The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism, by Stephen P. Weldon (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 9781421438580). 285 pp. Hardcover, $49.95.

The discerning reader may cringe at the oxymoron scientific spirit in the title of this book—doesn’t a scientific outlook preclude belief in spirits?—but do not despair. In what may be considered a key coming-of-age moment, the American humanist movement (of which Free Inquiry represents one strand) is now the subject of a major independent scholarly history.

Stephen P. Weldon is a historian of science at the University of Oklahoma. This book is the culmination of a project that began as his doctoral thesis in the 1990s. Therefore, it benefits from Weldon’s past interviews with major figures of the movement who are no longer living: Bette Chambers of the American Humanist Association (AHA), Jean Kotkin of the American Ethical Union, Free Inquiry founder Paul Kurtz, astronomer Carl Sagan, AHA patron Corliss Lamont, former AHA president (and, later, Free Inquiry columnist) Edd Doerr, AHA benefactor Lloyd Morain, and others. These interviews—and Weldon’s broad-ranging scholarship—shape an engaging portrait of a quirky, iconoclastic movement that wound up wielding disproportionate influence in mid-twentieth-century America. “My narrative is premised on the view that the history of humanism really does provide valuable insight into one aspect of the American experience, a rich and instructive place to explore American ideas and ideology,” Weldon writes.

This book, as Walt Whitman might say, contains multitudes. It includes admirable feats of scholarship but also disconcerting errors. Such is the book’s importance that both will receive careful attention in this (full disclosure) really lengthy review.

 

One thing Weldon gets spectacularly right is the “look and feel” of American cultural life inthe early to middle twentieth century—the years when the humanist movement emerged. For those who came of age after, oh, 1980, that period can seem impossibly remote. Aside from a brief anti-fascist interlude in the early forties, it was dominated by a Manichaean struggle between the opposing worldviews of capitalism and communism. Yet to be educated and liberal in the capitalist West was, not infrequently, to find oneself rooting for communism—or at least for its less abrasive cousin, socialism. (I was an undergraduate in the mid-1970s, near the end of this period. Even at my moderately conservative Catholic university, it was understood that worldwide socialist revolution remained possible. Some of my classmates dreaded the prospect, and others lusted for it; few viewed the struggle’s outcome as foreordained. That kind of smug monism would come into its own only with the triumphalism of the Reagan years.)

The early to middle twentieth century was also a time when Christian literalism had little public voice. Fundamentalism hunkered in a self-imposed ghetto, having abandoned the public square after the embarrassment of the Scopes trial of 1925. Filling the vacuum, a religious liberalism that treated the scriptures as more human than divine dominated educated opinion, if not always churchgoers’ hearts. As Weldon reminds us:

The political influence of conservative Christianity today sometimes causes us to forget how dominant liberal theology was at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was taught in the seminaries and expounded by ministers across the country. Humanism traces its origins back to this theological tradition.

From the perspective of the present day—with its presumption that neoliberalism is the best choice for all, its outspoken New Atheism, and its fuming religio-cultural Right—the early twentieth century is another world indeed. It was then that religious Humanism emerged from the liberal Protestant and Jewish traditions, a process that Weldon narrates brilliantly. “[S]elf-declared humanists … originated in the early decades of the twentieth century as a clearly defined movement within American liberal religion,” he writes. “The humanist movement crosses so many boundaries and involves so many prominent American thinkers that its story reveals many tacit social relationships that undergird our world.” Dispensing with god-belief at a time when almost all Americans were Christian, humanism “may have seemed radical for a majority of the population, but it was not marginal. It thrived in some of the wealthiest and most well-educated communities in the country.” These insights are essential to recognizing why humanism—on its best day a minuscule, elite movement—attained such “outsized influence within Western culture.”

The high point of this period was 1933’s Humanist Manifesto, hereafter Manifesto I (there would be many successors):

The manifesto was written during the heady first one hundred days of [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt’s presidency. It urged “a radical change in methods, controls, and motives” in order to establish a “socialized and cooperative economic order [and] the equitable distribution of the means of life.”

