Fred Whitehead

Freethinkers United! Conference 1997
Orlando, Florida

[Fred Whitehead was introduced by Mitch Modisett who said: ... while Christos cleans them out of the bookstore and the hallway ... if that doesn't work I will threaten to tell another joke; that should being them in. Fred Whitehead, editor of Freethought on the American Frontier, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Kansas, studied in England as a Fullbright Scholar and attended Columbia University as a Danford Scholar, earning his Ph.D. in English Literature in 1972. Since that time he has been teaching and engaged in scholarly pursuits and he is the contributing editor to the acclaimed Encyclopedia of the American Life. He is presently the editor of two newsletters. His most recent book is Culture Wars and he will talk to us about Freethought in America.]

I'm from Kansas City and over the years when I've been working in Freethought and Humanist History I kept hearing about these giant conventions in Florida. When we have such a meeting in Kansas City we might have 20 or 30 people. So I thought I'd better get evidence of this miracle with my own eyes. I have felt the presence, as it were--your presence. I'm very glad to be here to see that there are so many good questions, such a high level of thinking, and of pondering on the issues that we all need to confront and come up with solutions to. I did a book called Freethought on the American Frontier which Prometheus Books published in 1992. It was the first anthology of Freethought, Agnostic and Atheist literature, primarily from the middle west and the west of the United States. I did the book because no one had ever done it before which is probably the best reason to do a book. When I finished it I thought it was a job well done, but literally at the moment when I finished this book and sent it off to Prometheus--I realized to my horror that it was for a country that was neither free nor could think and so it was sort of shot into space. The other thing that's happened when I've gone to give talks, particularly at a library or for a women's club or a college class someplace, is that people don't know what freethought is. A hundred years ago it was a word that was in common use in this country. Today when I say I am working on freethought history, people look at me as though I am a scientologist, and so I hasten to give a word or two about the origin of freethought back in the eighteenth century and that it is generally examining the basis of religious belief.

What I'd like to do this afternoon is to read a bit from this book, Freethought on the American Frontier. I took the liberty of bringing five copies along with me so anyone who is interested to purchase a copy can do so after this session. I also left in the book room some fliers for those of you who want a list of freethought literature in the United States. And I also have a flyer out there for my newsletter, Freethought History, which is the only publication in the world devoted entirely to the history of atheism and agnosticism and related movements.

I'd like to dedicate this session to the memory of Gordon Stein. I am sure some of you know Gordon Stein or heard him speak at a meeting or know his monumental book Encyclopedia of Unbelief or his anthologies or his role in editing the American Rationalist journal. Curiously enough, I myself only met Gordon Stein once and that was 13 months ago when he came to Kansas City and gave a talk. Gordon was a very shy person in a way. It was curious because he was well known for giving debates and hundreds of people would come to colleges and the like, but he was a rather scholarly person and so on. So he came over to my house and we were sitting there and I showed him my freethought library. After he had seen my collection we were sitting around my kitchen. I've done a lot of oral histories of freethinkers which I'll talk about a little bit later and I said to Gordon, "Why don't we talk about your life? I'd like to get a tape of your story and where you came from and how you got started and so on." He was a little reluctant, but he agreed. So, we had a talk for an hour and a half or so. I think many of you know Gordon fell ill with cancer in the Spring. Neither of us knew at that time that he was ill or would become ill, and he died rather rapidly in August. He was only 55. Barbara? So his death was really a tremendous loss to American freethought scholarship.

Gordon and I didn't always agree on things but I've found that no freethinkers ever do, so you either worry about it or you don't worry about it. We didn't worry about it. We learned a lot from each other. So, after his death, I realized that I was particularly pleased that we had done this tape, and I offered a transcript to the American Rationalist which was published in St. Louis a Gordon Stein memorial issue. I noticed in the book room there are some sample copies of the American Rationalist. And if you are interested in Gordon Stein or if you liked him and respected his contribution, certainly, you should get a copy of the special Gordon Stein issue. I don't know if everyone knows Barbara Stocker. Barbara will you stand up? Barbara is the mainstay of the Rationalist Society of St. Louis. Barbara is a good friend of mine; once I started getting involved in this movement we'd meet up at gatherings like this. Barbara is, I think, managing editor. That's the person that does all the work and doesn't get the glory. So, Barbara is one of these great people--some of you may have known Eldon Scholl who was there in St. Louis for many years. We have a lot of people who help keep our movement going and keep the publications coming and the like. I also wanted to introduce someone else: Emmett Fields is a tremendous collector of freethought literature and he also realized the need to put this literature out on computer disks, including the entire Dresden edition of the works of Robert Ingersoll. He has also reprinted the pictorial textbooks of Freethought that were issued in the nineteenth century drawn by an artist named Watson Heston. Emmett has reissued these books--reprinted them--and they are available from Robb Marks, Bookseller (formerly H.H. Waldo, Bookseller). So, if you want more information on reprinting and computer disk versions of freethought texts, Emmett is the person to see at this conference.

