The Truth Seeker, "the journal of independent thought" is also the world’s oldest continuously published small press publication in America and this issue is a very special 125th Anniversary Issue. It’s expensively produced, glossy, glittering, with a striking cover of 24 previous TS covers.

The first issue of TTS was published on Sept. 1, 1873 by the Liberal Association of Paris, IL and this "association" was founder D.M. Bennett and wife Mary Wicks Bennett; the first editors of Truth Seeker.

The Truth Seeker has a remarkable and courageous history of involving itself in one freedom movement after another, from women’s rights to passionate protests against censorship and book-burning and book banning. One favorite target was Anthony Comstock who crusaded against the publication and distribution of what he thought was "obscene or blasphemous" material and one who personally persuaded Congress to pass the Comstock Act that prohibited such material from being sent through the mails. Just like the present day William Bennett, former DEA drug czar, Comstock fancied himself a keeper of America’s morals and, like Bennett, related to the First Amendment like Ted Bundy related to co-eds. Comstock had Editor Bennett arrested in 1877 for publishing in TS his "Open Letter to Jesus Christ." Undaunted, Bennett next attacked soap and toothpaste magnate Samuel Colgate who was then president of something called "The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. "

He was sentenced to 13 months of hard labor in 1879. D.M. Bennett was one of the few editors in American publishing who lived what Einstein thought: "The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.

The Truth Seeker attacks the nonsense of organized religion and castigates religious sects for the bondage it holds on the minds of men and women. This special issue features work by Robert G. Ingersoll ("the Great Agnostics"), Margaret Sanger; Madelyn Murray O’Hair, the lady who brought the lawsuit ending prayer in public schools; Emma Goldman and Clarence Darrow's summation to the jury in the Scopes "monkey trial." Mark Twain was an enthusiastic subscriber (referred to by editors as "our most irreverent subscriber) as was Harry Houdini, who spent his life exposing fraudulent "spiritualists" and "mediums." Harry was an enthusiastic supporter of TTS and was close friends with Ingersoll. Houdini owned the largest collection of Ingersoll memorabilia in the world and this, along with every issue of his TTS subscription which Houdini bound and preserved, is part of the Harry Houdini Collection in The Library of Congress.

Every publisher and writer in America today owes a debt to the editors and writers of The Truth Seeker. It was, and continues to be, a magazine that opposes anything or anyone that restricts the right of men and women to think, communicate and create. Or, as feminist Freethinker Lois Waisbrooker wrote in The Curse of Christian Morality. "...Until you women let go of God and take hold of yourselves, of the inner power of your own beings, there is no hope for you...stop praying and go to work."

The Small Magazine Review
March-April 1999