literally chiseled off the stone monuments of ancient Egypt. The high priest of Amon, whose services were no longer needed, was put to work in a stone quarry like a common slave.”

Akhenaten, we might say, had placed himself in a relation of atheism to these prior gods. If he didn’t entirely deny their existence, he at least claimed that the old gods had grown toothless and ineffectual; their time had come and gone. But in the end, despite all the destruction he wreaked, Akhenaten’s forcible reformation failed. After his death the old gods made a hasty comeback. Akhenaten’s first major successor, the pharaoh Tutankhamun — “King Tut,” whose nearly intact tomb was famously unearthed by the British archeologist Howard Carter in 1922 — moved the royal court back to Thebes and chose for himself a name that honored Amun, the most popular of the gods whose worship Akhenaten had targeted for extinction. The pharaohs who followed Tutankhamun continued his restoration, and Seti I, the first pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty, ordered the name of Amun chiseled back onto the monuments from which it had been effaced. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias” was inspired by a different pharaoh (Ramesses II), but the poet could as easily have been describing Akhenaten and the sun-wracked ruins of modern Amarna when he wrote,

The nineteenth-century American writer and political figure Robert G. Ingersoll — a Civil War veteran, Republican kingmaker, and self-declared agnostic, famous for his scandalous but popular lectures on the follies of religion — made that argument at length in an essay called “The Gods”.”

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL (1833-1899). BRADY-HANDY “THE INFIDEL” PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. COLORIZED VERSION © 2015 RODERICK BRADFORD.

n oth I ng bes I de rema I ns . r ound the decay o f that colossal wreck , boundless and bare t he lone and level sands stretch far away

There are many morals to this story. The most obvious is that human history is littered with the debris of discarded gods, a truth more than one atheist has used to belabor an opponent. The nineteenth-century American writer and political figure Robert G. Ingersoll — a Civil War veteran, Republican kingmaker, and self-declared agnostic, famous for his scandalous but popular lectures on the follies of religion — made that argument at length in an essay called “The Gods.” “Each nation has created a god,” Ingersoll declared, “and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own. . . . All these gods have insisted upon having a vast number of priests, and the priests have always insisted upon being supported by the people, and the principal business of these priests has been to boast about their god, and to insist that he could easily vanquish all the other gods put together.” This is true, and funny — the whole lecture is available online and well worth reading — but is it helpful?

Christians will object that gods like Aten and Amun are nothing like the God of Christianity, and in an important sense they’re right, but let’s see if we can tease another truth out of the story, one that won’t immediately provoke an argument. One thing we notice is that the gods, even insurgent gods like Akhenaten’s, don’t arise de novo. Gods are born of other gods, or are defined in relation to them. Aten was a minor sun deity for centuries — the name appears in the Abusir Papyri, dated to around the twenty-fourth century BC — before Akhenaten promoted him to the center of the universe, and the gods Aten temporarily displaced have long histories of their own, their own eras of relative favor and disfavor. What may seem at first glance like religious innovations are seldom actually new. In the Book of Genesis we find traces of an earlier Hebrew polytheism; the Christian gospels place Jesus squarely in the context of Judaic law and prophecy; Islam acknowledges Moses and Jesus as prophets; the Book of Mormon mimics the prose of the King James Bi-

ble, and so ad seriatim. Archeological digs in Shaanxi Province in China have found tombs dated to circa 4500–3750 BC in which the dead were buried along with earthly goods, suggesting a belief in an afterlife; during the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC), there was a flourishing pantheon of major and minor deities. In Europe and the Middle East we find evidence of religious practices as old as the Middle Paleolithic period, arguably including Neanderthal sites. There is no historical moment to which we can point and say, “Here begins religion.” Religion has existed, in other words, for as long as modern humans have walked the earth, and possibly longer. And the equally venerable tradition of punishing religious dissent, whether or not we call that dissent “heresy,” suggests that religion plays an important role in the way human communities define themselves and police their cultural and political boundaries.

In other words, the ubiquity and persistence of religion has shaped the way we think and talk about it. This is as true in the twenty-first century as it was in Akhenaten’s day. In the contemporary West our way of talking about God has been shaped by a complex set of influences, from pagan philosophy to the Catholic Magisterium, from Plato to Thomas Aquinas to David Hume, from the Renaissance to the Reformation to the Age of Enlightenment. This is the theater in which the dialogue between theism and atheism customarily takes place, this is the language it speaks, and this is where we stand when we add our voices to that debate.

Excerpt from Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God by Robert Charles Wilson. Reprinted with permission from Pitchstone Books. https://www.pitchstonebooks.com/

ISBN-10 : 1634312422, ISBN-13 : 978-1634312424

Format: paperback. Page count: 216 pages.

(September 26, 2023)

ROBERT CHARLES WILSON has been writing science fiction since the publication of his first novel, A Hidden Place, in 1986. His novels include Darwinia, Blind Lake, and Spin, which received numerous awards, including the Hugo Award, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), the Kurd Lasswitz Prize (Germany), and the Seiun Award ( Japan). His short fiction has been collected in The Perseids and Other Stories. He lives near Toronto with his wife, Sharry.

Altar calls inevitably made me uncomfortable, whether in church or at the climax of the Billy Graham rallies my parents watched on TV.

The Gentlest Memory of Our World”:

Robert Ingersoll and the Memorialization of Abraham Lincoln

By Justin Clark

The task of the historian is to notice the difference between myth and reality, but in a countervailing twist, recognize the historical importance of the development of myths.

A br A h A m L inco L n is one of the most writtenAbout subjects in ALL of history; thousAnds of books, articles, and speeches have been published on his life and legacy. As such, there is an interesting interplay between history and memory that manifests whenever the sixteenth president is discussed. Historian David Herbert Donald, one of the foremost Lincoln scholars of the 20th century, wrote in his essay, “The Folklore Lincoln,” that “the Lincoln cult is almost an American religion. It has its high priests in the Lincoln ‘authorities’ and its worshippers in the thousands of ‘fans’ who think, talk, and read Lincoln every day.” What we know about him is interpolated through decades of stories, recollections, and reflections that separate Lincoln the man from the Lincoln the myth. None of this is necessarily wrong, as all historical figures are subject to mythologizing and memorialization. The task

of the historian is to notice the difference between myth and reality, but in a countervailing twist, recognize the historical importance of the development of myths. One such figure that mythologized Lincoln while humanizing him was the orator Robert Green Ingersoll. Among the most sought-after public speakers and intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, Ingersoll is best remembered today for his excoriating lectures on religion. Known as the “Great Agnostic,” Ingersoll became the outstanding leader of the “Golden Age of Freethought,” an era after the Civil War and before World War I that saw a groundswell of religious criticism and secular activism. But his lectures, which were attended by thousands over the decades, were not limited to merely the religious. In fact, he spoke on a variety of subjects, from William Shakespeare to the history of the United States. As a veteran of the Civil War, Ingersoll’s

Photo by Chris Hardy@Unsplash.com

life deeply intertwined with arguably the most important event in the history of nineteenth century America.

His memorialization of Lincoln and the Civil War era started in earnest within a matter of years after the war ended. In September of 1876, Ingersoll delivered one of his most influential speeches in Indianapolis, of which a part is known to memory as the “Vision of War” speech. Introduced as “that dashing cavalry officer, that thunderbolt of war, that silver tongued orator” by Brevet Brigadier General Edward F. Noyes, Ingersoll commemorated the sacrifices of Union veterans as well as stumped for Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes in his remarks. Throughout his speech, Ingersoll uses the memory of Lincoln to hit home his partisan political message. One such example: “Every man that cursed Abraham Lincoln because he issued the Proclamation of Emancipation — the grandest paper since the Declaration of Independence — every one of them was a Democrat.” Clearly the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a contentious document in its time, of which many politicos disagreed with. Nevertheless, Ingersoll’s rhetorical flourish uses Lincoln’s political prescience to elevate the Republican party, which Ingersoll saw as the party of freedom and progress.

In the middle of his speech, Ingersoll’s tone shifted from partisan (and somewhat rancorous) to poetic and solemn as he reflected on the horrors of war, its fallen soldiers, and the society they had left behind. “These heroes are dead,” he began:

They died for liberty — they died for us. They are at rest. They sleep in the land they made free, under the flag they rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the tearful willows, and the embracing vines. They sleep beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of storm, each in the windowless Palace of Rest. The Earth may run red with other wars — they are at peace. In the midst of battle, in the roar of conflict, they found the serenity of death! I have one sentiment for all soldiers living and dead: cheers for the living; tears for the dead.

As a man who fought at the battle of Shiloh, who experienced horrors as a prisoner of war, Ingersoll’s words were not mere flights of rhetoric. He intimately understood the sacrifices his generation made in the service of saving the union, and he wanted every person hearing his words that day to recognize its sacrifices. His remarks received an immediate public reaction. The Indianapolis News praised his speech, albeit with slight criticism, writing “the orator justified all expectations by delivering a speech, bitter in perhaps of arraingment [sic], but comprehensive, eloquent, and inimitable.” The ‘vision of war’ section was later reprinted as a pamphlet with illustrations that hit home many of its core themes. It was one of the orations that made Ingersoll a nationally-renowned public speaker.

