Newsletter of the
Robert G. Ingersoll Birthplace Museum
and the Robert Green Ingersoll Memorial Committee
IN THIS ISSUE...
A cheery new welcome sign beckons as visitors enter the museum.
The new audio kiosk lets
up to three visitors listen
to any of five audio tracks.
Much is new at the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum for 2005.
Generous giving by donors last year, coupled with some very special
volunteer work, mean that a record amount of new or refurbished
material will appear in the Museum’s display cases this year.
The museum’s audio listening station has been completely revamped.
Instead of a single telephone handset on which one can hear a scratchy
copy of three brief Ingersoll statements recorded by Thomas Edison,
there are three handy headsets and a bank of pushbuttons.
Users can choose to listen to any of the three Edison recordings of
Ingersoll’s actual voice. And they can listen to piano and
full-orchestral performances of the 19th century Ingersolia March,
composed by John Philip Sousa imitator George Schleiffarth and
unearthed by supporter Martin Lifschultz. Volunteer perfomers James
Kurtz and Robert Guillory contributed the march recordings. Center for
Inquiry – Transnational superintendent Vance Vigrass installed the
electronics, Andrew Skolnick digitally enhanced the Edison recordings
for improved clarity, and Lisa Hutter and Chris Fix of the fearless CFI
art department produced the colorful signage.
Speaking of colorful signage, there’s a new welcome sign inside the
muse-um’s first room that offers free copies of Free Inquiry,
Prome-theus Books catalogues, and a greeting by Council for Secular
Humanism founder and chair Paul Kurtz.
Other new acquisitions include an original 1890s newspaper cartoon of
Ingersoll, a period drawing of the 1876 Republican Convention in
Cincinnati, where Ingersoll launched his national career, and an
artifact from the launching of the World War II Liberty Ship Robert G.
Ingersoll (see related story, p. 6).
This year also marks the return of several items withheld from display
while they underwent preservation and rebinding: lavishly-bound
editions of Crimes against Criminals, Little Journeys to the Homes of
Eminent Orators, and Prose Poems and Selections, as well as one of the
museum’s treasures: the original manuscript, largely in Ingersoll’s
hand, of the Great Agnostic’s famous speech “Ghosts,” presented
to us years ago by supporter Philip Thorek.
This remarkable magazine illustration depicts the
1876 Republican National Convention, held in a long-gone assembly hall now the site of Music Hall, itself the venerable home of the Cincinnati Symphony
Orchestra. On the stage in the far distance, Robert Green Ingersoll
launched his national reputation with his impassioned "Plumed Knight"
speech nominating James G. Blaine for the GOP nomination.
Image courtesy Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio.
This vintage calfskin-bound Roycroft copy of Crimes Against Criminals required painstaking rebinding by an artisanal book restoration service. After delaying for several years, the Museum was able to make the investment to rebind this and three other endangered volumes.
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Some of the Museum’s most impressive 2005 additions won’t appear at the
Museum at all. Center for Inquiry research fellow Christopher Whittle
recruited two State University of Buffalo student interns, Michael
Korona and Matthew Licata, who finally completed two long-delayed
Internet projects for the Ingersoll Museum. Museum director Tom Flynn
had compiled images and information for the two sites for several
years, but it took the interns to assemble those raw materials into web
sites.
By June 2005 at the latest, Mike Korona’s “Virtual Ingersoll Museum”
will be available at
http://www.secularhumanism.org/ingersoll/virtualtour.html. It’s an
online tour of the entire Ingersoll Museum, including detailed photos
and descriptions of every document and historical artifact displayed at
Dresden. There are also video clips and even the 11-minute museum
visitors’ orientation video available for download — literally hundreds
of images, clips, and files. A broadband Internet connection is not
required but definitely recommended.
At about the same time, intern Matt Licata’s completed
Freethought
Trail web site will go live at http://www.freethought-trail.org. This
site documents a dozen historical sites within a short drive of the
Ingersoll Museum that form part of freethought and radical reform
history.
In 1878, the third floor of this building in Watkins Glen, New York, was a meeting hall . the site of a freethought convention at which Truth Seeker publisher D. M. Bennett and two other freethinkers were arrested (for selling a birth- control pamphlet) at the instigation of decency crusader Anthony Comstock. The bad news: There's no historical marker. The good news: The Chinese and Italian restaurants on the ground floor are pretty good.
In the May 2005 issue of
Harper's Magazine, editor Lewis H. Lapham
praised Robert Green Ingersoll, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce as three
nineteenth-century voices that twenty-first-century Americans should
pay more attention to, lest militant evangelicals complete their
takeover of American life without so much as a single bleat of protest.
Mourning in his editorial "The Wrath of the Lamb" that "the delusional
is no longer marginal," Lapham warned that "[t]he faith-based
initiative descends upon the multitude in the glorious cloud of
unknowing that over the last twenty years has engulfed vast tracts of
the American mind in the fogs of superstition."
He quoted, among others, the following passage from Ingersoll:
When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and
hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few.. There is more
of value in the brain of an average man of to-day, than there was in
the brain of the world four hundred years ago ("God in the
Constitution," Dresden Edition, Vol. XII, p. 133).
In a way he himself might never have imagined, Robert Green Ingersoll
might be just the man this country needs to hear a great deal more of!
Ingersoll's most impassioned oration on the sacrifices made by Civil
War veterans and their families was the prose poem that became famous
as "A Vision of War" ("The past, as it were, rises before me like a
dream ."). First delivered to an Indianapolis audience in 1876, it was
an oration Ingersoll was asked to give time and again . especially at
Decoration Day (today's Memorial Day) observances. What touched hearts
and minds in the nineteenth century still resonates today, as historian
and Galena, Ohio, village-council member David A. Simmons discovered.