Manifesto I was signed and promulgated by some of America’s most radical Unitarian ministers. Yet it had been drafted by a philosopher, the University of Michigan’s Roy Wood Sellars. Its signer best-known outside Unitarian circles was another philosopher: the redoubtable John Dewey. “Early religious humanism was such a close collaboration between ministers and philosophers that one might go so far as to say that it was as much a philosophers’ campaign as it was a ministers’,” Weldon writes.

Alongside humanism’s Unitarian strand stood another rooted in Judaism. Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture movement supported liberal thinkers of Jewish background with fellowship as much as the religious Humanism rooted in Unitarianism supported Protestant sophisticates: with “fellowship of the sort that churches provided,” which religious Humanists thought “remained essential to people who had come to disbelieve in God.”[1]

Of course, if religious Humanists consider church-style fellowship essential, secular humanists do not. Often the latter seek emancipation from “fellowship of the sort that churches provide” no less avidly than they seek emancipation from obeisance to deities. “[S]ecular humanism is best understood as a synthesis of atheism and freethought, from which it derives its cognitive component, and religious humanism, from which it derives its emotional/affective component,” I wrote in 2002.[2]

If Weldon is surefooted when sketching the rise of religious Humanism, he is somewhat less so when dealing with humanism’s more secular strand. For one thing, he seldom uses the term secular humanism, except when discussing religious-Right smears against secular humanists or documents such as A Secular Humanist Declaration (1980). But in Weldon’s hands, the posture called scientific humanism—and, by extension, the so-called “scientific spirit” in the book’s title—seems closely akin to secular humanism.

For Weldon, “the visionary outlook” he calls “the scientific spirit of American humanism” centers on:

the notion that there is more to science than simply the knowledge it provides us. The very phrase … indicates that science and scientific ideas are tied to broad human concerns. Science is not just descriptive; it can have prescriptive aspects to it as well. There are moral codes and ideals embedded in the very core of what it means to look at the world from a scientific perspective, and these can give us guidance and suggestions about who we are and how we might live our lives.

As unremarkable as Free Inquiry readers might find that passage, it would have represented quite a cognitive stretch for mid-century devotees of the liberal arts who’d long supposed the humanities, rather than science, the sole arbiter of human values.

Humanism owes a vast debt to science, yet also to a more abstract ideal: “Although there was no supernatural cavalry that would come down to save us or guarantee our survival, the magnificent qualities that we had in ourselves—our intelligence, our resourcefulness, our minds—all gave us power to control our future.” Hear, hear.

A high-water mark for Deweyan humanism came in 1943 when, while World War II raged, four to five hundred leading intellectuals—including most of the top humanist thinkers—thronged a New York City gathering titled “Conference on the Scientific Spirit and Democratic Faith.” However conflicted it may sound to contemporary ears, that title was pure Dewey. It also presaged a coming split between humanism and the liberal-religious current from which it had sprung.

 

It was time, in other words, for secular humanism.

If “Dewey’s philosophy” was “a response to the need for a secular alternative to religion,” Weldon finds possible origins for later-twentieth-century secular humanism in two other stalwarts of Columbia University’s philosophy department: Sidney Hook and Corliss Lamont. Why Columbia? As American philosophy more narrowly focused on linguistic analysis, Columbia clung to a broader conception of the field. That made it “a magnet for scholars seeking to engage in a publicly oriented philosophy.”

Hook, “one of America’s most important public intellectuals of the twentieth century,” may have been the first secular humanist, Weldon writes:

With zero interest in religious practice, he affiliated with the humanist community solely as a result of his Columbia connection, most especially through his close relationship with Dewey. In this respect, Hook was unlike nearly all of the philosophers in the humanist community who preceded him—including Dewey himself—who, in one form or another, understood humanism in religious terms. A Jew by birth, Hook was not a member of the Ethical Culture movement, nor was he a Unitarian. Religion was, if anything, anathema to him, and while he may never have attacked liberal religion as such, when he spoke about religion, he derided it.

If Hook was the first secular humanist, the Marxist New York City millionaire Corliss Lamont may have been the second.

Lamont asserted that it was wrong to characterize humanism as religious. Reacting against the language of the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, he contended that it contained ‘probably the worst and loosest definition of religion that I ever saw.’ ‘Such definitions,’ he continued, ‘add nothing but evasion and confusion, confounding their creators, their users and the public at large.’

