In December 1885, Robert Green Ingersoll wrote a tribute to Elizur Wright, who had died the previous month. Ingersoll said Wright had been “one of the Titans who attacked the monsters, the Gods, of his time … at the peril of his life.” Because during Wright’s lifetime “a majority of Christians were willing to enslave men and women” and because he believed “that a good God would not have upheld slavery and polygamy,” Wright “became an enemy of orthodox religion … a friend of intellectual liberty.” Born in 1804 to pious evangelical parents, Wright nevertheless became an atheist abolitionist whose “life was spent in doing good.” Among his many words of praise, Ingersoll declared Wright “generous … a model citizen … always thinking of the public good … loving Nature … friendly in manner … loving and gentle in his family … physically fearless, intellectually honest, thoroughly informed; unselfish.” Ingersoll’s eulogy was more than any human being could ever hope for.
Although Ingersoll and Wright had been friends and co–vice presidents of the National Liberal League when it was formed in 1876, Ingersoll’s tribute was not hyperbole. In his thoroughly researched, well-crafted biography of Wright—Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse—Lawrence B. Goodheart demonstrates that Wright was one of the most principled atheists who ever lived, a man “whose entire career was devoted to promoting change” for the public good.[1]
Prior to the Civil War, many White abolitionists—and some slaveowners—believed that slaves could not be emancipated without disrupting American society. They thought that freed slaves would drive down Whites’ wages and exacerbate racial tensions, especially among Whites working with former slaves. (After his escape, Frederick Douglass himself experienced violence while working as a free laborer in New England.) To avoid social disorder and to maximize Blacks’ “potential,” the American Colonization Society (ACS) was formed in 1816, funded in part by the U.S. government. The Society sought to return freed slaves to Africa. Between 1820 and 1831, the ACS purchased, paid passage for, and helped settle 2,000 Black slaves in the West African colony of Liberia, now an independent nation.
Persuaded by William Lloyd Garrison’s argument that “the gradual emancipation program of the American Colonization Society was a moral fraud,” Wright was a rare American who—in Goodheart’s words—“embraced the holy crusade of immediate abolitionism.” Like Garrison, Wright believed that slaves should be freed immediately, without any compensation given to slaveowners. To both, slavery was illegal: America had been founded on the premise that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, liberty included. “Immediate abolitionists” thought slavery was immoral and economically backward: Blacks were humans, not objects to be traded or animals to be bred. Slaves also had no incentive to work hard. Yet the nation needed hardworking men to build towns, schools, canals, and railroads. In 1865, when Wright criticized the Emancipation Proclamation as a halfway measure, he wrote, “By the abolition of slavery, we mean full citizenship, the right of suffrage, and a homestead, irrespective of origin and color.”
Wright had no faith in early nineteenth-century American political “reformers.” Unlike his colleagues in New York’s American Anti-Slavery Society, Wright advocated an abolitionist third party as early as 1839 and self-published The Chronotype, a Boston newspaper devoted to “a sisterhood of reforms.” In addition to immediate abolitionism, Wright’s paper demanded equality for Irish immigrants, cheap postal rates, abolishment of capital punishment, rights for women—including suffrage and improved wages for seamstresses—rights for the mentally ill, a just distribution of wealth, and a severe wealth tax on “greedy” capitalists such as John Jacob Astor. According to Goodheart, the newspaper also “opposed Sabbatarianism, denied biblical inerrancy, and rejected the idea of eternal punishment.”
When the Liberty Party was formed in 1840, Wright joined and supported it, stating that “we have no faith in abolishing slavery or … capital punishment … till we can establish government on the one idea of equal rights for all.” Goodheart says that when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, Wright “called for civil disobedience to an unjust law” and was himself unjustly arrested “for assisting in the daring escape” of an escaped slave. He used his trial to “harangue against the Fugitive Slave Law.” In 1860, he wrote, “I don’t believe in the God of Books, I don’t believe in anything but facts appreciated by some degree of evidence.”