By 1880, then a more accomplished orator, Ingersoll began to tackle Lincoln as a subject more directly, publishing a laudatory sketch of the president that was published in pamphlet form. This version focused less on biographical details and more on character impressions of the president. Right from the outset, Ingersoll was keenly aware of how Lincoln’s memory is shaped by the public, often to the negation of the real person. As he wrote, “Hundreds of people are now engaged in smoothing out the lines of Lincoln’s face — forcing all features to the common mold — so that he may be known, not as he really was, but, according to their poor standard, as he should have been.” The metaphor of “smoothing out” is certainly apt; upon his assassination in 1865, Lincoln’s visage appeared in countless artistic depictions which removed him from the realm of mortals and into the hands of providence. He became more of a symbol than a man.

Ingersoll sought to correct this with his 1880 pamphlet, reminding Americans that “Lincoln was a many-sided man, acquainted with smiles and tears, complex in brain, single in heart, direct as light; and his word, candid as mirrors, gave the perfect image of his thought. He was never afraid to ask — never too dignified to admit that he did not know.” Ingersoll’s por -

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL (1833-1899). AS A COLONEL IN THE CIVIL WAR, INGERSOLL’S LIFE DEEPLY INTERTWINED WITH ARGUABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENT IN THE HISTORY OF NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTOGRAPH CA. 1890 COLORIZED VERSION © 2022 RODERICK BRADFORD.

trait, while still quite laudatory, nevertheless centered Lincoln’s humility and complexity, reaffirming his humanity rather than attempting to deify him. Additionally, Ingersoll emphasized Lincoln’s dedication to education, despite the latter’s known history of scant instruction. “Lincoln never finished his education,” he noted, “To the night of his death he was a pupil, a learner, an enquirer, a seeker after knowledge.” This was in stark contrast to those who Ingersoll called “spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.” This revealed an influential parallel between Ingersoll and Lincoln. Both were Illinoisans who received little formal education and became lawyers through independent study, rather than university. Ingersoll saw much of himself in Lincoln, which one suspects impacted the orator’s portrait of the president as a self-educated, self-made man not sullied by the indulgences of the established ways of acculturation. In all, Ingersoll’s 1880 pamphlet depicted Lincoln as a moral, and even righteous, figure, but still relatable — a man dedicated to education, honestly, and self-improvement.

By the 1890s, Ingersoll’s renown for oratory made him constantly in demand, and for the 1893 Lincoln Dinner of the Republican Club of New York on February 11, he gave a revised version of his speech as a keynote speaker. While much of the text is similar to the 1880 version, Ingersoll added a section of Lincoln’s own oratory as a means of memorialization. The passage, which Ingersoll described lovingly as “sculptured speech,” was taken from Lincoln’s remarks in Edwardsville, Illinois on September 11, 1858:

And when, by all these means, you have succeeded in dehumanizing the negro; when you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you? What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling seacoast, our army and our navy.

These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle.

Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defence [sic] is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere.

Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.

Lincoln’s words placed liberty, not mere power, as the heart of the American experiment of self-government, a heart which would be torn asunder by the barbarism of slavery. In reflecting on Lincoln’s use of language, Ingersoll declared, “The orator loves the real, the simple, the natural, and he places thought and feeling above all. He knows that the greatest ideas should be expressed in the shortest words. He knows that a great idea is like a great statue, and he knows that the greater the statue the less drapery it needs.” Among other attributes, Lincoln’s use of simple, but poetic language during a time of deep crisis, in Ingersoll’s estimation, cemented his place in American history.

Robert Ingersoll toured his speech around the country in 1893, with one of the stops being Indianapolis, where he had spoken many times since his “vision of war” speech in 1876. The venue was the illustrious English Opera House, right on Monument Circle and a mainstay of the entertainment scene during the era. The Indianapolis News and Journal ran flashy advertisements in advance of his appearance, with the latter stating “Colonel Ingersoll’s treatment of the subject is said to be one of those rarely intellectual things that is to be heard but a few times in a lifetime.” Ingersoll arrived in Indianapolis at noon on May 4, 1893, mere hours from his scheduled performance, according to the News, and the Journal ran a final advertisement in its early edition, noting that it would be Ingersoll’s “only appearance this season.”

The Standard Publishing Company of Indianapolis reproduced his speech, with commentary, in pamphlet form (a digital version is available via Indiana Memory). Ingersoll opens his speech with a fascinating coincidence of history: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, February 12, 1809. “Eighty-four years ago two babes were born,” he began: one in the woods of Kentucky amid the hardships and poverty of pioneers; one in England surround-

Right from the outset, Ingersoll was keenly aware of how Lincoln’s memory is shaped by the public, often to the negation of the real person.

ed by wealth and culture. One was educated in the university of nature, the other at Oxford. One associated his name with the enfranchisement of labor, with the emancipation of millions, with the salvation of the Republic. He is known to us as Abraham Lincoln. The other broke the chains of superstition and filled the world with intellectual light, and he is known as Charles Darwin. Because of those two men the nineteenth century is illustrious.

Ingersoll saw Darwin and Lincoln as emancipatory figures, with Lincoln the emancipator of people and Darwin the emancipator of minds. As one of the theory of

higher purpose allowed him to transcend his age and become a leader for the ages.

Near the end of his speech, Ingersoll dir ectly addressed the question of memory in regard to the “Great Emancipator.” “The memory of Lincoln,” he said, “is the strongest, tenderest tie that binds all hearts together now, and holds all States beneath a nation’s flag.” With this passage, Ingersoll positioned Lincoln as the force which connected the union and transformed the United States from a loose conglomeration of states into a single, unified nation. The nationalism of late-nineteenth century America was on full-display, with Lincoln as the catalyzing agent melding heart and hearthstone across the land. (This is an image of Lincoln that persists to this day; in times of crisis, politicians and the media often look to Lincoln for insights on how to unify and connect the people of America.) To reaffirm the importance of memory, Ingersoll ended his speech with the moving words, “Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest civil war. He was the gentlest memory of our world.”

evolution’s first popularizers in America, Ingersoll comprehended the profound implications of Darwin’s ideas in a deeply religious country. Perhaps Ingersoll linked Darwin with Lincoln in an attempt to soften the intellectual blow of his concepts; conversely, linking Lincoln with Darwin emphasized the importance of the former’s contributions to humanity, ones with transforming consequences for his nation. Later in his lecture, Ingersoll painted a portrait of Lincoln as a man of contradictions who nevertheless transcended them. “The sympathies of Lincoln, his ties, his kindred, were with the South,” he noted, “His convictions, his sense of justice and his ideals were with the North.” Born of upland southern ancestry and marrying into a southern aristocratic family, Lincoln could have easily given into the currents of his experiences. Yet, “he knew the horrors of slavery, and he felt the unspeakable ecstasies and glories of freedom,” Ingersoll continued, “he had the manhood and independence of true greatness, and he could not have been a slave.” Lincoln’s abhorrence of slavery, and the political road that conviction took him on, made him, in Ingersoll’s eyes, a statesman rather than mere politician. “A politician schemes and works in every way to make the people do something for him,” the orator declared, while “A statesman wishes to do something for the people. With, him place and power are the means to an end, and the end is the good of his country.” For Ingersoll, Lincoln’s sense of

Ingersoll’s appearance was a resounding success, with the Indiana State Sentinel writing, “English’s opera house was packed from gallery to pit Thursday to hear America’s greatest orator in his famous lecture, ‘Abraham Lincoln’.” Of his performance, the Sentinel also said, “Col. Ingersoll has lost none of his great ‘personal magnetism’ that enables him to move his audience to the feeling of his every emotion.” Its publication in pamphlet form ensured more people would imbibe his lecture, thus furthering his memorializing project of the sixteenth president.

Despite his success with audiences and readers, Ingersoll caught the ire of critics concerning his treatment of Abraham Lincoln’s religious views. Ingersoll, a religious skeptic who gave public speeches denouncing Christianity, was accused of asserting that Lincoln was a nonbeliever. As a March 26, 1893 editorial in the Indianapolis Journal remarked, “The assertion of Colonel Ingersoll in his address on the character of Abraham Lincoln, to the effect that he was a freethinker after the manner of Voltaire and Paine, challenged emphatic contradiction which was no more conclusive than the Ingersoll declaration.” The article then provides numerous quotations which give credence to the claim that Lincoln was a believer in God, such as the speech he gave in 1861 in Springfield before he left for Washington, wherein he said:

A duty devolves upon me which is, perhaps, greater than that which has devolved upon any other man since the days of Washington. He never would have

Lincoln’s words placed liberty, not mere power, as the heart of the American experiment of self-government, a heart which would be torn asunder by the barbarism of slavery.

succeeded except for the aid of Divine Providence, upon which he at all times relied. I feel that I cannot succeed without the same Divine aid which sustained him, and on the same Almighty Being I place my reliance for support, and I hope you, my friends, will all pray that I may receive that Divine assistance without which I cannot succeed, but with which success is certain.