Simmons, who edits the Ohio Historical Society's magazine Timeline,
rediscovered Ingersoll and "A Vision of War" . and put them
to use in his community's 2004 Memorial Day celebration. He reports:
I am in charge of a Memorial Day Service every year in Galena .. We
assemble on the Village Square for speeches and music and then troop to
the nearby cemetery for a few remarks, a gun salute, and taps. Finding
a good, concise speaker has become increasingly challenging. . [A]s I
got to know Ingersoll's writings and read . his Indianapolis speech . I
was impressed with how well it resonated with today's issues. I shared
it with the retired speech teacher, Roy Merchant, who lives in the
village and who is also commander of the local American Legion unit
(and an agnostic of long standing), and he enthusiastically agreed to
read it. I afterwards received several positive comments on it from
members of the assem-
bled residents.
To read the "Vision of War" speech yourself, visit
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/vision_of_war.html,
or turn to the Dresden Edition, Vol. IX, pp. 157 - 187. Fair warning:
before he gets to the inspiring "Vision of War" passage, Ingersoll
(foremost political speechmaker of, you will recall, the Republican
Party) unleashes oceans of turgid prose accusing Democrats of
responsibility for the Civil War, complicity with slaveholders, and
tearing apart the Union ("Every man that endeavored to tear the old
flag from the heaven it enriches was a Democrat"). It's instructive to
read these passages today and reflect on how the meaning of party
labels has changed.
Ingersoll: A Memorial Day Tradition
On Memorial Days of yore (then called Decoration Day), all eyes ... and ears ... turned to Ingersoll. Historical research coordinated by the Ingersoll Committee has unearthed new facts about this photo, displayed as a mural in the Museum front hallway. It depicts a Decoration Day tribute to Thomas Paine held at his New Rochelle, N.Y., homesite on May 30, 1894. The remarkable image was made by a professional photographer, Miss S. Lavin of 828 Broadway, New York City, and published in the freethought paper The Truth Seeker on June 9, 1894.
What’s God Got to Do With It? Robert Ingersoll on Freethought, Honest
Talk, and the Separation of Church and State, edited and with an
introduction by Tim Page. Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Press, August 2005.
ISBN 1-58642-096-8. Paper, 144 pages, $10.00.
For decades Ingersoll admirers have nurtured the hope that some
enterprising writer or filmmaker would rediscover the Great Agnostic
and restore him to the place of recognition he deserves. With this slim
volume Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning chief music critic for the
Washington Post and scholar of mid-20th century comic novelist Dawn
Powell, takes a bold stab at reacquainting American readers with
Ingersoll.
The book begins with a 17-page biography and appreciation.
Comprehensive and concise, it may be the best capsule introduction to
Ingersoll yet published. Best of all, Page presumes that his reader is
neither a freethinker or a history buff. Instead he presents Ingersoll
to the general educated reader on that reader’s terms.
That approach continues throughout the rest of the book, which consists
of short and midlength Ingersoll quotations, heavily edited and adapted
for modern audiences. Be warned: Page planes down Ingersoll’s most
florid rhetoric, which may draw the ire of purists. And he excerpts,
condenses, and retitles with abandon. From a single lecture, “The
Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child,” he draws three focused reflections
on Lincoln, human happiness, and evolution. Such heavy editing carries
risks, but in my opinion Page succeeds mightily. The end result
preserves most, if not quite all, of Ingersoll’s rhetorical sparkle
while making the prose far more accessible for today’s readers. And
Page’s rearrangement of the material makes manifest the relevance of
Ingersoll’s thinking for the burning issues of today.
Those of us who keep a volume from the Dresden Edition on our
nightstands might draw limited benefit from Page’s book. But we should
keep a few copies on hand to share with friends. It’s just the thing to
offer a curious acquaintance who might not have the time or the
historical erudition to benefit from Susan Jacoby’s magisterial
Freethinkers. It offers enough information to steer intrigued readers
to reliable primary sources, whether they want to read Ingersoll in the
original or learn more about secular humanism. Who knows? Tim Page’s
bold, accessible book might just succeed in its aim of making Robert
Green Ingersoll a household name once more.
Now available at the Museum gift shop (and by mail order), a new 2-CD
set offers up a double helping of Ingersoll's wisdom - recorded at a
professional studio and performed by a regionally prominent
Shakes-pearean actor and director.
Included are unabridged (and impassioned) readings of Ingersoll's
lecture "About the Holy Bible" and his 1890 magazine article "Why Am I
An Agnostic?" There's also a brief introduction to Ingersoll and his
life and times by Museum director Tom Flynn. The project was recorded
at Starfields Productions of Buffalo by engineer/owner Alan Dusel, who
has recorded numerous music albums, radio commercials, and the like.
The result is a 100 percent professional recording of a performance by
an anonymous master of the spoken word ... if you will, an Ingersoll
for our own age.
Funded by a grant from Canadian Ingersoll aficionado George Baker. The
2-disc set sells for $30.00, lower at the Gift Shop, and proceeds
benefit Museum operations.
Robert Green Ingersoll: the Most Remarkable American You Never Heard
Of, the 11-minute orientation video produced for the Museum in 2003,
was recognized as Best Documentary in the FutureVision Festival
sponsored by MacroSystem, manufacturer of the video editing system used
to create the production.
The video is available on a large TV/DVD player in the Museum's front
room. It can also be accessed as part of the Virtual Museum Tour. A
revised version of the video will be produced during 2005,
incorporating some newly-unearthed graphics and the new recordings of
George Schleiffarth's Ingersolia March.
The Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum at 61 Main St., Dresden, N.Y. will be open from 12 noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays from Memorial Day weekend through Hallowe'en (May 28 to October 30, 2005). Admission is only $1.00!
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
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