Robert G. Ingersoll

The standard claim about Ingersoll is that his unbelief cost him the governorship of Illinois, or a cabinet post, or higher. It is not quite documentation and not quite legend.

What is documented: he was a Republican of real standing, Attorney General of Illinois from 1867 to 1869, and the man who delivered the "Plumed Knight" nominating speech for James G. Blaine at the 1876 national convention, one of the most celebrated pieces of American political oratory of the century, which did not win Blaine the nomination but made Ingersoll's reputation as the finest speaker in the country. He was a valued campaigner for the party thereafter.

What is inference: that the party could not run an outspoken agnostic for office and both sides knew it. Contemporaries said so, he said so himself in his dry way, and no counterfactual can be checked. He was not, in any event, denied an office he had actively campaigned for; he chose the lecture circuit, and it made him wealthy.

The tone is what kept the audiences coming. He was ferocious about doctrine, hell above all, which he attacked as the single most damaging idea ever put into a human mind, and conspicuously gentle about people, and his funeral orations, delivered for friends and for a child of strangers, were reprinted as widely as the polemics.

Ingersoll's heresy was delivered through the most respectable medium his century offered: the paid public lecture. On the circuit he became, by common consent, the greatest orator in the country and one of its most expensive, commanding fees that reached into the thousands of dollars for a single night in an age when a workman earned a dollar or two a day, and filling the largest halls in America for performances delivered without notes.

The repertoire mixed freethought lectures, The Gods, Some Mistakes of Moses, Why I Am an Agnostic, with Shakespeare, Burns and reverent portraits of Lincoln, and audiences who deplored his theology paid to hear the voice; clergy attended, sometimes to answer him the following Sunday, which filled their halls too. The career had a strict boundary.

A brilliant trial lawyer and a loyal Republican whose nominating speech for Blaine in 1876, the Plumed Knight address, became a classic of convention oratory, he was told plainly that public office was closed to him unless he muted his religious views, and he declined the bargain; the offices went elsewhere and the lectures went on. The economics deserve notice because they answered a standing argument: that unbelief could not sustain public virtue or public interest. Ingersoll demonstrated weekly that an avowed agnostic could be the most popular platform figure in a churchgoing nation, provided the agnosticism arrived with wit, and the demonstration was itself his most effective argument.