At the same time, Lincoln may have not accepted the mainstream consensus on Christianity, which the editorial granted. “Abraham Lincoln may not have troubled himself about dogmas,” the Journal acknowledged, “but no man was ever more devout in his reliance upon the great power which controls human acts and events, or whose conduct was more thoroughly in harmony with the truths of the Sermon on the Mount.”

Ingersoll addressed these concerns head on in a series of letters between him and Colonel Charles

H. T. Collis, an Irish immigrant to the United States who also served in the Civil War. A book compiling their correspondence was published in 1900, shortly after

Ingersoll’s death. Collis attended Ingersoll’s performance of the Lincoln speech in New York on February 11, 1893 and immediate wrote to him challenging his conclusions on Lincoln’s faith. With passion and conviction, Collis wrote, “no man invoked ‘the gracious favor of Almighty God’ in every effort of his life with more apparent fervor than did he, and this God was not the Deists’ God, but the God whom he worshiped under the forms of the Christian Church, of which he was a member.” Ingersoll retorted in a follow up letter, writing, “Lincoln was never a member of any church,” and that “he denied the inspiration of the Scriptures, and that he always insisted that Christ was not the Son of God, and that the dogma of the Atonement was, and is, an absurdity.”

As with much of history, Lincoln’s religious beliefs fall somewhere between Ingersoll and Collis. It is true that he never formally joined a church or was baptized, but he often asked for counsel from religious leaders and infused his speeches, especially the Second Inaugural, with meditations that bordered on theology. As historian and Lincoln

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865). AMONG OTHER ATTRIBUTES, LINCOLN’S USE OF SIMPLE, BUT POETIC LANGUAGE DURING A TIME OF DEEP CRISIS, IN INGERSOLL’S ESTIMATION, CEMENTED HIS PLACE IN AMERICAN HISTORY. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 1909.

Photo by Casey Horner@Unsplash.com

Ingersoll saw Darwin and Lincoln as emancipatory figures, with

biographer David R. Contosta has written, “he was no Christian in any conventional sense of the term, since there is no evidence that he ever accepted the divinity of Christ or ever joined a church,” but “what he had come to embrace in the end was the inscrutable omnipotence of a God who worked his will in history though persons and events of his own time and choosing.”

One striking piece of evidence to support Contosta’s conclusion is Lincoln’s “Meditation on the Divine Will,” written in September of 1862. “The will of God prevails,”

Lincoln reflected:

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day.

Yet the contest proceeds.

Lincoln’s theology centered the agency of God in human affairs, using people as agents of his divine plan. These musings emphasize the stress Lincoln put on fate, a holdover from his Primitive Baptist upbringing, which, Contosta noted, stressed “predestination and human

sinfulness.” Lincoln was not an Agnostic like Ingersoll, but he also wasn’t the kind of Christian the Collis portrayed him as. As with many aspects of his life, Lincoln was a complex, often contradictory figure whose idiosyncratic religious views highlighted these tensions.

The Civil War, with Lincoln as its central protagonist, was the defining event of Ingersoll’s life. It shaped his view of politics, oratory, and even religion. He placed a high priority on telling this story with eloquence, mastery, and tactfulness. As a result, it is not surprising that his lectures on Lincoln became so popular as well as lauded. In commenting on his speech in Indianapolis, a pamphlet noted, “No man in the world could do justice to the memory of Abraham Lincoln with the same force and eloquence as Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll.” While there were many books and recollections published during Ingersoll’s time, he kept the public memory of Lincoln alive as only an orator could do. In some respects, it was a logical outgrowth of Lincoln himself, who was one of the most influential public speakers in American history. Robert Ingersoll’s orations on Lincoln, while somewhat forgotten now, nevertheless provided a unique contribution to the memorialization and mythologization of the sixteenth president — a vast tapestry of remembrance which continues to this day.

JUSTIN CLARK is a public historian and serves as the Digital Initiatives Director at IHB, a division of the Indiana State Library. He holds a B.S. in History/Political Science from Indiana University Kokomo and an M.A. in Public History from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. His graduate research focused on orator Robert Ingersoll and his contributions to Midwestern freethought.

Lincoln the emancipator of people and Darwin the emancipator of minds.

Joseph McCabe; A r ebel to h is Last b reath

By Bill Cooke

Joseph McCabe, the most remarkable polymath of the twentieth century, deserves to be remembered. Even within the humanist tradition he does not get the recognition he deserves. Part of the reason is that his criticism of Catholicism is often thought, by those who haven’t read his work, to be bigoted or “phobic.” The other problem was his difficult personality. We will see the reasons for this shortly. But even those who argued with him acknowledged McCabe was a gifted popularizer long before that was recognized as an honorable vocation. What is more, McCabe was ready to identify himself as an atheist, materialist and feminist, long before these terms were socially respectable.

He did so well in his study that he was appointed p rofes sor of p hilosophy and e cclesiastical h istory at a seminary in l ondon in 1890, aged only 23.

Joseph Martin Mccabe was born on noveMber 11, 1867 into a faMily of Modest Means , then living in Macclesfield, a silk-producing town in Cheshire, England. His father was Catholic, from an Irish family which had only recently fled the poverty in Ireland. As the second-born, Joseph was earmarked for the Church, which he duly entered at 16 to study for the priesthood. What McCabe bottled up for most of his life, but which comes as little surprise today, is that he was subjected to some degree of sexual abuse while in the Church’s care. Late in his life, while writing on sexuality and the inferiority complex, McCabe drops in a reference to his vividly remembering “attempts of men, on two or three different occasions, to induce me to do something of the kind when I was eleven or twelve years old, or sixty years ago.” (McCabe, 1941, p 84) He goes on to hint at various times at the arrested sexual development that this abuse produced. Unable to reach out then, even after he left the church, it was not until he was 74 years old that he felt able disclose his secret. It helps explain a lot about his difficult character.

From early on in his church career, McCabe suffered doubts, which were not alleviated by the official response to them, which was known as the blush technique: “How dare I, an ignorant boy, doubt what such legions of great men believed!” (McCabe, 1947, p 13) Father Antony, as he became, rallied repeatedly, expelled his doubts, and rose through the ranks. He did so well in his study that he was appointed Professor of Philosophy and Ecclesiastical History at a seminary in London in 1890, aged only 23. His studies would have earned him a PhD, but studying for the ministry forbade him from accepting one. But from 1893 onwards, Father Antony’s doubts became, in his words, dark and permanent, and he spiralled into a crisis of faith

at the end of 1895. On Ash Wednesday 1896 he left the Church to begin a new life in the wide world. Joseph McCabe was 28 when he emerged into the world, completely untutored in its ways. His first purchase was a book on etiquette.

McCabe soon found a new life in London, becoming associated with the fledgling Rationalist Press Association. As he had done in the Catholic Church, McCabe rose quickly through the ranks of the RPA. By 1914, a Christian opponent described him as the RPA’s “leading spirit.” (Drinkwater, p 20) But as with his experience in the Roman Catholic Church, McCabe’s time in organized freethought was not without conflict. McCabe never came to terms with the fact that people leave religion in many different ways. He had taken the passionate route of the betrayed believer, one that had cost twelve years of his life and a large amount of suffering and isolation. McCabe found it difficult to accept that others, whose path to freethought had been less fraught with suffering, were equally sincere. This, combined with his unresolved reactions to the abused he suffered as a child, ensured his life was not straightforward.

It took a quarter of a century, but over that time, McCabe gradually wore out his welcome in Rationalist circles. By 1928 he was estranged from the RPA, although a partial rapprochement was effected in 1934. Most of his later works were published by the eclectic American publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. McCabe died on January 10 1955, aged 87. He expressed the wish (unfulfilled) to have as his epitaph, “He was a rebel to his last breath.”

Written Output

for More than half a century Mccabe made his living from his pen, writing an extraordinary range of books, monographs, pamphlets, magazine and newspaper articles and encyclopedia entries and, indeed, entire encyclopedias. His writing was clear and unpretentious, if unspectacular. He wore his scholarship lightly.