Well, when I talk about freethought and what the atmosphere was like in the nineteenth century, I usually start with a cowboy song. Since I don't have my stetson or my guitar I am going to read it as a poem rather than as a song. It's about a cattle drive and this is called Silver Jack.

I was on the drive in '80 working under Silver Jack
Which the same is now in Denver and ain't soon expected back
There was a fellow 'mongst us by the name of Robert Wait
Kind of cute an' smart and tonguey, guess he was a grad-u-ate.

He could talk on any subject from the Bible down to Hoyle
And the words flowed out so easy, just as smooth and slick as oil.
He was what they call a skeptic and he liked to sit and weave
High fa-loo-tin' words together tellin' what he didn't believe.

One day we all were sittin' round,
Smoking burly-type tobacco and hearin' Bob expound:
Hell, he said, was all humbug, and he made it plain as day
That the Bible was a fable and we 'llowed it looked that way.

Miracles and such like were too rank for him to stand
And as for him they called the savior, he was just a common man.
You're a liar! someone shouted, and you've got to take it back
Everybody started--'twas the words of Silver Jack.

He cracked his fists together and stacked his duds and cried
'Twas in that thar religion that my mother lived and died.
And tho I haven't always used the Lord exactly right
when I hear a chump abuse him he's got to eat his words or fight.

Now this Bobby weren't no coward and he answered bold and free
Stack your duds and cut your capers, for there ain't no flies on me.
And they fought for forty minutes; the crowd would whoop and cheer
When Jack spit up a tooth or two and Bobby lost an ear.

At last Jack got him under and slugged him once or twice
and straightway Bob admitted the divinity of Christ.
But Jack kept reasonin' with him til the poor cuss gave a yell
and 'llowed he'd been mistaken in his views concerning hell.

Then the fierce encounter ended and they riz up from the ground
Someone took a bottle out which he kindly passed around.
We drank to Bob's religion in a cheerful sort of way
But the spread of infidelity was checked in camp that day.

This book was a terrific pleasure to work on because I kept coming up with these folkloric, bizarre, wayward people and episodes and events. Some of them were humorous; some of them were tragic; but, they all seemed realistic; and they all seemed important to me. One of the people that I excerpted in this anthology was a man named William Cowper Brann. Brann was a journalist in Texas who started a monthly magazine called The Iconoclast and this was in the mid 1890's in central Texas. You can imagine what it was like. He, however, obtained 100,000 subscribers to this magazine. Brann was a big, tall guy, very raw-boned looking, sort of cowboy-looking character, but he had this kind of extraordinary style which no one has ever equalled, I think, in American Freethought literature. One of his essays is called Texas and Intolerance and I just want to read you a few sentences to give you an idea of what his style was like. He said in this essay that around the country--bear in mind again it's a hundred years ago--some places have liberal ministers of religion. He said, however, "the Texas division seems to [have] become hopelessly stuck in the Serbonian bogs of brainless bigotry." And he concludes this essay in the following manner:

I have noticed that those who are most fearful that I could commit the awful sin of blasphemy or desecrate the Christian Sabbath by playing ball with the boys or dancing with the girls were the people I had to watch closest in a trade. Those who set up nights to agonize lest the young be led astray by some awful atheist could tell the smoothest falsehood with the straightest face. Those who wept the most copiously because the heathen of foreign lands had no Bible were a trifle backward in supplying the heathen right here at home with bread. That those who cried "Amen" the loudest at camp meetings were usually expert circulators of lies. If we could trade our ham-fat preachers for good samaritans at a ratio of 16 to 1 or brass collar orthodoxy for pure morality and about 300,000 brainless bigots and canting hypocrites for a yellow dog and lose him, Texas would be infinitely better off.

