May 21, 2008
Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers
I’ve just finished Susan Jacoby’s 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which I enjoyed reading. It is an account of freethought from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Virginia’s 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom to present-day battles between those supporting and fighting the teaching of evolution. The book’s tone remains fairly measured throughout, and her gallery of “infidels”—Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Robert Ingersoll, Emma Goldman, Roger Nash Baldwin, Madalyn Murray O’Hair—provides a welcome counterpoint to the figures that usually crop up in histories of American thought. Ingersoll in particular comes across as a winning figure, and Jacoby includes the eulogy he delivered at Walt Whitman’s funeral, on March 30, 1892, as an appendix. From that oration:
He came into our generation a free, untrammeled spirit, with sympathy for all. His arm was beneath the form of the sick. He sympathized with the imprisoned and despised, and even on the brow of crime he was great enough to place the kiss of human sympathy.
One of the greatest lines in our literature is his, and the line is great enough to do honor to the greatest genius that has ever lived. He said, speaking of an outcast: "Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you."
His charity was as wide as the sky, and wherever there was human suffering, human misfortune, the sympathy of Whitman bent above it as the firmament bends above the earth.
He was built on a broad and splendid plan -- ample, without appearing to have limitations -- passing easily for a brother of mountains and seas and constellations; caring nothing for the little maps and charts with which timid pilots hug the shore, but giving himself freely with recklessness of genius to winds and waves and tides; caring for nothing as long as the stars were above him. He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god.
That last word brings to mind Michael Robertson’s new book, Worshipping Walt: Whitman’s Disciples (Princeton), which I have not yet seen, but which various reviews have made sound appealing (see brief commentaries in the New Yorker and the New York Observer).