I do not remember when or under what circumstances I first met Tom Flynn, but I do know why we hit it off right away. Like me, Tom was devoted to reviving the public’s memory of Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899). He was the only person I knew who was as outraged as I was by the twentieth-century eclipse of one of the most famous Americans of the late nineteenth century—a man known as “the Great Agnostic.”

Tom was enthusiastic and tireless in his efforts to help others, like me, who were trying to unearth forgotten facts about a man who gave up what even his enemies acknowledged would have been a stellar political career to preach the gospel of freethought. When I was writing Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), I came across a quote in an editorial in The New York Times, which always took meticulous care to denounce Ingersoll’s antireligious views, in which the newspaper admitted that Ingersoll’s campaign against religious interference with government meant that he “never took the place in the social, the professional, or the public life of his country to which by his talents he otherwise would have been eminently entitled.”

This editorial, published shortly after Ingersoll’s death, did not apologize for the role of institutions such as the Times in denying Ingersoll political legitimacy. When I mentioned the quote to Tom, he said, “I have a better one.” He cited a comment by Edgar W. Howe, publisher of the Atchison Daily Globe in Kansas, in a memorial that spoke for freethinkers in the American heartland. Howe wrote:

The death of Robert Ingersoll removed one of America’s greatest citizens. It is not popular to admire Ingersoll, but his brilliancy, patriotism, and integrity cannot be doubted. Had not Ingersoll been frank enough to express his opinions on religion, he would have been President of the United States. Hypocrisy in religion pays. There will come a time when public men may speak their honest convictions in religion without being maligned by the ignorant and superstitious. But not yet.

With a laugh that seemed on the verge of tears, Tom said, “Not now either.”

If I seem to be talking more about Ingersoll than about Tom Flynn, that is only because Tom’s distinguishing characteristic was his role as a bearer of culture and neglected political memory. You can see what kind of a man Tom was by visiting the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in the tiny town of Dresden on the Freethought Trail in upstate New York.

Tom was the Museum’s director, and in that small house you will find the memorabilia of two lives dedicated to secularism and freethought. The diverse contents include elegant first editions of Ingersoll’s collected works; scratchy recordings made in his friend Thomas Edison’s original laboratory;  and Yiddish translations of Ingersoll’s frequently delivered lectures, attesting to the appeal of his message for Jewish immigrant expatriates from their religion (who had every reason to hate theocracies) as well as for refugees from Christianity. Another characteristic Ingersoll and Tom had in common was that they combined devotion to reason with a strong sense of humor—one reason Ingersoll’s lectures were attended by liberal religious believers as well as agnostics and atheists. He used to tell his audiences that when he first read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, his first reaction was to think about what a shock it would be to those who considered themselves nobles and aristocrats. “Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the Duke Orang Outang or the Princess Chimpanzee.”

There is only one thing wrong with the Dresden museum, and that is its location—hundreds of miles from major population centers.

I would like to suggest, as a most fitting memorial to Tom Flynn, that the Center for Inquiry arrange for traveling exhibitions of parts of the collection to cities such as New York (where Ingersoll and his family lived in Gramercy Park) and Philadelphia, where they can be seen by tourists who have no idea of what Ingersoll stood for and of the memories Tom dedicated himself to preserving. There the tourists would learn that on July 4, 1876, there was an American who declared, in the town of Peoria, Illinois, that the United States was the first secular government founded on earth. “The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword.” The United States, Ingersoll claimed (prematurely, as it turned out), had “retired the gods from politics.”

Not now, as Tom Flynn put it with a mixture of sadness and amazement. Still not yet.