At the center of his effort was Tom Paine. His sources were disparate, ranging from Shakespeare, whose works he cherished and would often quote, to poetry by his friend Walt Whitman, to the discoveries of Charles Darwin.

Ingersoll, the son of an Abolitionist preacher, was a famed, late nineteenth-century exponent of secularism or, as it was then known, freethought. For that reason, among others, it was not only revolutionary in its day but remains so in ours. It refers back to the Founders having omitted all mention of god from the Constitution: Search that document and you will find no “god” or “God,” no “Supreme Being,” not even so much as a polite tip of the hat to “Providence.” It’s instructive to think that when, in January, 2011, the Tea Party read the Constitution out to the House of Representatives, as if it were scripture, they were not called to account for the fact that the Constitution was, if anything, anti-scripture, a document meant to be construed as the work of human beings. The alternative Ingersoll helped to keep alive is the secularist view of American history. Ingersoll was one of those indispensible people who keep an alternative version of history alive.” Yale University Press, 256 pages, $25.Įarly on in her profile of Robert Ingersoll, Susan Jacoby writes that “Intellectual history is a relay race, not a hundred-yard dash. The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby. One answer she proposes is that it was generally assumed that the reactionary expressions of religion Ingersoll contended against would simply fade away over time, to be replaced by education, broader culture, and scientific reason. Robert Ingersoll is all but unknown in our time.

Freethinkers jacoby