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Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought
Yale University Press
January 2013
On Sale: January 8, 2013
246 pages
ISBN: 0300137257
EAN: 9780300137255
Kindle: B00AMYGFVC
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America’s
enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known
as “the Great Agnostic.” The nation’s most famous
orator, he raised his voice on behalf of
Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separation of
church and state with a vigor unmatched since America’s
revolutionary generation. When he died in 1899, even
his religious enemies acknowledged that he might have
aspired to the U.S. presidency had he been willing to mask
his opposition to religion. To the question that retains its
controversial power today—was the United States founded as a
Christian nation?—Ingersoll answered an emphatic
no. In this provocative biography, Susan Jacoby, the
author of Freethinkers: A History of American
Secularism, restores Ingersoll to his rightful place in
an American intellectual tradition extending from Thomas
Jefferson and Thomas Paine to the current generation
of “new atheists.” Jacoby illuminates the ways in
which America’s often-denigrated and forgotten secular
history encompasses issues, ranging from women’s rights to
evolution, as potent and divisive today as they were in
Ingersoll’s time. Ingersoll emerges in this portrait as
one of the indispensable public figures who keep an
alternative version of history alive. He devoted his life to
that greatest secular idea of all—liberty of conscience
belonging to the religious and nonreligious alike.
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