You could imagine the chaos that this provoked in Texas. He was of course writing in Waco and maybe there is something in the water down there. But, Waco is the head of Baylor University which is one of the flagships of Baptist Higher Education, and he got crossways with the administration out there and the students. One of the things he said once that always struck me as very succinct was "the only thing wrong with the Baptists is that they don't hold them under long enough." There is a certain crystal quality to that odd advice. What happened was in 1897 he was kidnapped in Waco and taken to the campus of the University and he was horse-whipped by students and if a faculty member had not passed by and saved him he probably would have been beaten to death right then and there. And the next year in 1898, he was assassinated--shot in the back in the street in Waco. He turned around and emptied his own pistol into his assailant--they both died within a few hours. In my book I have a photograph of his marker which you will find in Waco cemetery bearing the legend "Truth." You will see right over his temple the indent of a bullet. So, people used to come by and fire on his tombstone even after he had been killed. I was told when I went down to Baylor that there is folklore at the college that if before a big exam you go over there and rub that temple it will be good luck.

A couple of other things I wanted to give you from this anthology: I realized when I was working on this that there were so many great American writers who were freethinkers. Probably Mark Twain is well known to a lot of us and I was glad to see Letters from Earth out here for sale. But there were lots of other people who made a tremendous contribution. The first translation of Hegel's logic into English was done in St. Louis during the Civil War by a guy named Henry Clay Brokmeyer. Brokmeyer was a big tall guy--they were all raw-boned types for some reason--and he got turned on to Hegel so he translated this. Brokmeyer's translation has never been published to this day, but he gathered a bunch of young Hegelians around him; they all got turned onto Hegel's logic and then they ended up in the Union army in the Civil War. When the Civil War broke out it was precisely these German American radicals and revolutionaries who saved St. Louis for the Union. U.S. Grant himself said later if they had not done that there would have been a siege before St. Louis rather than at Vicksburg in Mississippi. And Frederick Engels said that the action of these Germans in St. Louis essentially saved the entire western part of the United States for the Union cause in the Civil War.

An essay I'm working on I might mention in passing, is a kind of long piece on freethinkers in the Union Army. Lincoln himself was a freethinker of some sort; he was rather evasive about it all but General Sherman was also a freethinker. Sherman's wife was a devout Catholic. ... So there's Sherman and there's all these people in St. Louis and Central Texas and so on and to my surprise no one has ever written on this subject. The body of Civil War literature is gigantic--there are whole libraries of Civil War literature and scholarship and no one has ever looked at freethinkers and the contribution they made. Well other people who were in this frontier freethought anthology are all the great founders of modern American literature: Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Clarence Darrow, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters. I realized that the people who were in the Chicago Renaissance, people that students all used to read in school--I don't know what they read now--but, we used to read all these people. They were freethinkers; they were heretics; they were atheists or agnostics or the like--very unorthodox in their views. And they were all fleeing puritanism; they were all fleeing repressive forms of Christianity and so it was a real kind of surprise to me to pull all of this together and say: they all fit; they were all part of our movement, our heritage. One of these poets that I mentioned, Vachel Lindsay, is an interesting case because he came out of the Campbellites, which are Disciples of Christ or Christian Church today and I am not going to try to tell the whole story about Campbellites, but Vachel Lindsay was very popular for poems like The Congo and General Booth Enters Heaven. Everybody used to read these poems and hear them when they were in school. But Lindsay had all these poems about doubt and about religious struggle and conflict and most of them were never reprinted until the 1980's. There is one poem I would like to read because it was so impressive to me and also seems very relevant to the type of social conditions that we have in America today. It's called Dreams in the Slum.

Some men, not blind, still think amid the filth.
Some scholars see vast cities like the sun
Bright hives of power, of justice and of love
In brains like these our Zion has begun.

What will you do to make their thought come true?
Or will you tread their pearls into the earth?
Friends when such voices rise despite the time
What are your shabby, rich man's temples worth?