Dewey, Hook, and Lamont shared a commitment to science. But science as these philosophers envisioned it had different nuances from science as scientists—and some science popularizers—knew it. At a time when many scientists embraced reductionism and determinism, humanists tended to reject those on principle. This “put early humanism on a collision course with other science-based philosophies,” including early- and mid-century atheism and freethought, whose principal exponents of the day—flinty characters such as Charles Lee Smith and Woolsey Teller—carried determinism and reductionism to not-always-logical conclusions.

Following World War II, a cohort of natural scientists, social scientists, and young philosophers with a more sophisticated grasp of science entered the movement, “and with their arrival, humanism changed.”

Among them was Paul Kurtz.

A Columbia-educated philosopher, Kurtz counted Dewey and Hook among his mentors. Yet his grasp of science was firm. Previous humanist thinkers might have lacked a ready response to claims that altruism is unscientific (“How could a quality evolve that does not benefit the organism itself?”) or that all phenomena are reducible to physics—views that then enjoyed some scientific acceptance. But Kurtz spoke assuredly of kin selection (helping to explain how natural selection might give rise to altruistic behaviors that appeared to benefit only others) and emergentism (which countered reductionism by noting that novel yet wholly natural phenomena emerge as one ascends the hierarchy from physics to biology to social systems).[3]

Kurtz also shared Hook’s taste for intellectual confrontation. He was “eager to promote controversial ideas in the pages of The Humanist,” the AHA’s magazine of ideas—of which he had been named editor—including some that ran contrary to the movement’s usual leftward tendency. Weldon writes that Kurtz’s “confrontational style frequently provoked dissention and division within the movement. Though he had roots in the Deweyan tradition, he came to epitomize the more positivist and iconoclastic strain of thought embraced by the scientific humanists.” In particular, Kurtz brought to The Humanist’s pages bare-knuckled debates over Skinnerian behaviorism. “[W]as this reductionistic account of human beings acceptable to humanists even when it contradicted long-standing humanist ideals about such things as equality and freedom?” Weldon asks. “The successful incorporation of behaviorism into the movement suggested that it could be.” (Behaviorist icon B. F. Skinner became a recurring contributor to The Humanist and, later, to Free Inquiry. Until his death, Skinner was a Laureate of the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism.) Perhaps only a thinker who had moved past reductionism on his own could have seen his way clear to explore it as forthrightly as Kurtz did.

Kurtz’s swashbuckling approach swelled The Humanist’s circulation. He further amplified the magazine’s reach with The Humanist Alternative, a public-affairs television program that aired nationwide (see Sidebar One). But his agenda ran contrary to the direction of the rest of the organization. During the same years, AHA Executive Director Tolbert McCarroll sought to build “an experimental humanist community” (read: humanist communes). AHA was then headquartered in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a radical college town that might have embraced such an undertaking (see Sidebar Two). Seeking a larger canvas, McCarroll engineered the removal of AHA’s headquarters to San Francisco. “[A]s editor, [Kurtz] stood as a counterweight to McCarroll, with an editorial policy that gave a strong voice to those scientific humanists who had been alienated by McCarroll’s efforts.”[4]

Yet give him credit, McCarroll pulled off one of the most astonishing corporate transformations in the annals of America’s nonprofit sector:

The [AHA] had been founded in 1941 as an educational organization, not a religious one, so it held an educational tax exemption. After [United States v. Seeger, a conscientious-objection case which accepted a very broad definition of religion], McCarroll spearheaded a successful effort to have the organization redefined as religious. One reason for this was that, during the Vietnam War, this change made it possible for the AHA to support the petitions of pacifist unbelievers who sought to get conscientious objector status. The redesignation also put the organization fully in line with McCarroll’s other efforts to promote humanist counseling and various ceremonial practices like weddings and funerals.

It’s nearly unheard of for a nonprofit to switch from one category of tax exemption to another, but McCarroll managed it. “It was a good strategy at the time that fulfilled the goals of some religious humanists,” wrote Weldon, “but the characterization of AHA as a religious organization was increasingly out of step with the majority of its members’ beliefs as they became ever more secular” (but see Sidebar Three).

