Robert G. Ingersoll: A Lifeby Frank Smith Book review by William B. Lindley
How do you write the biography of a man who was larger than life? You "drink from the fire hose", get busy, and produce a magnificent book. That is what Frank Smith has done. Ingersoll was born in 1833, the son of an itinerant preacher. (The preaching was by choice; the itinerancy was not.) He had a difficult childhood, losing his mother before he was three, but was the kind of boy whose love of life and abundant energy enabled him to throw off an upbringing of a kind that has crippled many others. After a brief period as a schoolteacher on the frontier, he went into law and built a career. (He served in the Civil War, his military career lasting 16 months, beginning and ending with rank of Colonel.) He was active in politics, serving as Attorney General of Illinois 1867-1868. Always a very open man, he did not hide his emerging freethought sentiments, and learned the hard way that this was not compatible with a political career. And so began his real career as a freethought lecturer, which lasted until his death in 1899. That, in short, is the story of Ingersoll's life. This book is the only biography of Ingersoll now in print. It is probably the best anyway. The author has drawn upon sources some of which were unavailable to previous biographers: David Henley; the Library of Congress; Roger Greeley; Fred Ingersoll Harmon; and many others, including, we are pleased to report, Truth Seeker magazine (present staff, alas, can claim no credit). Ingersoll's life was rich and complex, and the documentary material is vast. The author has made excellent use of it, giving us story after story, vignette after vignette, making those early days come alive again. For those of us who have picked up a sketchy history of Ingersoll's life, there are points that pique our curiosity, and this book satisfies our hunger for the details. The brief and strange military career; the blooming of Ingersoll's freethought and the withering of his political career that went with it; the people who were important to him - his brother Clark, Gov. Oglesby, Rev. Talmage, and so many others; Ingersoll's thoughts and actions on the political issues of the day. (History has a bad habit of repeating itself, and some of the issues treated in the book are with us now; seeing what people thought and did 100 years ago about things that vex us today offers a fresh perspective, but only if you read the book.) Especially touching are the encounters between Ingersoll and Walt Whitman. The Foreword is by Dr. Gordon Stein, and examines Ingersoll's long-term influence on religion, women's issues, civil rights, science, and government. Although Ingersoll himself was repressed from the national consciousness after his death, his ideas, while not original with him, had been so well expressed by him that they had taken root in the minds of many thousands. Notably, Ingersoll moved the cause of women's equality forward, and the fear of eternal hellfire and damnation became far less widespread. I hope this issue of Truth Seeker has piqued your curiosity about Ingersoll the man. Frank Smith's book will satisfy it richly. Get the book. Published by Prometheus Books, 700 East Amherst Street, Buffalo, New York NY 14215. 716/837-2475. $31.95 Cloth, ISBN 0-87975-588-1; pp417. Robert G. Ingersoll A Life by Frank Smith with photographs/illustrations.
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