Opposite STATUES OF SAINTS AT THE GORTON MONASTERY WHERE JOSEPH MCCABE RECEIVED HIS PRELIMINARY PRIESTLY EDUCATION. THE STATUES REPRESENT FRANCISCAN SAINTS, INITIALLY PLACED ON PLINTHS ELEVATED HIGH ON THE WALLS OF THE NAVE, SEEN PRAYING, READING, AND MEDITATING, AS DID THE FRANCISCAN MONKS AT GORTON. LINDA SPASHETT STORYE BOOK; SHOWING 19TH CENTURY STATUARY. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/3.0/ DEED.EN

It is next to impossible to compile a complete bibliography of McCabe’s writings over his almost six-decade career. The fullest attempt is in my bibliography of his works in my biography A Rebel to His Last Breath: Joseph McCabe and Rationalism . A lot depends on what counts as a book and what as a pamphlet. But if one counts as pamphlets his larger-

format Haldeman-Ju lius titles, known as the Big Blue Books, we have 94 books and 166 pamphlets. Nine of the books are collections brought together by Haldeman-Julius, which also sold separately as Big Blue Books. One hundred and two of the Big Blue Books were used in this way. McCabe was also responsible for at least 30 translations and revisions, 14 co-authorships and at least nine books ghost-written for Bishop William Montgomery Brown. One book was written anonymously (The Taint in Politics, a study of political corruption in Britain) and two under the pseudonym of Martin Abbotson. And then there are at least 126 Little Blue Books published by Haldeman-Julius. By any standard that is a remarkable body of work.

McCabe’s publishing career breaks into two sections. Until the mid-1920s his main publisher was Watts & Co, the publishing arm of the Rationalist Press Association in London. But after his break with the RPA it was Emanuel Haldeman-Julius who published most of his work. This was a relationship based on mutual respect and advantage. McCabe was fortunate Haldeman-Julius was available to take his work. And Haldeman-Julius was lucky to attract and keep a writer as productive and popular as McCabe. It was the arrival of McCabe that emboldened Haldeman-Julius to embark on the Big Blue Books. (Lee, p 114) According to Haldeman-Julius’s own figures, by 1949 he had sold 1,892,000 Big Blue Books written by McCabe. (Haldeman-Julius, 1949, p 22)

McCabe was first and foremost an historian, and most of his works are treated in the way historians approach their work, by looking at what came first and

how that influence spread. Being fluent in six languages (Latin, Greek, German, French, Spanish and Italian) he could read documents in the original, giving his scholarship of Roman Catholic history an authority denied to most. The principal themes he returned to most were the Catholic Church and evolution. His histories of the Catholic Church and treatment of its abuses was, for the most part, scholarly and civilised. But he was not limited to these themes. He wrote widely in other areas, including some well received biographies of St. Augustine, Abelard, Goethe, Talleyrand and Cardinal Richelieu. He also wrote an under-appreciated critique of George Bernard Shaw and a history of divorce laws. He even wrote two novels; In the Shadow of the Cloister (1908, under the pseudonym of Arnold Wright) and The Pope’s Favorite (1917).

As well as his written output, McCabe gave more than 4000 lectures around the world, from Melbourne to the Rhineland and from the Harvard Club in the United States, to coal miners in New Zealand. His talks, illustrated with lantern slides, the Edwardian equivalent of powerpoint, were an event in people’s lives in the age before television. McCabe also took part in at least a dozen major debates with religionists, creationists and spiritualists. The most notable of them was with the eminent spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the packed Queen’s Hall in London in 1920. The debate was a sensation and the ten thousand copies of the proceedings of the debate soon sold out. The research McCabe undertook for that debate alone generated two books. What, then, was the result of this extraordinary body of work?

What McCabe Believed

for soMeone who wrote as much as he did, McCabe spent relatively little time expounding his own beliefs. His prime interest was helping others arrive

THE KEY TO LOVE AND SEX IN EIGHT VOLUMES BY JOSEPH MCCABE. EDITED AND PUBLISHED BY E. HALDEMAN-JULIUS, GIRARD, KANSAS, 1929. EMANUEL HALDEMAN-JULIUS (1889-1951), WAS AN ATHEIST, SOCIALIST, REFORMER, WRITER, AND PUBLISHER. MCCABE WAS FORTUNATE THAT HALDEMAN-JULIUS WAS AVAILABLE TO PUBLISH HIS WORK. HALDEMAN-JULIUS, HOWEVER, WAS LUCKY TO ATTRACT AND KEEP A WRITER AS PRODUCTIVE AND POPULAR AS MCCABE. ACCORDING TO HALDEMAN-JULIUS’S OWN FIGURES, BY 1949 HE HAD SOLD 1,892,000 BIG BLUE BOOKS WRITTEN BY MCCABE. PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE HALDEMAN-JULIUS FAMILY COLLECTION PUBLISHED IN MCCLURE’S MAGAZINE IN AUGUST, 1924. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

at sound decisions based on reliable evidence. McCabe subscribed what I’ve referred to elsewhere as the heathen’s trinity. He was an atheist in what he did not believe; he was a rationalist in how he believed, and he was a humanist in what he believed. His life was devoted to expanding each arm of the heathen’s trinity to enrich the lives of others by helping them rid themselves of illusion and make-believe.

McCabe understood that rationality was a flawed and self-serving process which did not arrive at solid slabs of knowledge one could use to bludgeon religion with. Reasoning, he acknowledged, is “a process: one of several processes of the intelligence or several aspects of the mental life.” (McCabe, 1948, p 482) Flawed and problematic though reason is, McCabe was clear that it is all we have when we want to make intellectual sense of the world, so we had better ensure our reasoning process is in good working order. McCabe’s understanding of reason and the rationalism that is derived from it is remarkably contemporary.

Another noteworthy feature of McCabe’s free thinking is that he gravitated more towards atheism as he got older. For much of the earlier part of his career he was content to speak of himself as an agnostic, in line with the majority of critics of Christianity, then and since. But even then, he was not entirely convinced. In 1913 he wrote:

“I prefer the term ‘Agnostic’ to ‘Atheist’, because there is a common tendency to conceive the Atheist as one who believes he can disprove the existence of God, and there are men who hold those lines…At the same time, the word ‘Agnostic’ is not free from ambiguity. The earlier Agnostics had a metaphysical theory of the limitations of the human mind which I do not share. I mean only that no satisfactory evidence is offered to us of the existence of God (and God).” (McCabe, 1913, p 144)

As he got older, and less patient with obfuscation of this sort, McCabe became less willing to subscribe to agnosticism.

“Into this agnostic world I passed when I quit the Church 40 years ago, and until some 10 or more years ago it never even occurred to me to question the accuracy of may description of my position. Every non-Theist I met called himself an Agnostic. I have now seen for many years that the distinction favours superstition, and I have done all in my power, in spite

of the hostility of many prominent American and British Atheists, to induce sceptics to call themselves Atheists and Materialists.” (McCabe, 1980, p 4)

By the time of his autobiography, however, things had changed:

“For 20 or 30 years I have called myself an atheist. A growing impatience of hypocrisy moved me one day to inquire what this elegant word “Agnostic” and the despised word “Atheist” really meant, and to my surprise I found that, according to the Oxford Dictionary and all the leading authorities, I and all those colleagues of mine who called ourselves Agnostics were in fact Atheists.” (McCabe, 1947, p 89)

McCabe was even more suspicious of the term “humanism,” seeing it as susceptible to the same sort of evasions that “agnostic” allowed for. In particular, McCabe had little sympathy with the more overtly religious brands of humanism that were popular in his time. But though he criticised humanism as a brand, he practised a straight-forward humanism throughout his life.

It is next to impossible to compile a complete bibliography of m c c abe ’ s writings over his almost six-decade career. Continued on page 48

JOSEPH MCCABE (1867-1955). PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1895, ONLY MONTHS BEFORE HE LEFT THE CHURCH. HE WAS ALREADY CLEAR WHEN THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN THAT HIS FUTURE WAS AWAY FROM THE CHURCH. FRONTISPIECE OF TWELVE YEARS IN A MONASTERY BY JOSEPH MCCABE PUBLISHED IN 1912, LONDON, WATTS AND CO. PHOTOGRAPH RESTORATION AND COLORIZATION © 2023 RODERICK BRADFORD.

ANTHONY COMSTOCK and the CENSOR’S DILEMMA

the mind of the censor and the eye the beholder

THE FIRST AMENDMENT and the CENSOR’S DILEMMA

ROBERT CORN-REVERE

Foreword by Floyd Abrams

D.M. B ennett , the free - thinker who C o M sto C k jaile D , an D who C ha M pione D the 1877 petition drive to repeal the federal obscenity law, put his finger on the censor’s dilemma that eventually would sum up Comstock’s career. Bennett wrote that “[a]n honorable, good man will never willingly accept the office of a spy and informer to lie in wait and watch for the errors and weaknesses of his fellow-beings and then, by decoying them on and entrapping them, use their simplicity or their confidence to throw them into prison and effect

BENNETT PROPHESIED THAT THE COMSTOCK LAW WOULD BE “BELIEVED BY MANY TO BE SUBVERSIVE OF THE VERY PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN LIBERTY AND DESTRUCTIVE TO INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS GUARANTEED BY THE CONSTITUTION OF OUR COUNTRY.”