 

By now we are well into the latter half of the twentieth century, so I am overdue to note something odd: As Weldon’s narrative moves past mid-century, his grasp of the tenor of the times becomes less acute. He continues to describe the issues and personalities driving the movement deftly enough, but the arena in which those events unfold grows murkier in his telling.

Weldon completed his undergraduate degree in 1985, so the fifties, sixties, and seventies were before his time. Still, the movement titans he interviewed during his mid-nineties doctoral work would have spent much of their time with him recalling those halcyon years. In any case, the historian’s job is to develop a full command of whatever period one studies. Failing that, a major academic press such as Johns Hopkins might have retained some Greatest Generation or Boomer historian emeritus to fact-check the manuscript. In any event, Weldon is less precise at capturing the milieu of events post-1950 than he is with those that occurred earlier. That’s especially surprising because, based on my own studies of early twentieth-century humanism (and no few conversations with Kurtz about his Columbia days and stories he shared that Dewey and Hook had told him),[5] Weldon’s command of that earlier time is pitch-perfect.

Weldon’s account of later twentieth-century events is further complicated by the way the book’s chapters are structured. His first five chapters, covering the movement from its inception until the end of World War II, are linear. Beginning with Chapter Six, chapters are divided thematically: “Scientists on the World Stage,” “Eugenics and the Question of Race,” “The Humanist Counterculture,” “Skeptics in the Age of Aquarius,” “The Fundamentalist Challenge,” and so on. In many ways, this division makes sense. The rise of early-twentieth-century humanism was linear: humanism emerged among radical Unitarians, attracted a complement of philosophers, generated Manifesto I, and seeded a pseudo-congregational community out of which arose the AHA. By contrast, after 1950 matters grew more complex. Bona fide scientists changed the way the movement related to science; new personalities emerged; special-interest subgroups took shape; ideas from atheism and freethought inoculated the movement; and new organizations formed.

However justified Weldon’s new chapter structure may be, it confronts the reader with a phenomenon not previously seen in the book: certain historical events are treated more than once, popping up in multiple chapters. Writing history this way puts the burden on the author (or editor) to ensure that widely separated descriptions of the same event substantially agree—or that they at least do not contradict one another. Unfortunately, in The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism this ideal is not always met, as we see in the Sidebars. (On at least one occasion, a single event receives multiple incompatible treatments within a single chapter.)

 

The biggest single story in later twentieth-century humanism was probably the synthesis of atheism and freethought concepts back into a humanism that, at mid-century, remained close to its liberal-religious roots. Some of that change resulted from the increasing prominence of scientists and science popularizers such as Isaac Asimov in the movement; Weldon covers that capably. What Weldon short-changes, in my opinion, is the actual cross-fertilization of ideas from earlier American atheism and freethought into the humanist point of view. The leading figure in that process was Paul Kurtz, assisted by the freethought historian Gordon Stein, who stood beside him at the founding of Free Inquiry.[6]

The result of that process was the emergence of secular humanism as a new strand of the movement, distinct from the religious Humanism that had dominated earlier in the century.

Weldon’s treatment of this phenomenon is uneven; some of his thematic chapters present facts that others overlook.

In 1973, Kurtz (then editing The Humanist) and Edwin H. Wilson (previous editor of the magazine) released Humanist Manifesto II, the first update/successor to 1933’s Manifesto I, to worldwide attention. In contrast to Manifesto I, Manifesto II was markedly less religious, less socialist, and more explicitly secular. Humanism was described as a social and intellectual movement, no longer as a new religion as Manifesto I had presented it.

A third manifesto—A Secular Humanist Declaration, authored solely by Kurtz—followed in 1980. Weldon’s analysis of the two documents is perceptive enough, excepting the “elephant in the room” that it ignores:

The Humanist Manifesto II was not directly aimed at fundamentalism, but the Secular Humanist Declaration was—adopting, identifying with, and defending the very phrase secular humanism, which had been so vilified by the fundamentalists. This declaration was announced at the same time as a new journal, Free Inquiry, and a new organization, the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism. It was the culmination of Kurtz’s decade-long effort to forcefully rebut the assault on humanism and humanistic values.