As Goodheart’s title reflects, Wright became an “actuary,” which today connotes a dull, though well-paying, occupation you might not associate with an atheist activist. But if you have ever felt the need for life insurance, especially as a parent, you can thank Elizur Wright, whose contribution was—in Goodheart’s words—to “reform, rationalize, and regulate [the industry’s] practices, laying the foundation for safe and secure life insurance.” A knowledgeable mathematician, Wright published Valuation Tables, “a milestone in the search for order in the life insurance business,” which hitherto had no empirical basis for writing policies. He taught the industry that “while nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.”
Yet as an actuary, Wright was also “thinking of the public good.” Goodheart notes that Wright firmly believed life insurance “could provide in a changing society what Christian charity could not—the protection of the family from the financial destitution caused by death.” In the nineteenth century, widows and orphans were commonplace; the Civil War alone had created 200,000 widows. Especially when he traveled to Europe, Wright also worried about his own family’s financial security. At the dawn of American capitalism, he “perceptively argued as early as 1852 that state regulation was necessary to protect the consumer.” He persuaded Massachusetts to create an insurance oversight agency, of which he served as commissioner from 1858 to 1867. After all, Wright argued, “since the state chartered corporations … they must conform to the legislated expression of the people’s will.” Goodheart notes that as commissioner, Wright “relentlessly” sought to expose “dishonest or unsound [corporate] activities”; when he indicted the International Life Assurance Company of London for mismanaging millions of dollars, he even charged “that its officers were inordinately overpaid.” As part of his crusade “against incompetence and malpractice,” Wright also (in Goodheart’s words) “undertook the burden of public education because he understood that a well informed public was the foundation for sound life insurance practice.” Although Wright’s position “abbreviated his antislavery activity, he remained an outspoken abolitionist.”
To summarize: if, as the Ingersoll Museum states, Robert Green Ingersoll was “the most remarkable American most people never heard of,” then Elizur Wright was a very close runner-up. Perhaps he receives less recognition because—in contrast to Ingersoll’s twelve thick volumes of collected works—little that he wrote survives today. His most enduring legacy is the Middlesex Fells Reservation near Boston, which, says Goodheart, “provides water resources (including Wright’s Pond), recreational opportunities, and wild land.” Wright, with his usual passion, organized an association to protect the Fells from real-estate pressures. He “wrote letters to newspapers, lectured before clubs, and lobbied influential politicians.” After the state legislature passed a forestry act enabling municipalities to create public forest preserves, he worked to raise the $300,000 needed to acquire the land and donated $5,000 of his own money to the cause.
On the other hand, Ingersoll and Wright had clear differences. While Ingersoll supported unions, Wright opposed them, believing unions were a “monopoly” interfering with freely negotiated contracts between workers and capitalists. In fact, although Wright grasped “the structural factors causing economic hardship and economic inequality in the antebellum North,” according to Goodheart, Wright’s economic individualism “blocked his understanding of class formation during the Industrial Revolution,” a phenomenon Ingersoll grasped. And unlike Ingersoll, Wright always “blamed poverty on individual immorality and personal profligacy. Indeed, he never lost [his] pietistic inclination to fault the poor for drinking themselves into penury.”
However, on one issue, Wright may have been the more progressive of the two: the 1873 Comstock Act, officially titled An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles for Immoral Use. The Act prohibited the circulation through the mail of immoral and obscene literature. Named after twenty-nine-year-old New York salesman Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Act never defined obscenity. But according to David Rabban,[2] “postal authorities deemed obscene publications that, in recognizing a woman’s right to control her body, opposed legal regulation of marriage and provided sexually explicit information about contraception. They also defined obscenity to include blasphemy.” In effect, the Act prohibited advertisements (in Ingersoll biographer Orvin Larson’s words) for “abortion, contraceptive information, erotic pictures and stories … unconventional treatments of sex, love and marriage, and free-thought materials.”[3] As special agent of the Post Office appointed to enforce the Act, Comstock refused to distinguish between pornographic and scientific literature, which he called “more offensive to decency” and “more revolting to morals” than explicit porn!
