Fair and Balanced?

Statue of William Ellery Channing at entrance to the Boston Public Garden.

One of my first original contributions to freethought history was my biography of Dr. Charles Knowlton, an “infidel” who was jailed for writing America’s first medical birth control book. It would be an understatement to say he had a perspective that challenged the basic assumptions of his time about the social authority of religion and the actions of religious leaders. I have friends who are religious historians, and I expect my story made some of them uncomfortable. And I expect at some point, I’ll hear that I haven’t been fair to the other side—haven’t presented a “fair and balanced” view of the situation. I thought this might be fun to explore a little.

First, of course, there are some significant differences between history and biography. I clearly wasn’t writing a complete history of Ashfield, Massachusetts; or even of birth control or freethought. I was very lucky to have primary sources that included a lot of Knowlton’s personal opinions. This material is often ironic and funny in tone, and I used a LOT of it to try to put the reader into Knowlton’s head, as much as that’s possible in a non-fiction work. Did I think that his personal perspective was THE TRUTH and the final word on all the issues Knowlton faced? Of course not. But I DO think it represents a perspective that is sadly lacking in our understanding of Knowlton’s time.

For example, I have a chapter in which Knowlton—from his jail cell— writes a letter to the editor of Boston’s freethought newspaper, the Investigator. Rather than complaining about his imprisonment (in the East Cambridge jail, which was so bad it caused Dorothea Dix to become a prison reformer!), Knowlton deconstructed William Ellery Channing’s Discourse on the Evidences of Revealed Religion, which he said an earnest young minister urged him to read and take to heart.

In addition to telling Knowlton’s story and describing his evolving ideas, I tried to address some of the social issues surrounding this biography. There’s a class conflict going on here as well as a religious thing. And there’s a historiographical point. US Historians have written countless books on the contributions of religion to American social and cultural (and political!) history, and have magnified the changes in theology they call the “Crisis in the Standing Order” or the various “Awakenings,” without adequate context. From Knowlton’s jail cell, the contrast between the fire and brimstone Calvinists he’d grown up listening to, and the new, slightly more gentle, liberal Unitarians of the Boston elite, was a distinction without a difference. Both denominations believed that by writing a book about birth control, Knowlton had endangered public order—and that he should be behind bars for that.

There’s a statue of Channing at the entrance to the Boston Public Garden. Knowlton has been virtually forgotten. I found that really offensive, so I decided to do something about it. That also suggests a point of view that isn’t particularly “fair and balanced.”  But social, labor, and other historians who wrote about outsiders, underrepresented minorities (or even unrepresented majorities, like women!) have often been accused of being unbalanced. This strikes me as a last-ditch effort of entrenched elites, who see their grip on power loosening. My question for those critics is, why wasn’t it important to be fair and balanced until now?