What is missing from this terse account, of course, is that a few years after the publication of Manifesto II, Kurtz was forced out of the American Humanist Association. The reasons were partly ideological, partly political, and partly rooted in personality clashes. But the genesis of A Secular Humanist Declaration reads far differently when one understands it as the founding document of a new secular humanist organization that Kurtz needed to create after getting drummed out of AHA.

Oddly, just six pages later (and still in the same thematic chapter) Weldon revisits this same event, now with greater emphasis on the new organization rather than the declaration: “Kurtz left the AHA and created a new group called the Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH). Because this was his own organization, Kurtz was able to impose a more combative tone than was possible while working within the AHA.” Here we find nuances missing from the previous passage. Others stay hidden; a reader unfamiliar with the facts could still digest these two extracts without ever realizing that Kurtz left AHA involuntarily.

On an admittedly pedantic note, the copy editor in me can’t help wondering why the main text’s first mention of the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (on page 180) does not merit the parenthetical addition of its acronym (CODESH), while the second mention (on page 186) does.

Just two pages later, Weldon briefly acknowledges the influence of the early atheism and freethought traditions on Kurtz’s work, though only in connection with this magazine: “Free Inquiry … drew on the rationalist and freethought strand of secularism that had flourished in the nineteenth century rather than on the genteel ministerial tone of Unitarian religious humanism.” This credit is overdue but seems inadequate to describe a body of ideas that had at least as much to do with secular humanism’s divergence from religious Humanism as Weldon’s so-called “scientific spirit” did. In any case, by his final chapter, Weldon is back to omitting freethought from a list of the movement’s contributing factors:

In this book, I have documented various influences on American humanism: the moral and intellectual spirit of the Enlightenment, the liberal religious theology of Protestant modernism, the secular outlook of liberal Jewish intellectuals, the Deweyan and later positivist traditions in American philosophy, and the visionary thinking of prominent American scientists.

These lacunae aside, Weldon does on the whole a solid job of tracing the major events in humanism from 1950 to the present:

• The sometimes-quixotic insertion of noted scientists into global geopolitics after the Second World War;
• The disputation of liberal and conservative ideas in the movement and its publications;
• Humanism’s role in the counterculture of the sixties and seventies;
• The rise of paranormal skepticism out of the humanist movement (see below);
• The Christian fundamentalist renaissance of the seventies; and
• Battles over evolution and creationism of the nineties and the aughts (which still go on to a lesser degree today).

In his ninth chapter, Weldon provides a detailed analysis of skepticism as an offshoot of the humanist movement. The rise of what is now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry as a project of the AHA during Kurtz’s Humanist editorship has received too little historical attention. Weldon also devotes substantial focus on the controversies that challenged the skeptics’ movement in its early years—the clash between Kurtz and Marcello Truzzi over the editorial direction of the new magazine The Zetetic (now the Skeptical Inquirer) and interlocking disputes over an early Humanist article criticizing astrology, which led to the Mars Effect controversy and the so-called “sTARBABY affair.” At this remove, those squabbles may have received more attention than they deserve. On the whole, though, Weldon perceptively explores the implications that ensue when a humanist movement spins off a special-interest scientific group that takes no official position on religious matters.

There are other small missteps along the way. Weldon seems convinced that African Americans for Humanism was an independent organization, not a project of first the Council for Secular Humanism and later the Center for Inquiry. He does not comment on the New Atheism, which erupted with a string of best-selling books in the mid-2000s and significantly altered the landscape in which humanist organizing unfolded. Bafflingly, Weldon says nothing about Kurtz’s final departure from the organizations he had founded or about the subsequent path the Center for Inquiry has taken.

Still, despite its multitudinous flaws, this book represents a milestone. Organized humanism has become the subject of its first major, independent academic history—a book that truly “contains multitudes” on both sides of the ledger. Supporters and students of the movement can learn much from this volume.

