But their very rise makes Susan Jacoby’s fine, compact and judicious account of Ingersoll’s life and ideas all the more important. "As someone who did brave battle with narrow-minded fundamentalists in his own day, Robert Ingersoll would surely be appalled at the political influence of their heirs today. His warmth, humor, tolerance, and rhetorical skill are vividly conveyed, and they are validated by much contemporaneous testimony from figures who would ordinarily have been expected to shun an infamous blasphemer."-Frederick Crews, University of California, Berkeley "Jacoby succeeds in capturing Ingersoll's remarkable appeal across sectarian and political boundaries. Won Honorable Mention in the 2013 Great Midwest Book Festival for the Biography/Autobiography category, given by JM Northern Media LLC Won Honorable Mention for the 2013 Southern California Book Festival, in the Biography/Autobiography category, sponored by JM Northern Media LLC "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. He devoted his life to that greatest secular idea of all-liberty of conscience belonging to the religious and nonreligious alike. Ingersoll emerges in this portrait as one of the indispensable public figures who keep an alternative version of history alive. 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. To the question that retains its controversial power today-was the United States founded as a Christian nation?-Ingersoll answered an emphatic no. presidency had he been willing to mask his opposition to religion. When he died in 1899, even his religious enemies acknowledged that he might have aspired to the U.S.
A biography that restores America’s foremost nineteenth-century champion of reason and secularism to our still contested twenty-first-century public squareĭuring 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.
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