Well I just want to conclude then this reading from the book with a couple of things. I only have two women in this book--I was sort of exhausted by the time I got it done and I realized I wanted to do an anthology of women freethinkers. Annie Laurie Gaylor from Freedom From Religion Foundation has just completed a very large and very substantial and important anthology called Women Without Superstition. I was glad to help her--to give her some suggestions and so on. But I will say and I admit that there's only two women in this first book. They are rather spectacular women but to try to explain their contribution would be a little complicated. There's another cowboy poem that's in the book called Reincarnation by a guy that's a rancher out there in I guess Montana. His name is Wallace McRae and as you may know there's been a big revival in cowboy poetry in recent years. There are big meetings and so on like we're having here and hundreds of people will come and it's rather impressive. Sometimes the poetry is pretty bad, but sometimes it's pretty good, too. And I think this poem by McRae is probably one of the most famous of the new cowboy poems. It's called Reincarnation.

What does reincarnation mean? A cowpoke asked his friend.
His pal replied it happens when your life has reached its end.
They comb your hair and wash your neck and clean your fingernails
And lay you in a padded box, away from life's travails.

The box and you goes in a hole that's been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when you're planted 'neath a mound.
Them clods melt down just like your box and you who is inside
And then you're just beginning your transformation ride.

In a while the grass'll grow upon your rendered mound
til some day on your moldered grave a lonely flower is found
And say a hoss should wander by and graze upon this flower
that once was you but now's become your vegetative bower.

The posey that the hoss done ate up with his other feed
makes bone and fat and muscle essential to the steed
But some is left that he can't use and so it passes through
And finally lays upon the ground this thing that once was you.

Then say by chance I wanders by and sees this on the ground
And I ponders and I wonders at this object that I've found
I thinks of reincarnation, of life and death and such
And come away concluding'--Slim you ain't changed all that much.

Two poems I want to conclude with [are] by a poet named Tom McGrath who was a good friend of mine. I judged from the questions and bits of paper people passed up [that] many people here are concerned with social issues and maybe socialism and capitalism and all that sort of thing. Tom McGrath was an atheist and a communist and he died in 1989. He had been sick in his later years. But he has a poem in the anthology called The Heroes of Childhood and it's about doubt. During the 1950's he was black-listed--couldn't keep a job in academe even though he had been a Rhodes Scholar from North Dakota. This is a poem about doubt and trying to hold to principles in the midst of repression and confusion and dismay. It's called The Heroes of Childhood.

The heroes of childhood were simple and austere
And their pearl handled six guns never missed fire
They filled all their straights, were lucky at dice
In a town full of bad men they never lost face
When they looked under beds there was nobody there

We saluted the outlaw whose heart was pure
When he stuck up the stage and the mail car
Big Bill Haywood or Two Gun Marx who stood
Against the bankers and all their works
They robbed the rich and gave to the poor

While we in our time are not so sure
When the posse catches us our guns hang fire
And strung up from the wagon tongues of long reflection
Our hearts are left hanging by the contradiction
Which history imposes on our action here

Perhaps we were mistaken; it has been so long
In the fierce purpose of those Dead-eye Dans
Did they too wake at night in a high fever
And wonder when their action would be clear if ever
For the saint is the man most likely to do wrong

In any case we later ones can only hope
For the positive landmark on the distant slope
Moving through this world's Indian nation
The heart must build its own direction
Which only in the future has a permanent shape

Another poem--I'll conclude the reading from the book with this one--The Vision of Three Angels Viewing the Progress of Socialism.

I like this one because it was written long before anyone dreamed all this business about angels would come back.

And the first with his hands folded and a money belt for a truss
Said looking into the commune well I will be damned and buggered
Having been a banker in real life to see how those burrowing beggars
Live without mortgages and rents and with no help from us

And the second who had been a soldier in civilian life said
Jesus Christ they'll never believe me when I tell the boys in the squad room
That no one down there says sir and they won't believe what's harder
That even bug-house nuts don't want to be Julius Caesar.

And the third with the teamsters cap and callouses on his wing said
I fell away from the flesh and into the hands of heaven
But the working stiffs down there are finally getting even
So I'll stick around until judgment. Heaven is a sometime thing.

