By Robert W. Morrell
Freethinkers, A History Of American Secularism. Susan Jacoby. New York, Metropolitan Books, 2004. 417pp. Illustrated. Hardback. ISBN 0 8050 7442 2. $27.50 (£17.50).
Although it may seem something of an exaggeration I nevertheless feel that books devoted to the history of secularism are sadly as rare as hens teeth, so it was something of a surprise when I read a mention in an American publication about the forthcoming publication of the work under review. The author’s name was unfamiliar to me, something which made me wonder just what sort of book she had produced, would it turn out to be a poorly researched work that damned secularists and then went on to describe them as old fashioned and out of date because Christianity had changed so much, which it has not? Or would it be a melodramatic essay based around the activities of a few controversial figures such as Madelyn Murray O’Hair?
Well, in the event the book turned out to be an extremely well written and very readable work, and, yes, it does mention Madalyn Murray O’Hair, albeit briefly, the author describing her as “almost alone in her willingness to call herself an atheist”, and who earned her place in the religious right’s pantheon of demons for her success in having prayers banned in American schools. However, although individual rooms are large in the pages of the book, by no means all having actually connected with organised secularism as such, the author’s overwhelming concern is with issues, and it is the secular response to these that is the main characteristic of the book. Nevertheless in the process the author, who does not lack a sense of humour, introduces her readers to characters such as Philo D. Beckworth, who built a “grand theatre” or “temple of the performing arts”, in Dowagiac. Beckworth was “a committed freethinker and the town’s main employer, his factory being one of the largest producers of stoves and furnaces in the United States. He had a strong philanthropic streak and not only paid his employees high wages but also gave them sick pay, which, Ms.Jacoby remarks, was in 1890s America almost unheard of. His theatre was, which was adorned with busts of famous freethinkers, including Ingersoll, Paine, Voltaire, Susan B. Anthony, George Elliot, Victor Hugo, George Sand and Walt Whitman, theatre was dedicated by Ingersoll, who, she writes, °seized the once-in-a- lifetime chance to dedicate a building prominently displaying his own graven image — a distinction customarily reserved for the honoured dead”. The theatre was demolished in 1968 and many of the busts were destroyed, however, local freethinkers rescued that of Ingersoll and it can now be seen in the Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York. Another bit of odd information was that the notorious Roman Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen, went to considerable lengths to conceal the fact that he had a Protestant half-sister, and what was more, something he acknowledged with great reluctance, his great uncle Daniel Sheen had been a partner in Robert Ingersoll’s law practice in Peoria, but, claimed Sheen, he never embraced his partners agnosticism.
American is a country in which state and church are legally separated, but as Ms. Jacoby notes, it is “one of the greatest unresolved paradoxes of American history that religion has come to occupy such an important place in the communal psyche and public life of a nation founder on the separation of church and state”. The early chapters of the book discuss the influence of Thomas Paine, to whom a whole chapter is devoted and attempts to impose religion on the new republic, one such attempt being made by Patrick Henry, who in 1784 introduced a bill into the Virginia General Assembly to assess all citizens for faxes to pay teachers of religion. The bill’s passage appeared to be a foregone conclusion but following a campaign against it led by James Madison, which even gained support from religious groups — one petition against it was signed by four thousand Quakers, it was, the author says, “relegated to the dustbin of history”, and instead the Assembly adopted Jefferson’s proposal for the complete separation of church and state, with some modifications.
Essentially this book might be described in broad terms as being thematic, in that the author examines in subjects such as woman’s rights, slavery, evolution and anti-evolution, the rights of America’s coloured population, cultural activities, the ‘Unholy Trinity: Atheists, Reds, Darwinists’ (a chapter heading) which introduces readers to among others, the Scopes trial, which has popularly been represented as a defeat for obscurantist fundamentalism, but, as the author points out, this was not quite so, and literary censorship, discussing in detail the efforts to suppress Walt Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass. In this issue, the author presents the attitudes and work of individual secularists, but also brings to the fore just how much support they received from religious individuals and groups.
Freethought had little impact on one major group in American society, the coloureds. Ms.Jacoby discusses the reasons for this and in the process introduces us to the Negro secularist W. E. B. Du Bois, not that he appears to have had any formal connection with any freethought group. Brought up a Christian he increasingly came to regard “the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, colour caste, exploitation of labour and war”, although this clearly points to his freethought, or if you like, secularism, having been founded on and inspired by political considerations. In 1894 he had created a storm of controversy while employed as a lecturer at Wilberforce College, a college for Negroes run by the Ohio state government and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, when he flatly refused to lead students in public prayer. He was to write as a consequence of having studied in Europe that, ‘Religion helped and hindered my artistic sense. I knew the old English and German hymns by heart. I loved their music but ignored their silly words with studied inattention. Grand music came at last in the religious oratorios which we learned at Fisk University but it burst on me in Berlin with the Ninth Symphony and its Hymn of Joy. I worshiped at the Cathedral and ceremony which I saw in Europe but I knew what I was looking at when in New York a Cardinal became a strike-breaker and the Church of Christ fought the Communism of Christianity. The cardinal in question was Patrick Hayes. In old age Du Bois joined the Communist Party as a protest against McCarthyism.
Secularists prominent in the fight for women’s rights include Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ernestine Rose, both of whom get good coverage in the book. The work of the anti-immorality campaigner Anthony Comstock in seeking to use the legislation he and his associates had inspired in an attempt to suppress the distribution of freethought and secularist works, targeting in particular the freethought publisher D. M. Bennett, whom he managed to have jailed having tricked him into selling him an immoral pamphlet and sending it through the post, this being the charge, however, Comstock’s real aim, as Ms. Jacobi notes, was to close down Bennett’s successful journal the Truth Seeker. In this he failed.
It may well be that in the coverage of individual Secularists one could wish for more detail, as in the case of Emanuel Haldeman- Julius. His success as a publisher is recounted, indeed his Little Blue Books sold in their hundreds of millions, but there is no mention of the attention FBI’s chief J. Edgar Hoover’s animosity and his attempts to have Haldiman-Julius indicted as a communist, however, unlike so many others Haleman-Julius’s great wealth made this difficult because he could afford to hire good lawyers. He was certainly a sort of ambivalent socialist but he never a member of the Communist Party, even if he did publish a gushingly uncritical biography of Stalin written by Joseph McCabe, although this was during the war when Stalin was very, much an `Uncle Joe’ figure. One might add that Ms. Jacoby says Haldeman-Julius also published an edition of the bible, though while I possess the Stalin biography I have. never. I saw a copy of this, though it would not surprise me if he did, it’s rather too long for the Little Blue Book format, or the other series, the Big Blue Books, in which the Stalin biography appeared.
This is a truly fine book, even if it is not about organised, secularism as such, and here the title is a bit misleading, but secularism in broad terms, or secularisation if you prefer. Nevertheless it deserves a place on the shoes of anyone interested in freethought history. It is well indexed, and has a bibliography that has extended my books wanted list considerably. What is more, for a well-bound, illustrated hardback the price is reasonable, there are many paperbacks that nowhere approach its value priced far in excess of it. I do not often describe a work as being essential reading, but in this case I have not the slightest hesitation in doing so.