The Great Agnostic (27 page)

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Unlike
The Age of Reason,
Volney's book, a rambling meditation on his travels in the Levantine Empire, has not stood the test of time. His excoriation of dictatorship, coupled with flowery conversations with ghosts and reflections on ruins, seems almost unreadable today, but it was extremely popular among freethinkers in both the United States and Europe through the mid-nineteenth century.

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This argument can still be found in unsophisticated fundamentalist antievolution literature and on anti-evolution Web sites, although it is not as common as it was a century ago. Even the most obdurate anti-evolutionists today are well aware that the emergence of new species, including
Homo sapiens,
took place over a period of time that could never have been witnessed by one man from beginning to end.

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The best-known line in this speech is, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

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This speech was delivered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Horace Greeley's
New York Herald
described the scene in its edition of October 31, 1880: “When the expounder of the Gospel of Christ took the famous atheist by the hand, and shook it fervently, saying that he respected and honored him for the honesty of his convictions and his splendid labors for patriotism and the country … the great building trembled with a storm of applause.”

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A sound recording of Ingersoll reciting this creed, which he used in many speeches, can be heard by visitors to the Ingersoll Birthplace-Museum in Dresden, New York. The recording was originally made by Ingersoll in Thomas Edison's laboratory in New Jersey and has been remastered several times.

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Soap manufacturer Samuel Colgate, a major financial backer of the Society for the Suppression of Vice when it was headed by Comstock, had to withdraw an advertising campaign for his new product Vaseline when the
Truth Seeker
gleefully reprinted the company's claims that petroleum jelly was a useful method of birth control. Unfortunately, the false belief that Vaseline was an effective contraceptive lingered well into the twentieth century and was responsible for a good many unwanted pregnancies.

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The term “fundamentalist” in its current sense, meaning one who accepts all biblical descriptions as literally true, did not enter the American language until the second decade of the twentieth century, after publication by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles of a multivolume work,
The Fundamentals,
defending orthodox Protestantism. Bryan was, however, a fundamentalist in the sense that the classification is used today.

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It should be noted that Ingersoll was using the word “capitalists” in purely descriptive fashion—meaning people who possessed capital—and neither in the pejorative way that has long been associated with far left politics or in the positive way that it is used by right-wing proponents of an unregulated market today.

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The 1911 fire, in which 145 garment workers died, remains the single deadliest workplace accident in New York City history.

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In American politics today, there are of course economic conservatives of the Randian strain who (unlike Rand) are not atheists but have embraced social conservatism as well. Representative Ron Paul and his son, Senator Rand Paul (named for you-know-who), are two prominent examples.

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Decision 109 US3, october 15, 1883.

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One important reason why the WCTU eventually joined the suffragist movement was that male state legislatures had repeatedly refused to pass laws establishing habitual drunkenness as a ground for divorce.

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Voltaire's
Dictionnaire,
published in 1764, was not a dictionary of words but did classify its articles and subjects in alphabetical order—a practice introduced during the Enlightenment. It included many articles dealing with the church's history of prosecuting religious dissidents for heresy and blasphemy. It was designed to be more compact, and therefore more easily accessible, than previously published alphabetically arranged volumes.

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Details of the execution vary in different accounts (including those by Voltaire himself). In some versions, the young chevalier was beheaded before his body was burned. The burning of the book along with the body, dead or alive, is reported in every version.

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One of Adams's greatest disappointments in old age was his inability, at the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1820, to persuade the delegates to grant equal legal rights to Jews.

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Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, a strong supporter of the death penalty, explicitly made this argument in a speech delivered at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2002 and tellingly titled “God's Justice and Ours.” Democracy, Scalia argues, is responsible for the rise of opposition to the death penalty in the twentieth century. “Few doubted the morality of the death penalty in the age that believed in the divine right of kings,” Scalia adds. That is undeniably true but is hardly a constitutionally viable argument for capital punishment imposed by a modern state: one might as well argue that human sacrifice is acceptable because in many primitive cultures, few doubted the morality of crushing skulls in order to place them in the foundations of temples as a rite of sanctification and purification.

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Ingersoll apparently never answered the letter, although his correspondence contains many personal replies to inquiries like Bryan's. One can only wonder if a direct engagement with Ingersoll would have altered the mindset that produced Bryan's lifelong commitment to the defense of literal biblical faith.

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The idea that vaseline was an effective contraceptive persisted, alas, well into the twentieth century—especially among the young—and was surely responsible for a fair number of teen pregnancies.

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Ingersoll was referring to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the construction of which began in 1892.

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The downgrading of the flames of hell worked. A 2008 poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that while 74 percent of Americans believe in heaven, only 59 percent believe in hell.

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Booth was the brother of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. The brothers had split on the issue of slavery and the Civil War.

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Tolstoy, born in 1828, was only five years older than Ingersoll. Raised, of course, in the Russian Orthodox Church, the writer experienced a deepening crisis of faith after completing
Anna Karenina
in 1877. Tolstoy's rejection of the flesh, wealth, and all sensual pleasures found its most famous expression in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” which was held up by the official Tsarist censor because his advocacy of chastity even within marriage was actually a violation of the church's teachings. He was excommunicated by the Russian church in 1901.

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The deliberate infliction of pain on live animals in the name of science lasted well into the last quarter of the twentieth century. In his 2011 book
The Better Angels of Our Nature,
psychologist Steven Pinker recalls torturing a rat to death as a research assistant under the instructions of a Harvard professor. He described the act as “the single worst thing I have ever done.”

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Seven years later, when the rumors had not ceased, Mrs. Ingersoll and her sister signed an affidavit attesting to the events of his last hours.

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In a then-famous 1888 disputation with English cardinal Henry E. Manning, Ingersoll wrote, “It may be sufficient to say that there is no crime that man can commit that has not been committed by the vicars of Christ. … Among [the popes] there were probably some good men. This would have happened even if the intention had been to get all bad men, for the reason that man reaches perfection neither in good nor in evil; but if they were selected by Christ himself, if they were selected by a church with a divine origin and under divine guidance, then there is no way to account for the selection of a bad one. If one hypocrite was duly elected pope—one murderer, one strangler, one starver—this demonstrates that all the popes were selected by men, and by men only, and that the claim of divine guidance is born of zeal and uttered without knowledge.”

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The family of Joseph P. Kennedy, who sent his sons not to Catholic schools but to the best secular prep schools and universities in the country, exemplified this tendency.

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During the Gilded Age, the demand for feathers, especially ostrich plumes, to decorate ladies' hats was so great that various species were threatened. Along with the anti-vivisection movement, outrage at the destruction of birds for millinery was one of the earliest animal rights campaigns.