The Great Agnostic

October 29, 2012
A rare all-American atheist is celebrated in this provocative if hagiographic sketch. Journalist and atheist intellectual Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism) recaps the Gilded Age career of Robert Green Ingersoll, an influential lawyer and liberal Republican orator dubbed “The Great Agnostic” for his wildly popular lectures on religion, evolution, and other hot-button issues. Her brisk, lucid study makes him an apostle of irreligion in the tradition of Thomas Paine: a minister’s son steeped in Christian doctrine, Ingersoll used folksy humor, clear expositions, and conversational language to extol science and condemn religious cant. (He lampooned the notion of intelligent design by touting cancer as the capstone of God’s plan.) She also styles him a paragon of progressive politics and culture—she appends his luminous eulogy for Walt Whitman—and a near-saintly exemplar of secular humanism, complete with deathbed scene bathed in the joyful denial of a world to come. The author sets her frankly laudatory portrait—her afterword enjoins latter-day “‘New’ Atheists” to honor Ingersoll’s memory—in an insightful analysis of the late Victorian clash between a scientific, Darwinian worldview and a fundamentalist backlash. Jacoby is hardly neutral in that culture war, but her stimulating study shows that rationalist skepticism is as authentic and deep-seated as America’s fabled religiosity. Photos. Agent: Georges Borchardt.

November 15, 2012
Veteran journalist Jacoby (Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age, 2011, etc.) pens less a biography than a series of sympathetic essays on the ideas of Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899), a Gilded-Age media superstar whose speeches entertained vast audiences even of those who disagreed with his agnosticism. Enthusiastic followers included Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, Clarence Darrow and W.C. Fields, yet he has largely vanished from history. At the same time, religion--in America uniquely among developed nations--remains almost universally respected and politically influential if sometimes distressingly anti-intellectual. Largely self-educated, Ingersoll passed the Illinois bar at age 21, rising in Republican state politics to become attorney general in 1867. Despite the atheism that put elective office out of reach, his brilliant oratory kept him influential in the party, whose deference to conservative Christian beliefs did not appear for another century. While Ingersoll's atheism filled auditoriums and provoked outraged sermons and editorials, many public stances were far ahead of his time. He denounced racism, discrimination against blacks and anti-immigration laws. He spoke out for the equality of women--not merely for the vote which preoccupied activists at the time--but for birth control and equality in marriage, education and jobs: positions no man and few women of his generation advocated. Nineteenth-century unbelievers tended toward pseudo-scientific social Darwinism, but not Ingersoll, who supported social reforms, free public education and workers' rights. More earnest than truculent, Jacoby writes for a readership of freethinkers, but believers who stumble upon the book will find it hard to deny that, irreligion aside, Ingersoll was a thoroughly admirable figure.

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February 1, 2013

Robert Green Ingersoll was one of the most famous orators and prominent nonbelievers in the United States during the Gilded Age. Frequently cutting across political and social boundaries, Ingersoll won admiration even among his enemies with his charm, wit, and rhetorical ability. Today his legacy is largely forgotten, overlooked even in the pantheon of American secularism. Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism) aims to restore Ingersoll to a more prominent place in American intellectual history as an important classical liberal and humanistic defender of the liberty of conscience in the tradition of Thomas Paine. In her enthusiastic (at times approaching hagiographic) celebration of Ingersoll's life and thought, Jacoby expands on the story of one of the most fascinating characters she covered in Freethinkers. VERDICT Although there are a handful of other biographies on Ingersoll, few have been written in recent years and none addresses his contemporary relevance as ably as this one. Readers interested in the history of American secularism and nonbelievers hungry to expand their repertoire beyond the New Atheists will enjoy this book.--Brian Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY

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