EXCERPT FROM The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder — The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma

By Robert Corn-Revere

their utter ruin.” Such a man, Bennett added, “who receives weekly pay for prying into the transgressions of mankind, and bringing them to consequent punishment, will always be hated by mankind, and the office must fall to the lot of some man of desperate fortunes and ambiguous character.”

Bennett prophesied that the Comstock Law would be “believed by many to be subversive of the very principles of American liberty and destructive to individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution of our country.”

In the end, he was proved to be right, both about the general disrepute of censors and about the constitutional standards that later would limit obscenity law. But both developments occurred far too late to help him.

It may be too much to suggest that Comstock alone could be responsible for such an enduring backlash. Public attitudes were transformed by multiple forces in the 20th century. The nation survived two world wars and saw the birth of wondrous new media of communication — from cinema and radio to television and the Internet. The Jazz Age came and went and youth culture embraced various forms of entertainment their parents neither understood nor countenanced. America’s acceptance of free expression was tested by the labor movement, the Red Scare, the civil rights and anti-war movements, and various drives to tamp down popular entertainments — from comic books to rock music. And through it all, as society changed, the courts developed a robust body of First Amendment law that initially recognized some protections for freedom of expression and grew to embrace broad free speech values as fundamental. But these developments in the law and many of the cultural events that shaped them took place beneath the long shadow cast by Anthony Comstock.

The Comstock Effect

i n his own way Comstock contributed to the cultural backlash. Think of it as a Gilded Age version of what is now called the Streisand Effect — the effort to suppress information that only makes it more sought after and available. The modern incarnation got its name from entertainer Barbara Streisand’s 2003 lawsuit against the California Coastal Records Project to block access to photographs of her cliff-side Malibu home on grounds of invasion of privacy. News of the lawsuit itself sparked interest in the photos — far more than would have existed from the archive alone — and by the time the meritless case was thrown out, many thousands of people saw the photos that otherwise would have been unknown to them. Over 420,000 people reportedly viewed the photos of Streisand’s home in just the few weeks after she filed suit,

and her name is now forever associated with comically misguided censorship efforts.

So it was with Comstock, and, as with most major developments involving American censorship, he was the pioneer. Comstock wrote about it himself in an 1891 article entitled Vampire Literature, in which he recounted an anecdote in which a fashionably dressed young woman came to his office seeking assistance. She was an actress in need of publicity, she explained, and said she wanted to publish a “spicy” book. She then asked if she could pay him to “attack it just a little” and to “seize a few copies” in order to “attract attention to her book and to get the newspapers to notice it.” Comstock stiffly declined, describing the encounter as “sad and ludicrous.” But he forgot to add it was ironic as well, confirming he wasn’t in on the joke. As art historian and Comstock biographer Amy Werbel has written, “Comstock, as much as or perhaps even more than any other figure in American history, put art on page one.” Morris Ernst aptly described vice-hunters who succeeded the old man as “the advertising agents of sex.”

Of course, Comstock should have been aware of this effect from the beginning, and, to a certain extent he was. Even before he traveled to Washington to secure passage of a federal obscenity law and prior to the formation of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, his efforts to prosecute Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Clafin, and to suppress their salacious account of the Ward-Beecher affair, only stoked interest in the scandal and drove up sales (and prices) of their weekly newspaper. Comstock understood cause and effect, but the ultimate lesson that censorship is counterproductive was utterly lost on him. He later noted that when his anti-vice society attacked a book it resulted in “a large amount of free advertising for the offensive matter.” For that reason, he directed the society’s efforts to obliterate offending works entirely by arresting both the author and publisher while seizing the publication and printing plates and destroying them. But such scorched earth tactics inevitably failed. Despite the crackdown,

D.M. BENNETT (1818-1882). FOUNDER, EDITOR, AND PUBLISHER OF THE TRUTH SEEKER (1873-1882). FRONTISPIECE OF THE CHAMPIONS OF THE CHURCH: THEIR CRIMES AND PERSECUTIONS. D.M. BENNETT, LIBERAL AND SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING, NEW YORK, 1878.

Comstock observed in 1891 New York was facing “an epidemic of lewdness through the channels of light literature” and that there was “strong competition among writers and publishers of cheap books and papers to see which one can excel the others in unclean stories.” As usual, his takeaway was that he was right and the rest of the world was wrong.

And he never learned. Toward the end of his career he attacked George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession because a central character in this work about women’s empowerment was involved with prostitution. When Comstock sent a note demanding that the producer cancel the “filthy play,” the savvy promoter leaked the ultimatum to the press, and publicly invited Comstock to attend rehearsals at the Garrick Theatre. Unamused, Comstock went to court to block the “obscene” performances but was unsuccessful. As the play’s producer understood (but as Comstock failed to appreciate), the resulting publicity made the play a huge success, with overflow audiences and tickets fetching premium prices. So many people thronged to opening night that the city police had to call out the reserves to manage the crowds.

There is no doubt but that the Comstock Effect was real, although some aspects of it have taken the form of legend, including his efforts to suppress public display of prints of Paul Chabas’ painting September Morn. Described by biographers as his “best-known escapade in the field of art,” Comstock’s actual involvement was limited to bullying a store clerk into removing the print from the front window of Braun & Company, a confrontation captured in a tongue-incheek front-page New York Times account. But that the story mutated and eventually took on a life of its own.

There is a legend that press agent Harry Reichenbach engineered the event specifically to boost sales of September Morn, and was engaged by Braun & Company to achieve that end. Reichenbach claimed he paid forty or fifty kids to stand outside the store window and gawk at the piece, then placed an anonymous call to Comstock to report the “outrage.” Comstock predictably rushed to the scene, and, according to this account, ordered the print removed. The rest, as they say, was the first rough draft of history. The story made international headlines, and reportedly challenged news of the war in Europe for the public’s attention. This spurred sales of the print and American art dealers reportedly sold seven million copies in just a few months. The value of Chabas’ original painting was said to spiral from thirty-five dollars to ten thousand dollars.

It is a great story, and, given Comstock’s career, not entirely incredible. But it is more likely an example of a clever promoter exploiting general awareness of the Comstock Effect to burnish his own image. Reichenbach recounted the event in his 1931 autobiography Phantom Fame, in which he claimed credit for making September Morn the most famous painting in the world. He wrote that he had applied for work at a small art shop that had been unable to sell 2,000 surplus copies of the print, and he hit upon the idea to “introduce the immodest young maiden to Anthony Comstock.” Several calls to the old man’s office went unanswered, but this changed, Reichenbach wrote, after he hired a bunch of youngsters for fifty-cents apiece to stand outside the display window “uttering expressions of unholy glee and making grimaces too sophisticated for their years.” Comstock rushed to the scene, and the unseemly display of despoiled youth prompted the desired reaction. According to Reichenbach, Comstock first demanded the print be removed, and when that failed, he appealed to the courts. As a direct result, according to the promoter, a lithograph that had been rejected as a brewer’s calendar became an overnight sensation.

There’s only one problem with Reichenbach’s boast — not one word of it is true. There is nothing to indicate he ever worked for Braun & Company, and ac-

COMSTOCK UNDERSTOOD CAUSE AND EFFECT, BUT THE ULTIMATE LESSON THAT CENSORSHIP IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE WAS UTTERLY LOST ON HIM.

ANTHONY COMSTOCK (1844-1915). PHOTOGRAPH FROM HARPER’S WEEKLY, MAY 22, 1915.

cording to contemporary newspaper accounts, he was not looking for work at the time but was already an established publicist. More to the point, September Morn had already become infamous by the time Comstock learned of it, because the Chicago police had tried unsuccessfully to prosecute a small art store for selling copies of the print. An alderman known as “Bath House John Coughlin” (reputedly a “companion and protector of prostitutes, pimps, barrel house bums and saloon keepers”) announced that September Morn could not be displayed anywhere in Chicago, but was rebuffed by the courts. None of the accounts from the time suggest any contact between Reichenbach and Comstock, and one newspaper reported that Comstock approached Braun & Company only after a school teacher complained to him that display of the print “might work havoc in the minds of her pupils passing that way.” Even then,

Comstock did not bring a legal action as Reichenbach claimed, but satisfied himself with abusing a store clerk (and getting a headline).

But as with any good fiction, just because the details were made up doesn’t mean the story is false. Writing four years before Reichenbach spun his tale, Broun and Leech described as a “yarn” suggestions that “Comstock’s attention was purposefully called to the picture by the proprietor who wished to boom the sales” of September Morn. That story was denied by the good men of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who said that Comstock dispatched an assistant to look at the Braun & Company display, who reported that it was “not actionable.”

Comstock likely reached the same conclusion — at least as to a criminal prosecution — but he never disavowed his encounter with the store clerk, as reported in the Times. Whether or not conceived as a PR stunt, there is no denying that Comstock’s objection to September Morn and the front page New York Times coverage helped stoke the work’s phenomenal success. As Broun and Leech observed, “[t]he picture sold hugely, and indeed some people went into the print publishing business merely for the sake of handling this picture.” The story was recounted in Comstock’s obituary, and the New York Times reported that within weeks of the incident copies of the print were on sale in every part of the

Left “SEPTEMBER MORN” OIL PAINTING CREATED BY PAUL ÉMILE CHABAS IN 1911. WIKIPEDIA COMMONS.