The projects I am working on now, one is women freethinkers. I was glad to see Annie Laurie's book come out and it's really an extraordinary book and well worth $25 postpaid from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. So I do encourage everyone to go out and get that one. It's a good book. I have a co-editor for the project that I'm working on--her name is Elizabeth Gerber and she happens to live in Kansas City and so we are kind of working in a parallel track to what Annie was doing and also Carole Gray who is an outstanding young freethought scholar in Columbus, Ohio. I've wanted to produce a three-volume documentary history which would start with the revolution, and colonial period and would come up to the present. When I say a documentary history, Annie Laurie's book has a lot of the major statements, the documents in terms of essays and some poetry and the like of that. But there is a lot that happened in American legal history, trials, letters, diaries and many things like this of women freethinkers that we're on the trail of. So, I have no idea when this project will be done, but it's a very large scale project.

The other project that I'm working on--and it's a similar project--is a Documentary History of Freethought in the American South. People kept saying: well that will be a short book. But I kept running on to parts of the story of freethinkers in the south. I'm a Yankee from Kansas and don't know anything about the south. Subsequently I spent many thousands of dollars and traveled many thousands of miles all the way from Virginia to Texas. This project will be four volumes. The first one will begin with Thomas Jefferson and others in the Revolutionary Period and particularly in Virginia--James Madison in Virginia and so on. In the early days there were many freethinkers who were planters like Jefferson, like Madison, I mean they were substantial people. We would say upper-middle-class people. But, they well knew what religious persecution was all about. Therefore, we have the First Amendment to the Constitution and the Constitution itself. It wasn't only Jefferson and Madison; there were many others in Virginia, down in the Carolinas and so on. I'm on the trail of a lot of those people. But the cotton gin came in; the production of cotton became industrialized; and they required large-scale slave labor to be successful. This led to the collapse of the old sort of enlightened planters out there. They were still around, but they became quiet. Then the abolitionist movement began to build up and so on and there were terrible things that began to happen. For example in 1835 in Charleston, South Carolina a mob led by the ex-governor of South Carolina invaded the post office--attacked the post office because they heard that there were several sacks of mail of abolitionist literature there; and they burned those sacks of mail. This happened many, many times in the south so that you get this sort of thing. What does freedom of the press mean if you're willing to have the mail burned? What occurred was this terrible repression against anybody who was progressive, anybody who was anti-slavery and so on. At the same time there were parts of the south who were against slavery all the way through the Civil War. In the northern parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, there were counties that never took down the stars and stripes. They were isolated from the big plantation sections down south of there, but they were hill people, they were mountain people, and they were pro-Union. Carleton Beals, who was also a Kansan, tracked down their stories in a book called War Within a War and you can imagine what it was like to be a pro-Union person out there in the hills. People were being burned alive and all this sort of business; it was terrible. But, they were also in a way freethinkers and democratic, anti-slavery people.

Some of the other things I have encountered in working on this project are not so unhappy. We've been talking about the need to be aware of social issues. I've learned in doing the history of freethought that you have to learn about a lot of other things that are parallel to it or feeding into it or freethought is helping them. And one of the wonderful stories I found was in a book called The Prohibition Movement in Alabama. In 1943 there was a prohibitionist campaign in Alabama around the town of Tuscumbia and this is just a couple of sentences:

On the night of September 28, 1942, several high school boys made three assaults with beer, whisky and wine bottles upon the home of Reverend J. Luther Gaines, pastor of the First Baptist Church and chairman of the Cobert County Temperance Alliance. The car license number was taken and reported to the police who refused to investigate the matter or take any steps toward protecting the minister's home.

Here are these kids in this town who said--and here they don't just write letters to the newspaper--they want to get a bunch of beer bottles and whiskey bottles and bombard the guy's house. I think you could contend that this is a form of freethought action. And so you encounter this kind of thing in Southern history.

The other thing that I've done in this project is to collect oral histories with southern freethinkers. I've got about forty hours of tapes. Some of you may have know John Marthaler of Pascagoula, Mississippi. Marthaler was a great friend of Madalyn Murray's and often went to her conventions. I interviewed him in his little house there a few miles from the ocean, and he told me his father had run a road house down the road from where he was living all the way through the 20's when there was national prohibition. John said he himself had started working in this illegal saloon at the age of 16 and he said "thousands of Baptists fell off bar stools in front of me."