A first in the Western world, the Comstock Act especially reflected its namesake’s view that contraceptives promoted obscene and illicit sexual activity. Comstock was an evangelical crusader, and “his” laws were also adopted by twenty-four states, especially in Puritan New England, where Connecticut went a step further and prohibited not just the advertising but also the use of birth control—even by married couples in their own bedrooms. Violators faced a one-year prison sentence, though enforcement was rare. Of course, Comstock had the support of the Catholic Church, which condemned both birth control and abortion.
Today, the Comstock Act seems oppressive and outdated, a legal remnant of the past. But as late as 1960—in U.S. v. Zuideveld—the U.S. Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality; not until 1983 was the Act ruled unconstitutional. And according to historian Estelle B. Freedman,[4] in the nineteenth century, ideological restrictions on sexual intercourse—contraception included—served many “women’s self-interest” and provided them “leverage in their dealings with men.” By accepting the common Victorian view that couples should restrict sexual intercourse to the procreation of children, women achieved “greater personal freedom,” elevated themselves “closer to personal morality with men,” and established greater “control over reproduction.” (It’s a control Elizur’s wife Susan may have desired, given that she spent most of her life raising eighteen children—thirteen of whom died—while Elizur worked.) Freedman says that with the exception of a few radicals, “even feminists” rejected artificial contraception “and preferred to keep sexuality and reproduction linked.” “Radicals” included anarchist Emma Goldman and suffragist Margaret Sanger; Sanger—who opened America’s first birth-control clinic—was also indicted by Comstock in 1914.
Women’s increased control over reproduction is evidenced by the decline in marital fertility rates from 7.04 births in 1800 to 3.56 births in 1900, rates that also reflect women’s increasing entrance into the workplace. Freedman says that to effect this decline, there is “extensive evidence that married, middle class white women might have used contraceptives or abortion, as well as abstinence.” In fact, the Comstock Act “may have been a reaction to … [women’s] increased use” of birth control during the nineteenth century. Freedman also notes that although most women of the day advocated Victorian ideology, they “did not necessarily remain asexual themselves, either in marriage or with friends.”
Men, too, subscribed to Victorian ideology. Authors commonly viewed sexual desire as harmful to the mind and body, and sex itself as even “depleting” men’s bodies. Homosexuality and masturbation were said to contribute to mental decline, the latter even to “insanity.” Freedman says that “Americans feared uncontrolled erotic sexuality as something that threatened to place the individual beyond the control of the community,” possibly leading to anarchy. Abolitionists attacked “the unrestrained lust among male slaveholders” as an abuse of power that could lead to the unraveling of civilization. More positively, male sexual sublimation and self-control were viewed as keys to economic success and class mobility, vital to the “education of a gentleman,” and distinguishing middle-class managers from the unruly working class. (The relatively high birth rates among working class immigrants worried the wealthy who chiefly financed Comstock’s work.) Of course, by exhibiting self-control and using contraceptives, aspiring young men could also “avoid the economic burden of families.” None of this precluded, however, their occasional enjoyment of prostitutes.
During his tenure as special agent of the U.S. Post Office, “Comstock claimed to have prosecuted more than 3,600 defendants and destroyed over 360 tons of obscene literature.”[5]
Defendants included freethought newspapers and literature, especially if they mentioned contraception.[6] For example, Comstock arrested Ezra Harvey Heywood for mailing his pamphlet Cupid’s Yokes—a polemical attack on marriage—and a medical book about sexual physiology; also arrested was DeRobigne M. Bennett, founder and publisher of leading freethought newspaper The Truth Seeker, for mailing his work An Open Letter to Jesus Christ and a scientific treatise, How Do Marsupials Propagate? Comstock further threatened to arrest Bennett’s printer if he continued to print The Truth Seeker. Convicted offenders faced up to five years of hard labor and a $2,000 fine; Ingersoll persuaded President Rutherford B. Hayes to pardon Bennett. After Wright posted his $1,500 bail, Heywood too was pardoned.
Not to be denied, Comstock targeted the publisher again. Using a pseudonym, he entrapped Bennett by requesting another copy of Cupid’s Yokes, which Bennett mailed him. In December 1878, Comstock re-arrested Bennett. Bennett was tried and convicted. Ingersoll again argued for President Hayes to pardon him, but this time Hayes refused. According to Orvin Larson, Hayes’s previous pardons had led to a “storm of protest” accusing him of “capitulating to liberals, infidels, free lovers and smut dealers.”[7] Bennett ended up serving thirteen months of hard labor.