Below “SEPTEMBER MORN” CENSORED WITH A DRESS IN THE LEAVENWORTH TIMES , 1813. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

REICHENBACH CLAIMED HE PAID FORTY OR FIFTY KIDS TO STAND OUTSIDE THE STORE WINDOW AND GAWK AT THE PIECE, THEN PLACED AN ANONYMOUS CALL TO COMSTOCK TO REPORT THE “OUTRAGE.”

United States. Hoax or no hoax, with Comstock’s help the controversy made September Morn one of the most famous and popular paintings of the 20th century.

A slow-motion backlash in the law

One consequence of being the Bond villain of censorship is that Comstock galvanized opposition to his cause. And the reaction he inspired was as broad and deep as his universal mission to reform society. His 1880 tome Frauds Exposed devotes 32 chapters to his various causes that included taking on bank fraud, gambling and lotteries, bogus mining companies, fake jewelry scams, divining rods, quack medicine, petty swindles of various kinds, dime novels and — of course — obscenity. The subject of smut was his chief preoccupation, however, and it kept him very busy indeed, as he saw filthiness in everything from literature and art to medical texts. This mobilized a resistance that included more than just the freethinkers and free love advocates that first pushed back against his militant prudishness and it grew over time to include mainstream publishers, artists, doctors, and merchants.

But while the social backlash was more immediate, taking the form of critical commentaries, satire, and petition drives, reform of the prevailing legal standard took far longer. And the task was formidable. Comstock was no lawyer, but he followed the controlling precedents closely and observed accurately in 1891 that the test for obscenity adopted by the British courts in Regina v. Hicklin “has been adopted and affirmed in every case

of importance tried since on both continents.” Under that test, he noted, “[c]lassical, standard, literary, and medical works are all indictable if sold in such a manner as to reach and corrupt the young and inexperienced.” This seeming legal monolith forced Comstock’s opponents to develop and refine the legal arguments to dismantle a broad obscenity standard that eventually would prevail decades after the crusader’s death.

Comstock’s indiscriminate attacks on all that he considered “unclean” sowed the seeds of his undoing. Had he confined his campaign rooting out to back-alley smut peddlers and the furtive boys behind the newsstands it is doubtful he would have generated such widespread sympathy for his victims or inspired an articulate response to the legal doctrine of the day. But by making martyrs of the likes of Ezra Heywood and D.M. Bennett, and by equating pornographers with artists, playwrights, doctors, and birth control advocates, Comstock guaranteed a cogent case would be made that he had gone too far. And his many goofs and gaffs provided ample ammunition to make that case persuasive.”

The friends of commercialized pornography were few,” Broun and Leech wrote, but for “the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience, men may be found ready to fight and suffer.”

Such concerns prompted 70,000 people to sign the National Liberal League’s 1878 petition asking Congress to repeal the Comstock Act, a document that began to lay an intellectual foundation for arguments against censorship. The petition described the Act as

THEODORE SHROEDER (1864-1953) WAS A PSYCHOANALYST, AUTHOR, AND A FOUNDER OF THE FREE SPEECH LEAGUE IN 1902. WIKIPEDIA COMMONS.

a plain violation of the letter and spirit of the First Amendment and charged that it was being used “for the purposes of moral and religious persecution, whereby the dearest and most precious rights of the people are being grievously violated under the forms of legal inquisition, fines, forfeitures, and imprisonment.” It posited that the First Amendment requires the government to remain neutral in the field of ideas, and that “all attempts of civil government, whether State or national, to enforce or to favor particular religious, social, moral, or medical opinions, or schools of thought or practice, are not only unconstitutional but ill-advised, contrary to the spirit and progress of our age, and almost certain in the end to defeat any beneficial objects intended.” The petition proclaimed that society’s “mental, moral, and physical health and safety” would be “better secured and preserved by virtue resting upon liberty and knowledge, than upon ignorance enforced by governmental supervision.” It concluded that “even error may be safely left free, where truth is free to combat it,” and that “the greatest danger to a republic is in the insidious repression of the liberties of the people.”

Another of the arguments developed in this early period was that obscenity laws are incapable of precise definition and their enforcement is inherently subjective. This theme was sounded during the keynote address at an “Indignation Meeting” organized to protest Ezra Heywood’s conviction for publishing Cupid’s Yokes. The event, held at Boston’s Faneuil Hall on August 1, 1878, was the first official project of the National Defense Association (“NDA”), which was formed after the repeal petition floundered. The new organization was created to continue the effort to end the Comstock Act and to defend those prosecuted under it. Between four and six thousand people crowded into Faneuil Hall for the event and a full account of the proceedings was later published. In the first of many speeches denouncing Heywood’s conviction, the staunch abolitionist Elizur Wright, argued that few would have objected to the law

if it could define obscenity “as not to exclude a great part of our most valuable literature, including the Bible, and so as not to violate the true and constitutional liberty of the press.” That same year, D.M. Bennett, who also fell prey to the vagaries of the Comstock Act, wrote that obscenity “ought to be correctly described so that it may be known in what it consists, and so that an accused person shall not be at the mercy of a man or of a number of men who construe what is obscene, what is indecent and immoral, by their own particular opinion or notion of morality and immorality.”

Arguments about the legitimacy of obscenity laws continued to be developed and refined as time went on. Pioneering free speech advocate and scholar Theodore Schroeder reviewed trials of Ezra Heywood and others for selling Cupid’s Yokes and concluded that obscenity law boiled down nothing more than a disagreement about literary style. He likened obscenity laws to those banning witchcraft. Schroeder surveyed five arrests by federal and state authorities involving Cupid’s Yokes, and observed that one prosecution was abandoned, two resulted in findings of not guilty and two resulted in convictions. He concluded “no man on earth can tell, even now, whether it is a crime to send Cupid’s Yokes through the mail.” And he added, “[i]f anyone claims to know whether the law condemns this book, I ask him to point to a statutory test which is decisive,” noting “[e] ven if in every case Cupid’s Yokes had been declared not to be ‘obscene,’ still this would be no protection to the next vendor of the book.”

Others reasoned that prevailing law destroyed freedom of expression because it could result in a conviction if a book contained a single “immoral” passage. At D.M. Bennett’s trial, for example, his attorney tried to persuade the court to consider the work “as a whole,” and not to dwell just on what prosecutors thought were the naughty bits. These arguments were unsuccessful at the time, but they contributed intellectual heft to concepts that eventually became the law.

The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder Cambridge University Press (2021).

Paperback, 384 pages.

ISBN-10 : 1107570379. ISBN-13 : 978-1107570375

ROBERT CORN-REVERE is a leading American First Amendment lawyer with a career spanning almost four decades. He has argued and won key free speech cases in the Supreme Court, obtained the first posthumous pardon in New York history for comedian Lenny Bruce, and successfully defended CBS in the Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” case.

BUT BY MAKING MARTYRS OF THE LIKES OF EZRA HEYWOOD AND D.M. BENNETT, AND BY EQUATING PORNOGRAPHERS WITH ARTISTS, PLAYWRIGHTS, DOCTORS, AND BIRTH CONTROL ADVOCATES, COMSTOCK GUARANTEED A COGENT CASE WOULD BE MADE THAT HE HAD GONE TOO FAR.

WORLD’S OLDEST MAGAZINE FOR FREETHINKERS FOUNDED

BY D.M. BENNETT IN 1873

I have not lost one iota of love for the cause. And were it not for my infirmities I would stand at the helm as long as life lasts.

“The great majority of us are agreed that there is no purpose in life except such as we, collectively choose to give it. One spends four decades exploring and meditating all the philosophies and theologies, the theosophies and anthroposophies, and one finds in the end that the truth about life is so simple that you can teach it to children of ten.” (McCabe, 1932, p 248)

McCabe spoke occasionally about what he called the humane spirit. At the end of The Bankruptcy of Religion (1917), one of his best books, McCabe unleashed one of the few rhetorical flourishes:

“Let us make a science of the life and resources of humanity on this planet; let us organise it as men organise a great business, so that the work of the world will alternate happily with the play of the world; let us act as if there is no heaven, and the one chance of happiness we have is before the heart ceases to beat; let us each be apostles of the social spirit until a sound standard of conduct rules the world.” (McCabe, 1917, p 308)

McCabe’s notion of the humane spirit is not that different to the humanitarian revolution that Steven Pinker spoke of in The Better Angels of Our Nature as one of the forces for good in history. (Pinker, chapter 4) When McCabe described his own outlook, he called himself as an atheist and a materialist. As understood in today’s language, he would be happy to see himself as a secular humanist.

