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→Susan Jacoby on the Golden Age of Freethought
{{Cquote|To describe the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries as a golden age of freethought is to suggest not that a majority of Americans were persuaded by rationalist or antireligious arguments but that those arguments reached a much broader public than they ever had in the past. Unlike eighteenth-century [[Deism|deists]], nearly all of whom identified with [[Thomas Jefferson|Jeffersonian]] [[democracy]], American freethinkers of the late nineteenth century were anything but unified in their political views, which ran the gamut from [[anarchism]] to [[Herbert Spencer|Spencerian]] [[conservatism]]. Freethinkers might be Democrats, rock-ribbed Republicans, or, on occasion, socialists with either a capital or a small s.
{{Cquote|To describe the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries as a golden age of freethought is to suggest not that a majority of Americans were persuaded by rationalist or antireligious arguments but that those arguments reached a much broader public than they ever had in the past. Unlike eighteenth-century [[Deism|deists]], nearly all of whom identified with [[Thomas Jefferson|Jeffersonian]] [[democracy]], American freethinkers of the late nineteenth century were anything but unified in their political views, which ran the gamut from [[anarchism]] to [[Herbert Spencer|Spencerian]] [[conservatism]]. Freethinkers might be Democrats, rock-ribbed Republicans, or, on occasion, socialists with either a capital or a small s.
The one political concern that did unite all freethinkers was their support for absolute [[separation of church and state]], which translated into opposition to any tax support of religious institutions-especially parochial schools. For the most part, tax support of religious schools had been a nonissue on a national basis before the Civil War-although New York City's Catholic leadership had pushed unsuccessfully in the 1840s for government subsidy, long established in many European countries, of religious education. By the 1870s, when the growth of the older [[Ireland|Irish]] [[Catholicism|Catholic]] community and new immigration from the Catholic countries of [[Europe]] began to transform the ethnic and religious makeup of most large cities, the financing of parochial school education became a divisive issue throughout the country.<ref>[http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/secular-philosophies/the-golden-age-of-freethought.aspx The Golden Age of Freethought], Beliefnet</ref>}}
The one political concern that did unite all freethinkers was their support for absolute [[separation of church and state]], which translated into opposition to any tax support of religious institutions-especially parochial schools. For the most part, tax support of religious schools had been a nonissue on a national basis before the Civil War-although New York City's Catholic leadership had pushed unsuccessfully in the 1840s for government subsidy, long established in many European countries, of religious education. By the 1870s, when the growth of the older [[Ireland|Irish]] [[Catholicism|Catholic]] community and new immigration from the Catholic countries of [[Europe]] began to transform the ethnic and religious makeup of most large cities, the financing of parochial school education became a divisive issue throughout the country....
Freethought periodicals, which proliferated after the Civil War, were important sources of communication within the freethinking community. They included the venerable Boston Investigator, dating from 1831; the Truth Seeker, founded in 1873 in Peoria, Illinois, but soon relocated to New York City; the Blue Grass Blade in Lexington, Kentucky; the Free-Thought Ideal and Free-Thought Vindicator in Ottawa, Kansas; the irresistibly titled Lucifer, the Light-Bearer in Topeka, Kansas; and the Iconoclast in Austin, Texas, whose editor, William Cowper Brann, was shot in the back and killed by an enraged Baptist in 1898. Brann is an unusual figure in the annals of American freethought, because he was a militant racist-a stance that made him a pariah within the national freethought movement (though many northern freethinkers, like others in the North, saw racism as a strictly southern phenomenon).
But the freethought lecture circuit--not the press--was the chief mode of communication between committed agnostics and a larger public that was interested in but did not define itself by religious skepticism. Americans flocked to lectures in every area of the country--whether in great cities where well-off inhabitants could afford to pay the munificent sum of one dollar for a ticket to a lecture by the famous [Robert Green] Ingersoll (scalpers in New York City, the newspapers reported disapprovingly, got up to two dollars) or in towns like Dowagiac, where a citizen might spend a nickel to hear a traveling lecturer at the Universalist Church, the established venue for heretical talks. General circulation newspapers treated the talks--especially the more controversial ones--as legitimate news events. Ingersoll, Stanton, and Anthony made headlines and sold newspapers wherever they went. When Anthony spoke at the Dowagiac Universalists' invitation in 1874 (two decades before she was enshrined in the Beckwith Theater's dissident pantheon), the church was packed even though the one local newspaper described her arguments as "lengthy but not particularly convincing... and [eliciting] but little enthusiasm." Not little enough, the writer was forced to admit, because when Anthony asked her local audience for a show of hands on the woman suffrage issue, "the ladies" surprised the men by responding with an uppity and overwhelming "aye."
<ref>[http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/secular-philosophies/the-golden-age-of-freethought.aspx The Golden Age of Freethought], Beliefnet</ref>}}
== Charles Louis Richter on the ending of the Golden Age of Freethought ==
== Charles Louis Richter on the ending of the Golden Age of Freethought ==