Bennett’s arrest precipitated a serious schism within the National Liberal League, a group consisting “largely of free love and birth control advocates, opponent of organized religion, anarchists, and other assorted libertarians who stood well outside the mainstream of American society.”[8] In 1876, the League had circulated a petition asking Congress to “repeal or materially modify” the Comstock statutes “so that they cannot be used to abridge the freedom of the press or of conscience.” After Comstock showed the House Committee on the Revision of Rules “a collection of smutty circulars describing sexual depravity,”[9] the Committee rejected the petition.
At its 1880 meeting in Chicago, the Liberal League debated the issue. A majority believed that the League should fight to completely repeal the Comstock Act. Despite his own personal style—“no tobacco, no rum, no philandering, only moral intensity”—Elizur Wright supported the majority by stating, “a law which excludes from the mails a publication of my own or any other man … [is an] utterly unconstitutional invasion of my rights as a man and a citizen.” He thought vice should be eradicated, but, according to Goodheart, Wright believed “the dissemination of scientific knowledge about human sexuality was the best way to eliminate a market for prurient material.” Until then, local legislators could prosecute publishers of “sexually descriptive material without redeeming social value.” In supporting resolutions calling for the complete repeal of the Comstock Act, Wright was joined by “dozens of others”[10] in the League, including James Parton, O. B. Frothingham, T. C. Leland, and Courtland Palmer.
League President Francis Abbot—who believed Comstock had done some “necessary work”—thought repealing the Comstock Act was too radical and that the League should support Comstock’s strictures on mailing obscene materials. When he attacked the majority, League members elected Elizur Wright to replace Abbot as president. Goodheart says that when Abbot attacked him, Wright “accused Abbot of wanting the league to be ‘a sort of watch over my brother church’ responsible for every member’s morals.”
As for Ingersoll, Susan Jacoby is mistaken when she writes that “Ingersoll had no particular interest in the obscenity issue per se” and suggests that he was mostly “repelled by images that degraded women” in “obscene” literature.[11] As a vice president of the National Liberal League, he served on the committee that presented the League’s unsuccessful petition to Congress in 1876. At the League’s 1880 meeting in Chicago, Ingersoll vehemently sided with Abbot and other league members who wanted only to “reform” the Comstock Act, maintaining its strictures against obscene literature. Ingersoll delivered two long, impassioned speeches against repealing and in favor of only reforming the Comstock Act. When the majority voted to repeal, Ingersoll got up, walked out, and resigned his position as vice president of the League. He was then—according to T. B. Wakeman—“rebaptized” into the Republican Party. According to Larson, two years later when the League met in St. Louis, Wakeman “acknowledged that Ingersoll’s defection was partly responsible for the League’s failure in political action.”[12] And Rabban says that Ingersoll’s and other minority members’ resignations substantially undermined any further “organized opposition to the Comstock Act.”
During his lengthy “pro-reform, anti-repeal” speeches addressed to League members, Ingersoll had presented several arguments. One was practical: he felt that members could not “afford to put into the mouth a perpetual and continual slur”—which Christians would utter—that League members supported obscene literature, which Ingersoll compared to a “crawling, slimy lizard.” Because the League had demanded that Christians “expunge” obscenity from the Bible, he felt League members would also be subject to charges of hypocrisy if they opposed Comstock’s laws. But his argument extended beyond his fear that “we lay ourselves open to the charge … that we are in favor of widespread immorality.” He felt that the entire future of the League—its support for universal secular education, taxation on church property, and freethought—had already been compromised. He stated that the League’s “repeal” position on Comstock had limited its membership; in one hyperbolic flourish, he even stated that “Had it not been for [our position on obscenity] the Liberal League of the United States would tonight hold in its hand the political destiny of the United States.”