Science and Evolution

Joseph Mccabe was deeply interested in popularizing evolution for non-specialist readers. He understood that Charles Darwin had changed the world and that so much religious thought was predicated on pre-Darwinian thinking, most of which tended to inflate humans in their own eyes as the centre of the universe. The idea of evolution, he wrote in his autobiography, “put a vertebral column and a spinal cord into what had hitherto been my loose collection of scientific facts, and I began to organise it and fill up the deficiencies.” (McCabe, 1947, p 40) So if people were going to adapt to their new, more modest place in the scheme of things, they needed a general grasp of the principles of evolution. The outstanding features of his understanding of evolution are its breadth and accuracy. He was able to distinguish a genuine intellectual development from a passing fad. And on most occasions when he departed from the conventional wisdom of the time, it was to assert a strictly Darwinian reading of the issue at hand. In doing this, of course, events have largely proved him correct.

McCabe burst onto the scene in 1900 with his translation of Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe, a

book which should be thought of as an equivalent to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion a century later. The Riddle of the Universe was a blockbuster introduction to evolution and what it means for us as human beings. The first edition of ten thousand copies quickly sold out and a hundred thousand copies were sold within a year. A quarter of a million copies sold outside of Germany, where twice that number moved. The Riddle of the Universe was an enormous financial boost to Watts & Co and the RPA, and made McCabe’s reputation. For the rest of Haeckel’s life McCabe was his staunch defender in English. He became Haeckel’s bulldog. In fact, McCabe’s grasp of evolution can now be seen to be surer than Haeckel’s, whose views were more generally Lamarckian and social Darwinist than McCabe subscribed to.

More often than not it was the very same academics who scorned McCabe as a popularizer who succumbed to the fads he was able to see through. For example, McCabe was intelligently skeptical of Social Darwinism, which he denounced in 1914 as a “pseudo-scientific application of evolutionary views to social problems,” insisting that there is no scientific justification for a doctrine of eternal struggle. (McCabe, 1913a, pp 2078) He was also scornful of the fad among some evolutionists between the wars known as “emergent evolution,” which sought to emphasize a vitalist creativity in each new evolutionary development. McCabe dismissed emergence as nothing more than “mystic machinery.”

(McCabe, 1931, p 247) He noted that it was this variety of evolutionary thinking that the Church of England had in mind when it decried the conflict between religion with science. And positive eugenics was dismissed as “secular Calvinism.” (McCabe, 1927-29, Vol. XII, p 40) McCabe was also generally skeptical about Piltdown Man, which established academic authorities hailed as the definitive missing link between ape and human. (McCabe, 1920, p 96 and 1931, pp 253-4)

McCabe was critical of the race theories popular in his time, both among the general public and parts of the academic establishment. His historical understanding was too acute to fall for the popular theories of pure races. Not only was inter-racial breeding not a bad thing, McCabe told his American audience in 1935, it was an important source of cultural progress. “It was non-Aryan and non-white races that laid the foundations and built up the structure of civilisation during 3000 years; and, as I will show presently, it was, as late as 1000 years ago, men of the Semitic race who laid the foundations of our modern civilisation.” (McCabe, 1935, p 55) McCabe was unusual in his recognition of the contribu-

tion to civilisation made by the Arabs, the Jews and the Chinese. He got into trouble during his tour of New Zealand in 1910 when he praised the moral culture of the Chinese, running counter to the widespread prejudice there. In 1935 McCabe wrote The Splendour of Moorish Spain, one of the earliest overviews of Europe’s debt to Muslim culture. He said similar things about the Jews, praising their contribution to Western civilisation and discounting any talk of a Jewish race, noting the wide variety of people identifying as Jews. Anti-Semitism, he said, was motivated by nothing more than jealousy and greed. (McCabe, 1935, p 61)

In the same way he was willing to offend supporters in New Zealand by praising the Chinese, McCabe was also prepared to defend African Americans to his readers in America. He said quite bluntly that seeing any trace of inferiority in African Americans was “absurd.” He went further, insisting that responsibility for change lay with the white Americans. “We still treat coloured folk at the best as children, at the worst as animals. We shall never have a sound judgment of their capacity as long as there is any tincture of prejudice, or pre-judgement, in our attitude.” (McCabe, 1935, pp 62-3) Differences in cultural attainment among peoples was always attributed by McCabe to access to education, particularly scientific education. In the context of the time, McCabe’s views on race stand up well almost a century later.

Neither was McCabe guilty of scientism, or placing faith in science as an agency of salvation. Rather than giving “laws of nature” a cosmic inevitability, McCabe wrote of them straight-forwardly as trustworthy “only insofar as [the scientist] knows it to have been based on extensive observations. He keeps an open mind until repeated observations all the world over have brought the same result.” McCabe made the simple observation that we “do not want to substitute the word science for the word God.” (McCabe, 1932, p 138)

Catholicism

Mccabe’s role as a critic of the Catholic Church has not helped his posthumous reputation. In an age which tends to conflate criticism with being “phobic,” McCabe has frequently been a target of virtue-signalling. And given that much anti-Catholic polemic is low-grade stuff, the suspicion of the genre is not unreasonable. But with McCabe it’s different. McCabe wrote about the Catholic Church as much as an original scholar than as a popularizer, not least because of his ability to read documents in their original language. Crises in the History of the Papacy (1916) remains a sound work of historical research and was many decades ahead of what Catholic writers were able to say about their church. McCabe also wrote some autobiographical studies of living in the church, in particular Twelve Years in a Monastery

ERNST HAECKEL (1834-1919), WAS A GERMAN EVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHER WHOSE ENORMOUSLY POPULAR THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE WAS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY JOSEPH MCCABE. PHOTO OF HAECKEL, 1906. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. “HAECKEL’S LATEST WORK” ARTICLE FEATURED ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE TRUTH SEEKER, AUGUST 29, 1914.

A nother noteworthy feature of m c c abe ’ s free thinking is that he gravitated more towards atheism as he got older.

(1897), which tells of fellow priests driven mad by sexual frustration, ruined by drink, or sunk into triviality as the only means of surviving the unnatural regime they found themselves in. His autobiographical works avoided the tabloid sensationalism that so many others writing this sort of work indulged in.

It is important to remember that the Catholic Church McCabe was critical of was a very different concern to that which emerged after the Second Vatican Council in 1963-5. In the decades before Vatican II, as the Council has become known as, the Catholic Church was much more confrontational with trends in the world it saw as antithetical to its interests and beliefs. The Syllabus of Errors had formally condemned most aspects of modern secular society, and in 1910 Catholic clergy signed the Anti-Modernist Oath to confirm their opposition to modernity in all its forms. The Index of Forbidden Books was still in active operation, and the First Vatican Council had formalized the doctrine of papal infallibility. In its horror of communism, significant elements of the Catholic hierarchy had lent support for fascists in Spain and Italy and had, until it was too late, averted their gaze in Germany.

Notably absent from McCabe’s criticisms was the voyeuristic drooling over immorality in the convent, which still underlies so much Protestant anti-Cath-

olic polemic. Neither was he overly interested in lascivious popes. His prime focus was on the disconnect between claim and reality in papal politics and the degree to which the modern world was traduced by the Vatican. Even the controversial Black International series, run by Haldeman-Julius over 1941 and 1942, are largely free from disreputable prejudice toward Catholics as people.

“Let it be understood that we are not attributing vileness of character to the pope and his court of cardinals or to the hierarchy of archbishops and bishops through whom they act, and assuredly we are making no charge against the Catholic laity, beyond saying that they ought to know what to expect from the writers of their papers and literature who are aware that the reader is sternly forbidden to read any criticism of what they say.” (McCabe, 1942, p 4. See also McCabe, 1947, p 22)

Only in a couple of his very last publications did McCabe stray beyond the papacy and Catholic thought to indulge in more generally negative comments about Catholics in general. Today, little McCabe said against the Catholic Church, has not been said, often in harsher tones, by scholars identifying as Catholics. But in his day, it was seen by many as incendiary stuff, and he was subjected to an orchestrated campaign of vilification that lasted decades. The overwhelming majority of his work on the Catholic Church offer intelligent, well researched and clear assessments that have stood the test of time.

Historicity of Jesus

one area that could be bothersome for American freethinkers is that Joseph McCabe was deeply opposed to the various arguments for the mythological Jesus which, among non-specialists, retains a degree of support even today. Unlike mythicists, McCabe could see that asserting Jesus is a myth is no less doctrinaire than to assert his full historicity. “I loathe the hard dogmatism that pushes some eccentric opinion,” he wrote in his autobiography, “as that Jesus really was a fish-god of ancient Palestine or the hero of a rustic passion-play — because it has such a destructive air.” (McCabe, 1947, p 25) Instead, his view on Jesus accords far more closely with contemporary scholarship.

He understood that c harles d arwin had changed the world and that so much religious thought was predicated on pre- d arwinian thinking, most of which tended to inflate humans in their own eyes as the centre of the universe.

