The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby

I
The Making of an Iconoclast
    Disobedience is one of the conditions of progress.
    â€”RGI, “Individuality”
    In the tiny town of Dresden, near the shore of Lake Seneca in upstate New York, stands the modest frame house in which Robert Ingersoll was born. The Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, operated by the Council for Secular Humanism, houses the memorabilia of a lifetime dedicated to the cause of freethought. The collection contains mementos ranging from a scratchy recording Ingersoll made in his friend Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to a Yiddish translation of his lecture “Some Mistakes of Moses,” indicating that freethinking Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side were as attuned to the Great Agnostic’s message as American-born expatriates from Christianity. Supported by a small number of donors, the facility attracts only the most devoutfreethought enthusiasts, partly because it lacks the digital paraphernalia considered essential for the expansion of museum audiences and partly because of its off-the-beaten-track location. Although the area is spectacularly beautiful, with crystalline lakes (known as the Finger Lakes because of their shape) formed more than two million years ago by glaciers during the Ice Age, it is at least a five-hour drive from any major population center in the Northeast. But the Ingersoll museum’s obscurity in the tourist landscape has less to do with its location or its antiquated paper-and-ink aura (which can be an advantage for small historic houses) than with the general lack of public knowledge about America’s secular freethought traditions. Only an hour’s drive away in Seneca Falls, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, founded in 1969, offers visitors a technologically up-to-date experience in the town where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott launched the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement with a declaration that “all men and women are created equal.” * The feminist movement has done a much more effective job of reclaiming its own history, and of garnering donations, than the growing number of Americansecularists have of preserving and publicizing their heritage. The proportion of Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion and who consider their outlook on public affairs wholly or predominantly secular has doubled during the past two decades, but this decline in religious faith does not necessarily translate into a commitment to the promotion of secular values or knowledge of secular American history and its heroes. *
    The future scourge of orthodox clerics was born on August 11, 1833, to the Reverend John Ingersoll, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Mary Livingston Ingersoll. † Although the Finger Lakes area was predominantly agricultural, it also participated in the late 1820s and 1830s in the new commercial prosperity generated by the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and therefore to New York City and Europe. The canal was the greatest engineering feat of the first half of the American nineteenth century and served as the vital connection between the western frontier and the eastern seaboard for most of the 1800s.Without the Erie Canal, it would have taken much longer for the young American republic to exploit the politically imaginative leap of the Louisiana Purchase. This first great achievement of American technology fueled the ambition of and created liberating possibilities for a generation that came of age when the manmade waterway was crucial to the economic development of a westward-expanding nation—just as the automobile, a century later, would encourage personal mobility on a previously unimagined scale.
    Another characteristic of the Finger Lakes region was its wide variety of dissident religious and social movements, and that cultural history makes it seem almost providential that Ingersoll was born there.