Brief Thoughts about Jacoby's Freethinkers

There's a LOT of good material in this for freethinkers interested in our history. And, more important for a popular history, this is a pretty good explanation of why secularism is vital to the survival of the nation established in North America in 1787.  As she has in the past, Susan Jacoby addressed mainly American freethinkers and really avoided linking them (especially the later ones like Ingersoll and Sanger) to any type of broader transatlantic tradition. So that opportunity still exists for me.

Jacoby began her history of American freethought with the generation of the founding fathers. In a sense, this may be symbolic of my biggest beef with the book—much as I like it, overall. There’s really no context for the existence of freethinkers in the British colonies or the early American republic. They just seem to spring up, as if they were self-created.  

In reality, of course, freethought grew out of the same rationalism and modernism that created the age of discovery and set the stage for the industrial revolution. Old-world scientists like Newton and philosophers like David Hume and John Locke contributed to the world-views of the American freethinkers. Many American freethinkers such as Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley actually emigrated to America and contributed to the success of the revolution and the new republic.  

Jacoby opened with the iconic American pair, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. But then she digressed a bit to mention opponents of freethought such as Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight. Both these men were presidents of Yale College. I think there’s a significant untold story here, about the resistance of these two orthodox Congregational minsters to change. The anti-freethought bias of most early American colleges deserves some attention as well. Timothy Dwight, who was called the pope of New England by not only freethinkers but by his many political enemies, tried to convince his followers that the world would end if the libertine Deist Jefferson was elected President in 1800. “Our wives and daughters,” he said, would be “the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonored; speciously polluted.” When Connecticut finally disestablished the Congregational Church in 1818, Jefferson (probably alluding to Dwight) wrote to Adams about his satisfaction that “this den of priesthood is at last broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character.” Of course, this is not at all how Timothy Dwight is remembered by American historians. So I think there’s much more to be said about the opponents of freethought during this early period, just as I think there’s a lot more to say about the way freethinkers influenced religion as America grew.

Jacoby did mention Ethan Allen’s 1784 book, Reason the Only Oracle for Man, and called attention to the “revolutionary connection between political and religious freedom.” I think she reiterated a bit of old-fashioned prejudice, however, when she said “Ordinary literate Americans might not have been reading Locke, Hume, Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot.” Since the 1980s, Social Historians have been reporting that in fact regular American people were surprisingly well-read. Studies of the catalogs of early publishers like Isaiah Thomas (whose printing press can be seen at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester) and estate inventories of regular New Englanders (described in William Gilmore’s book Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life) suggest that serious literature, science, and philosophy were being read by a very wide and diverse population of a “republic of letters.” In my own studies, I found a surprising number of Massachusetts boys named for British scientist/poet Erasmus Darwin between 1800 and 1849.

Given the recent controversies over whether the United States was established as a “Christian Nation,” it’s not surprising that Jacoby gave plenty of attention to Jefferson’s 1779 bill to guarantee religious freedom in Virginia and the subsequent Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786). Jacoby suggested James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments…should be as familiar to students of American history as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” In it, Madison called attention to the “malignant influence” intolerant religious institutions have on the “health and prosperity of the state.” The passage describing the Virginia Constitution’s inclusion of affirmation and banning of religious tests as qualifications for office was the most-highlighted part of the first chapter, according to Kindle, followed by the establishment clause of the US Constitution’s First Amendment.

Jacoby mentioned Isaac Backus, who was a leading Baptist during the colonial period. I think the role of religious groups like the early Baptists that challenged the orthodox established churches deserves more study (as it has received in British history). Another group that probably deserves more attention is the conservative wing of the orthodox/federalist party, who opposed the Constitution because it did not include their God. Most often, the story of resistance to the Constitution focuses on radicals such as the Shaysites. So it’s interesting to see what the opponents on the other side were saying, if only to form a better view of the pressure the framers were under from many different constituencies.   

Here’s an interesting passage:

Values are handed down more easily and thoroughly by permanent institutions than by marginalized radicals who, even if they change minds in their own generation— as the abolitionists did— are often subject to remarginalization in the next. Secularist movements, with their generally loose, nonhierarchical organization, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in a systematic way. (p. 103)

I was a bit less interested in the 20th century chapters (I tend to prefer the 19th century), but I did think it was interesting that Jacoby noted that “The farmers who rode fifty miles across the prairie to hear Ingersoll speak in the 1890s were likely to be found in their own living rooms, listening to their own radios, in the 1920s—and radio sponsors did not spend their money to promote attacks on the God of the Bible” (p. 263). It's an interesting point that it’s the centralization of “free” speech enabled by technology that moved us from one-to-one to one-to-many communication and blocked out minority messages. A situation that is only now being rectified...or is it?