Notes

1. Free Inquiry follows the practice of capitalizing the H in religious Humanism, as religious Humanism defines itself as a religion, while not capitalizing it when referring to other forms of humanism. Weldon does not follow this convention; when quoting from his book his practice will be followed.
2. Tom Flynn, “Secular Humanism Defined,” Free Inquiry, Fall 2002.
3. Personal conversations with the author, especially 1990–1995.
4. Readers may not be surprised to learn that McCarroll, still living as this is written, went on to found a monastic community in the Bay Area and wrote several books on Eastern spirituality.
5. I am also indebted to Nathan Bupp, who shared with me his impressive research into Columbia’s Philosophy Department from Dewey to Kurtz that he conducted during his years as a Center for Inquiry employee.
6. Stein, the foremost historian of freethought in his time, was the first associate editor of Free Inquiry, a longtime editor of the venerable American Rationalist, and editor of the original Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Prometheus Books, 1985). He was also the founding librarian of the Center for Inquiry.

Oh, Those Errors

Despite its many excellences, The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism contains some noteworthy errors. Some are faults in research; others may represent failures in editing or fact-checking by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Two of them can be disposed of quickly here. Three others require the presentation of substantial background information and will be discussed in the numbered sidebars below.

• For a scholar chronicling history, important parts of which unfolded in the sixties and seventies, Weldon’s familiarity with the period seems thin. On page 157—describing the Flower Power era as fertile soil for paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs whose spread prompted skeptics to organize—he explains the origin of the term Age of Aquarius thusly: “A popular song—the Fifth Dimension’s ‘Aquarius’—immortalized the notion in 1969 …”             Wow. “The Age of Aquarius” (never just “Aquarius”) was the most popular song from the hugely influential rock musical Hair, which debuted not in 1969 but in 1967. It’s true that The 5th Dimension, a popular “Champagne soul” group, topped the charts with its cover of the song in 1969. But to anyone who knows the period (in my case, by being a teenager then), “The Age of Aquarius” is simply inseparable from the cultural juggernaut that was Hair. (For another seeming lapse of period knowledge, see Sidebar One below.)

• On another occasion (again in his discussion of the rise of the skeptics’ movement), Weldon sounds wrong even though, strictly speaking, he’s right. On page 159 he wrote: “The popular science writer Martin Gardner published a book in the 1950s titled In the Name of Science …” This is true. But few skeptics would recognize the book by that title. Gardner’s In the Name of Science was published by Putnam’s Sons in 1952 to moderate success. In 1957, Dover Publication issued a revised and expanded edition retitled Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. It is this version that (to borrow a phrase from a much-later time) “went viral.” Fads and Fallacies went through at least thirty printings. More important in view of Weldon’s topic, the Dover version inspired many who went on to play seminal roles in forming organized skepticism. It’s not exaggerating to say that almost all skeptics of a certain age had fond memories of their first reading of the book they knew as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science—in verbal shorthand, just Fads and Fallacies. (By the way, the whole project began with a 1950 article that Gardner published in The Antioch Review, the literary magazine of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. See Sidebar Two, below.)

Sidebar One: Airing The Humanist Alternative

Over several years in the early 1970s, the AHA produced and distributed a public-affairs television series titled The Humanist Alternative. It was a half-hour talk show. Each episode featured Paul Kurtz in dialogue with a prominent humanist such as behaviorist B. F. Skinner; Aryeh Neier, then national director of the ACLU; sex educator Helen Caldicott; ethicist Joseph Fletcher; and many others. National figures would be interviewed at an independent television station in Buffalo, New York, where Kurtz was based.

In Chapter Eight, “Inside the Humanist Counterculture,” Weldon describes The Humanist Alternative as having been “broadcast on public television stations across the country.” That may sound right to contemporary readers; surely it’s the way such a project would have been pursued in the 1990s. (In the aughts, an advocacy organization might have distributed its episodes using cable access. These days it might post the episodes on YouTube.) But that’s not how The Humanist Alternative worked. In fact, it’s not how any public-affairs television program worked in the early seventies.