The problem that I have with this project, Freethought in the American South, particularly with the oral histories: I have transcribed a few, but anyone who has ever done transcription knows what a slow and tedious process it is and so it's a project that's on hold. I have tried to find a publisher for it without success; and I've been told by one prominent freethought publisher that freethought history doesn't sell. So, I would say, if we don't defend our heritage and our culture and if we don't bring this out to people, then we are really derelict in our responsibilities to young people and to education and so on. I don't want to get into a long crying jag about my difficulties with this project, but I do think that we have to defend our heritage. We have to defend this very remarkable historical record of achievement and courage in the face of great difficulties. I have been pondering on the nature of why people are religious. What is it they find in religion and it finally struck me one day that they don't particularly care about the beliefs. They can just make a living. If you go into freethought history, the prospect of starvation opens wide and free. And we really need to do something about this. We need to do it on the basis of our young people. We need to develop young scholars. I am glad to see that you have a scholarship program here in Florida. We need more of those so that we can bring people along and help younger people get involved in saving our heritage.

Just a couple of things I want to conclude with. The Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka, Kansas recently had a newspaper sale and I've used that collection for a good many years. There were various important freethought papers that came out of Kansas including The Appeal to Reason, Lucifer the Light Bearer, American Nonconformist and so on. Kansas has totally lost that now and it's Bob Dole Country. But, it is there in the record. When I got the list of papers which were to be sold at public auction, I discovered to my horror that one of these papers was The Boston Investigator. The Boston Investigator was probably one of the two or three most important freethought newspapers in the nineteenth century in this country. And so, I got on the OCLC which is the national computer network; and I went and I tried to access which libraries had holdings of it. The Boston Public Library lacked a good many years of that paper. The Library of Congress lacked a good many years, particularly the 1890's. As it turns out, Kansas Historical Society had that paper through the 1890's when no one else did in the whole country. And it was about to be sold before it had been microfilmed. I won't get into the whole story here, but this is still going on and I'm going to publish an essay about this in my newsletter in the next issue.

This problem we have with the destruction of our culture and loss of memory and loss of our heritage--it's actually happening. A lot of things are being discarded from our libraries, and have actually been lost. So, we need have attention to this and make sure that we are saving the freethought heritage.

Christos: Before we go into the questioning, Barbara wants to say a few words to you.

Barbara Stocker: Fred didn't tell you the rest of the story. He told you about making his tapes--the oral history of Gordon Stein. Last summer, when we decided to put together the memorial issue for Gordon Stein, Fred offered to let me use that tape. Of course I spent three days in front of the computer transcribing it, but it really turned out to be the center piece of that issue and I want to thank Fred right now for letting me do that.

Fred Whitehead: I was just thinking. I have never been to Orlando before. It's a pretty wild experience. I came in on this Bronson Highway down here which is like a video game that's a hundred miles long and rather nightmarish, too. My son says I'm just one of those old hard copy guys and that's about right. But I kept thinking what can we do about this? It's so terrible and so far gone. Then it just struck me yesterday that what we need is "Freethought World" where you can go and see the trial of Socrates; you have the martyrdom of Hypatia; you have Cromwell's soldiers breaking the statues of the Bishops in the churches; you see the constitution and the struggle for religious liberty. That's just fantasy, but why not fantasize a little bit?

Q: I seem to recall recently in Freethought History a comment sharing your frustration with what I think you refer to as the libertarians within the recent humanist/atheist [movement], people like Ayn Rand.

Fred: You were reading in my newsletter something about excluding the Ayn Rand people, libertarian, free-market people from freethought history? Well, I don't know how you got that idea. I'm on the socialist wing of this, personally. But, when you are doing history you have to represent the breadth of what it is. You can't pick and chose; you can't say: well I don't like those guys so I'll leave them out. And certainly Ayn Rand belongs in our women freethinkers project. I don't know what we are going to do about permission to reprint Madalyn. I was thinking about that the other day: who has the rights to Madalyn's papers? But seriously, I struggle with this all the time--to be sure that I don't skew something because of my own prejudice or my own predilections.

Fred Whitehead
Box 5224
Kansas City, KS 66119
whitehe@kumc.wpo.ukans.edu
913 342 6379