What about Wright’s view of the First Amendment? Ingersoll argued that the “U.S. government has a right to fix limits on what goes into the mail. Certainly they have a right to say you shall not send a horse and wagon by mail.” He further stated that “It is the business of a secular government [to prevent the appeal of obscene literature].” Ingersoll—an experienced lawyer—also expressed his faith in the federal courts to prosecute obscenity fairly; in the rare event cases were decided by “idiotic jurors,” he proposed that the League establish a “committee of defense” that would examine individual cases as they arose. If, he argued, a defendant is “pandering to the lowest passions in the human breast,” he should be found guilty, and the government should “burn [his literature] up.” But if it were clear that a defendant had “pure intentions,” then the League would defend that person. He did not mention that despite many such efforts, Bennett was serving hard time for his offense.
In sum, Ingersoll argued that Comstock’s laws
ought not to be repealed. Some of them are good. The law against sending instruments of vice in the mails is good, as is the law against sending obscene books and pictures, and the law against letting ignorant hyenas prey upon sick people, and the law which prevents the getters up of bogus lotteries sending their letters through the mails.
But by which standards is “obscene literature” to be judged? When a convention delegate asked Ingersoll, “Who is to be the judge of [the manifestly obscene]?,” his answer was “There are books that nobody differs about,” a statement even more questionable than Potter Stewart’s 1964 declaration that “I know [obscenity] when I see it.” Also dubious was Ingersoll’s statement that “the literature of real Freethought shall not be discriminated against [because it is] absolutely pure. We know it.” And that League members would attack the church “in perfectly pure language.” Ingersoll’s “answers” did not convince the majority, who voted in favor of the repeal resolutions. As mentioned, Ingersoll then quit the League.
In the years since the Liberal League’s schism over obscenity, the U.S. Supreme Court has basically taken Ingersoll’s position that the First Amendment does not license obscenity. But as W. Corbin Howard has written, “The Court has had great difficulty in discovering a definition which reliably separates obscene from non-obscene material.”[13] In 1973, the Court tried to concretize the definition when Chief Justice Warren Burger (in Miller v. California) wrote that obscenity must meet three criteria: It must be 1. “Prurient in nature” 2. “Completely devoid of scientific, political, educational, or social value”’; and 3. “Violate local community standards.” But terms such as prurient and completely devoid and social value are highly debatable. And exactly which community’s “standards” should any material be judged by? Difficulties in defining obscenity—especially during the internet age—have probably discouraged the high court from taking cases involving alleged obscenity; these difficulties have certainly confused juries, with one lawyer having stated—thirty years ago—that “a serious review of the U.S. Supreme Court’s flawed obscenity case law is long overdue.”[14]
In the end, given that the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned the Comstock Act, that “obscenity” is such a subjective concept, and that the American public has increasingly resisted government regulation of personal morality, one could argue that during his time, Elizur Wright’s position on obscenity was more progressive than Ingersoll’s. On the other hand, if Ingersoll were alive today and had the benefit of hindsight, it’s quite possible that, like Wright, he would take a more elastic view of the First Amendment.
Notes
[1] In the lengthy online biography of Wright written by Francis Stearns for Project Gutenberg, it is incredible that he never mentions Wright’s transition to atheism and the U.S. government’s persecution of him and other freethinkers after the Comstock Laws were passed.
[2] David Rabban. Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years. Cambridge: 1997.
[3] Orvin Larson. American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll. Citadel Press: 1962.
[4] Estellei B. Freedman. “Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America …” Reviews in American History, 10:4.
[5] https://law.jrank.org/pages/5508/Comstock-Law-1873.html
[6] Susan Jacoby. The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, Yale, 2013.
[7] Larson, ibid.
[8] Donna I. Dennis, “Obscenity Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the United States,” Law and Social Inquiry, 27:2.
[9] Mary Ware Dennett, Birth Control Laws, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.219265/page/n75/mode/2up.
[10] The Works of Ingersoll, v.12, p. 220.
[11] Jacoby, ibid.
[12] Larson, ibid.
[13] W. Corbin Howard. “Miller, Jenkins and the Definition of Obscenity.” Montana Law Review, 36:2.
[14] See, for example, https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1990/12/27/verdicts-confound-notion-of-what-is-obscene/.