In those years, public television stations enjoyed relatively generous federal funding for program production and acquisition. Consequently, public stations were less hungry for free programming provided by advocacy organizations than they would become in later decades. However, the appetite of commercial stations for donated advocacy content was vast, owing to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine (introduced in 1949) required commercial radio and television stations to present controversial issues of public importance in a way the FCC would regard as balanced. As a result, for-profit broadcasters devoted their Sunday morning schedules to airing issue-oriented public-affairs shows provided by educational institutions, advocacy organizations, and (often) religious organizations.[1] Just as Saturday mornings were in those days a ghetto of cartoon shows punctuated by toy commercials, Sunday mornings were a ghetto of well-intentioned talking heads.[2]

Paul Kurtz had designed The Humanist Alternative (and its successor series, Ethics in America, which Weldon never mentions) to fill the same niche as public-affairs programming then supplied to stations by mainstream religious groups. No one could argue that humanism was not controversial, so station managers tended to view The Humanist Alternative as “instant balance.” The program won airplay on scores of commercial TV stations, as well as a smaller number of public stations. But make no mistake, commercial stations bound by the Fairness Doctrine were its principal target.[3]

The Fairness Doctrine was eliminated by the Reagan Administration in 1987, after which demand for long-form public affairs programming on commercial stations evaporated. Non-historians who came of age after the late eighties might be forgiven if they never imagined that a distribution strategy like The Humanist Alternative’s was once possible.

Two chapters and thirty-eight pages later, Weldon provides a second account of the same events. It materially disagrees with the previous account, with the effect of making it more accurate: “By 1973 … Kurtz was hosting a TV show, The Humanist Alternative, which aired on commercial and educational stations in the United States and Canada.”[4]

[1] Sunday morning staples of today such as Meet the Press and Face the Nation started out as network-level efforts to slake this same demand.

[2] It was also the golden age of commercial-length public service announcements interspersed among the advertising spots. If you’re anywhere near my age, you can still see the tear rolling down that Native American’s cheek as he contemplates roadside littering.

[3] At the direction of Paul Kurtz, I managed the digital remastering of thirteen historically noteworthy episodes of The Humanist Alternative in 2002. This entailed a review of the entire back catalogue and extensive files from the production of the series.

[4] My knowledge of broadcast station programming practices draws largely on my own experience. I majored in communications from 1973–1977; during those years I worked at a noncommercial campus radio station that programmed issue-oriented talk shows that came in the mail on twelve-inch LPs. (The station operated as if the Fairness Doctrine applied to it, the better to prepare students for employment at commercial broadcasters.) After graduation, I worked for chapters of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, where part of my job involved taking advantage of the Fairness Doctrine to maximize public exposure for chapter fundraisers on local stations. Needless to say, I followed the news avidly as the Reagan Administration dismantled the Fairness Doctrine and everything that had grown up around it. (I designed haunted houses, too, but that’s a topic for another bloated book review.)

Sidebar Two: Awake, Yellow Springs!

Also in Chapter Eight, Weldon tells the story of AHA Executive Director (and future contemplative guru) Tolbert McCarroll, who yearned to redirect the organization toward a future of encounter groups and the like. Unfortunately, for reasons Weldon seems to consider inscrutable, the AHA of the sixties was headquartered in “sleepy Yellow Springs,” Ohio. “The version of humanism that was emerging from McCarroll’s work,” Weldon writes, “was ill-suited to the tiny Midwestern town of Yellow Springs … where the national headquarters was located.” The only remedy was to move the headquarters to some more, well, happening place—in the event, a San Francisco mansion overlooking the Presidio. (The headquarters next moved to Buffalo and years later to Washington, D.C.)

            But was Yellow Springs “sleepy”?

            Hardly.

The village was founded in 1825 by Owenite Utopians. Antioch College was launched there in 1850. With legendary education reformer Horace Mann as its first president, Antioch was only the third American college to admit Black students on an equal basis with Whites. In 1862, the abolitionist and later freethought leader Moncure D. Conway settled a “colony” of some thirty freed slaves in the village. By then Antioch was recognized as one of the nation’s most radical liberal-arts institutions. Its second president, Arthur E. Morgan, went on to lead the Tennessee Valley Authority, then returned to Yellow Springs to help develop Quaker communes. During the Red Scare of the fifties, Yellow Springs and Antioch were both investigated by Ohio’s state Un-American Activities Committee. (Of course, it had one.) In the sixties, Yellow Springs emerged as a hotbed of civil rights and anti–Vietnam War activism. In 1979, it became one of the first U.S. municipalities to prohibit discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

Far from being “sleepy” or “ill-suited” then, Yellow Springs might have been a perfect setting for McCarroll’s social experiments—had his ambitions been less national in scope.