THE POPES AND THEIR CHURCH : A CANDID ACCOUNT BY JOSEPH MCCABE. SECOND EDITION PUBLISHED BY FREETHOUGHT PRESS ASSOCIATION, NEW YORK, N.Y., 1924.

There were, McCabe, explained, hundreds of Jesuses. “The figure of Jesus, the biography, grew, as time went on.” (McCabe, 1929, p 221) This is what the so-called Third Quest of the Historical Jesus, which has been underway since the 1980s, has belatedly confirmed. Yeshua ben Yosef was a Jewish demagogue who was transformed into Jesus the Christ by successive Christian re-writings. “So it seems to me far more reasonable, far more scientific, far more consonant with the facts of religious history which we know, to conclude that Jesus was a man who was gradually turned into a God.” (McCabe, 1929, p 228) McCabe went on to say about Jesus:

“The world may come generally to accept this view, and may honour Christ, in passing, for his human zeal. But you cannot make a religion on that. The figure of Christ, the great white Christ who has ruled Europe for a thousand years, will gradually pass away.” (McCabe, 1923, p 41)

Feminism

perhaps Most reMarkable was McCabe’s record as a feminist. His three main publications in this area; The Religion of Woman (1905), Woman in Political Evolution (1909) and Key to Love and Sex (1928) are among the least appreciated of McCabe’s huge corpus. In particular, The Key to Love and Sex is as comprehensive a coverage of gender and sexuality issues as could be found at the time. Its range is wider than the earlier works, which were focused around making the case for women having the vote. McCabe finished The Religion of Woman with this appeal:

“Let women rise and shake from their sex once for all this stigma of indifference to intellectual movements, this honied insinuation of mental inferiority, this suspicion that they care not whether the basic ideas of their spiritual belief are true or untrue.” (McCabe, 1905, p 94)

Much of what he wrote reads well a century on, because McCabe avoided the errors of many of his contemporaries of indulging in the stereotyping of women solely as wives and mothers and bearers of the next generation. He patiently refuted all the prejudices of the day about women being more emotional, and more religious, less capable of sustained action than men. He even devoted time to defending blondes from the usual accusations. At times, McCabe sounds quite contemporary, as when he says it is “to a very great extent the male who has created what in our modern civilisation we call the ‘typical woman’, and we then call every woman unnatural and unwomanly who diverges from it.”

(McCabe, 1928, Vol. I, p 55) McCabe also saw through many male attitudes of time, and since, when he crit-

icized men who advocated female liberation merely so that they could have easier access to problem-free sex.

(McCabe, 1928, Vol. III, p 61)

Perhaps because of the abuse he suffered as a young novice, McCabe never came to terms with homosexuality as a legitimate expression of identity. For much of his life, he spoke of it in nineteenth-century terms as “unnatural vice.” But, to his credit, he wasn’t prepared to condemn others based on his own preferences. “Perversities of taste,” he wrote in The Key to Love and Sex, “do not concern the law, and we should have to inquire whether there is in the practice a social danger proportionate to the penalty which the law inflicts.” (McCabe, 1928, Vol. IV, p 38)

McCabe the Prophet

though not as consistently on target as H G Wells managed to be, McCabe was a credible prophet, at least most of the time. He was least convincing when he actually set out to forecast what the future. For example The Next Fifty Years (1950) is one of his weakest works. The world at the end of the century was forecast to look pretty much like a better-managed Edwardian society, with speed limits of ten miles an hour and communal living in large tenement blocks run by a “father of the block.” But even in this work, McCabe foresaw the problem of aging populations in the West and the dire problem of massive soil erosion. (McCabe, 1950, pp 7, 10, 20)

When he wasn’t trying to be a prophet, McCabe was always stronger. For example, in Can We Save Civilization? (1932) he made a couple of very incisive calls. China, he wrote, was destined to become one of the most formidable economies on earth by the end of the century. And before the Nazis took control of Germany, he saw their victory and that Soviet Russia was likely to ally herself with Germany. (McCabe, 1932, pp 55, 177)

At heart, McCabe was confident that things would get better. After all, he had seen that happening in his own lifetime. He never took progress for granted as written into the stars. Like H G Wells, McCabe was a meliorist; he saw progress as something that could happen if enough people understood the science that underlies the modern world and made the effort to bring about improvements.

McCabe’s Errors

Mccabe wasn’t always right. He was wrong, for example, in refuting Wegener’s theory of continental drift, and he persisted in thinking Asia was where Homo sapiens emerged from. Perhaps more importantly, he defended the notion of ether far longer than was seemly, which also made it difficult for him to accept Ein-

stein’s Theory of Relativity until quite late. But when, by the mid 1920s, he did finally accept he was wrong, he launched into explaining the Theory of Relativity to his readers. (See, for example, McCabe, 1931, chapter two) In other words, when the evidence became overwhelming, he was prepared to change his opinion and adopt new views. This, surely, is the first duty of the responsible popularizer.

These few and relatively minor errors do not undermine McCabe’s record as a skilled and responsible popularizer of contemporary thinking to non-specialist readers. Despite the limitations of his education, and in scientific matters being largely self-taught, he avoided all the fashionable errors of his day and gave his readers sensible, balanced and reliable overviews on a staggering variety of subjects. His books, whether on evolution, the Catholic Church, feminism, or a host of other subjects, anticipated current ideas by two generations. McCabe deserves to be linked with Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan as among the most intelligent, acute and lucid popularizers of the twentieth century.

A Rebel to His Last Breath: Joseph McCabe and Rationalism by Bill Cooke with Foreword by John R. Burr, Ph.D. Prometheus Books, 2001. Hardcover, 332 pages.

ISBN-10 : 157392878X, ISBN-13 : 978-1573928786

BILL COOKE is an historian of freethought and author of A Rebel to His Last Breath: Joseph McCabe and Rationalism

He has written the only full biography of McCabe and has recently completed a reassessment of H G Wells, H G Wells and the Twenty-First Century. Bill is interested in the viability of living an authentic humanist life with as little pandering to anthropocentrism as possible. His books explore aspects of the history and meaning of atheism and humanism. He has lived and worked around the world, including in Kenya, New Zealand, the United States and Britain. Bill teaches philosophy in Warrington, Cheshire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooke, Bill, A Rebel to His Last Breath: Joseph McCabe and Rationalism, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001.

Cooke, Bill, The Gathering of Infidels: A Hundred Years of the Rationalist Press Association, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004.

Drinkwater, C L, Common Objections to Christianity, London: Robert Scott, 1914.

Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel, My Second 25 Years, Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1949.

Lee, R Alton, Publisher for the Masses: Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017

McCabe, Joseph, The Religion of Woman, London: Watts & Co, 1905.

McCabe, Joseph, The Existence of God, London: Watts & Co, 1913.

McCabe, Joseph, The Principles of Evolution, London: Collins, [1913a].

McCabe, Joseph, The ABC of Evolution, London: Watts & Co, 1920.

McCabe, Joseph, The Twilight of the Gods, London: Watts & Co, 1923.

McCabe, Joseph, The Key to Culture, Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1927-29.

McCabe, Joseph, The Key to Love and Sex, Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1928.

McCabe, Joseph, The Story of Religious Controversy, Boston: Stratford, 1929.

McCabe, Joseph, The New Science and the Story of Evolution, London: Hutchinson, 1931.

McCabe, Joseph, Can We Save Civilisation? London: The Search, 1932.

McCabe, Joseph, “Are there inferior races?” Appeal to Reason Library, No. 1. 1935, pp 54-66.

McCabe, Joseph, The Inferiority Complex Eliminated, Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1941.

McCabe Joseph, The Vatican and the Nazis, Auckland: N V Douglas, 1942.

McCabe, Joseph, Eighty Years a Rebel, Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1947.

McCabe, Joseph, A Rationalist Encyclopedia, Watts & Co, London, 1948.

McCabe, Joseph, The Next Fifty Years, Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1950.

McCabe, Joseph, The Logic and Virtue of Atheism, Austin, TX: American Atheist Press, 1980.

Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature, London: Allen Lane, 2011.

Today, little m c c abe said against the c atholic c hurch, has not been said, often in harsher tones, by scholars identifying as c atholics.

TS

Above THE HISTORY AND MEANING OF THE CATHOLIC INDEX OF FORBIDDEN BOOKS BY JOSEPH MCCABE. PUBLISHED IN 1931 BY HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY, GIRARD, KANSAS.

THE KEY TO CULTURE: THE MYRIAD MYSTERIES OF THE MIND BY JOSEPH MCCABE. NUMBER 14 (OF 40 VOLUMES). EDITED AND PUBLISHED BY E. HALDEMAN-JULIUS, GIRARD, KANSAS, 1929. Below JOSEPH MCCABE, 1910.

GEORGE E. MACDONALD April 11, 1857 – July 21, 1944

James Hervey Johnson Editor/Publisher 1964 –1988

150 Years FREETHOUGHT OF