Sidebar Three: When Did AHA Lose Its Religion?

In Chapter Ten, Weldon described AHA’s switch from educational to religious tax-exempt status during the sixties. As noted above, the change came to seem “increasingly out of step with the majority of its members’ beliefs as they became ever more secular.” Yet, Weldon elaborates, “the group’s tax designation as a religious entity remained on the books, lasting until the early 1990s.” A note attributes this claim to a 1993 interview with Fred Edwords, then the AHA’s executive director.

            Yet in 1993, AHA was still a religious organization. Moreover, it would remain so for fourteen more years.

            What happened?

Here’s what I know after following this story for far, far too long. By 1989, with pressure from AHA members to abandon the religious exemption cresting, AHA’s board of directors resolved to act. In that year, AHA absorbed a Quaker religious Humanist organization, the Humanist Society of Friends (HSOF); the idea was that HSOF would take over those AHA initiatives such as the Humanist Counselor program that required religious status.* In all other matters, the AHA would “use its long-standing educational designation,” an article in the January/February 1990 issue of the AHA membership newsletter Free Mind declared. Then–AHA Board Chair Edd Doerr supplied a few more details in the following issue of Free Mind.

            After which, silence descended.

For years, most in the movement thought AHA had resumed its educational status. At this remove, it’s no longer clear who—aside from select AHA boardmembers—initially knew that the promised transition had been sidelined. Fred Edwords might well not have known when Weldon interviewed him in 1993. (Hell, I knew one mid-1990s AHA board member who thought the change had gone through!)

Why had the board’s decision of 1989 come to naught? First, the “long-standing educational designation” boardmembers had banked on reclaiming no longer existed. Back in the sixties, Tolbert McCarroll had done his work too well; the IRS had apparently discarded AHA’s old educational status altogether. Thus, changing back would involve far more “from-scratch” legal work than originally anticipated. In addition, operating as an educational nonprofit (once that was possible) would impose additional bookkeeping costs and public-disclosure requirements.

For all those reasons, the quest for educational status was quietly abandoned. “The decision not to proceed was based in pure pragmatism,” then–AHA Executive Director Tony Hileman admitted to me in a 2002 interview.**

Only in the mid-nineties, with the rise of online reference tools such as GuideStar, which made charities’ annual statements easily searchable, did it become evident that AHA was still operating under its religious exemption. In the early 2000s, AHA’s board promised again to change it—again without apparent result. Finally, in the spring of 2006, the AHA voted to drop the religious exemption and to do whatever it took to obtain new educational status. Then–AHA Executive Director Roy Speckhardt described the process as “very unusual (perhaps one of a kind).”***

Only in early 2007 did the Internal Revenue Service declare the AHA exempt on educational grounds. Interestingly, the status change was made retroactive to January 1, 2003—so maybe that abortive early-2000s effort had borne some fruit after all. ****

The tale of the AHA’s tax exemption approaches the tone of soap opera. But the key point here is that had Weldon looked beyond his 1993 interview notes, a bit more research in archives he was already perusing would have revealed to him that AHA’s religious exemption persisted well beyond “the early 1990s.”

* Because Humanist Counselors were legally clergy, they could perform legally binding marriages in all fifty states. Keeping them under the umbrella of a religious entity was thus imperative.

** Telephone interview with Tom Flynn, originally published in Tom Flynn, “A Secular Humanist Definition: Setting the Record Straight,” Free Inquiry, Fall 2002.

*** Roy Speckhardt, “The Humanist Tax Exemption,” Humanist Network News, February 7, 2007. This article is no longer available on AHA’s site; it is archived at http://archive.li/hDrao. Accessed December 20, 2020.

**** Tom Flynn, “Does Opportunity Knock?,” Free Inquiry, August/September 2018. Online at /2018/09/does-opportunity-knock/.