This week I will be speaking at the 2006 Speechwriter's Conference, presented by Lawrence Ragan Communications, Inc. My subject is the life and rhetoric of Robert Green Ingersoll, the "Great Agnostic."

To mark the occasion, I am reprinting an appreciation of Ingersoll I wrote that was first published in Speechwriter's Newsletter in July of 1999, on the hundreth anniversary of Ingersoll's death:

FORGOTTEN FIREBRAND

During one of his lecture tours of the United States, Oscar Wilde discovered that an American speaker was drawing bigger crowds and higher fees than he was. Piqued, the brilliant and loquacious Irishman – himself one of the most spellbinding talkers who ever lived – sat in on several of his rival’s lectures. He came away marveling. “Robert Ingersoll,” he opined, “is the most intelligent man in America.”

Wilde was not the only literary lion to be awed by Ingersoll’s eloquence. Mark Twain wrote of him: “Lord, what an organ is human speech when it is played by a master!” Walt Whitman (at whose grave, Ingersoll would deliver a eulogy of surpassing grace and tenderness) said that Ingersoll's oratory was “sweet, fluid – as they say in the Bible, like precious ointment.”

Nor were Ingersoll’s admirers limited to the world of letters. Great scientific minds like inventor Thomas Edison and naturalist Luther Burbank praised Ingersoll for the brilliance and clarity of his thought. Social activists, like Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs, saw him as a friend of the common man. Still others – including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass – were grateful for his ardent support of votes for women and equal rights for African-Americans.

Ingersoll was a man well ahead of his time. Even today, when President Clinton is trying to coax the nation into a frank dialogue on race, it is unlikely that a white speaker would be as searingly honest in addressing a black audience as Ingersoll was in 1883: “It is very easy to see why colored people should hate us, but why we should hate them is beyond my comprehension. They never sold our wives. They never robbed our cradles. They never scarred our backs. They never pursued us with bloodhounds. They never branded our flesh.”

In another speech, he summed up his views on the equality of all persons in the ringing words: “I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.”

Who was this forgotten firebrand, Robert Ingersoll?

He was born in Dresden, New York in 1833, the son of a Congregationalist minister. Largely self-educated, he qualified for the bar and established a successful law practice in Illinois in 1858. When the Civil War broke out, he raised the 11th Illinois Cavalry Regiment and was awarded the rank of colonel. After leaving the army, he became a major figure in Republican Party politics. His nomination of Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine for the presidency at the Republican national convention in 1876 (the famous “Plumed Knight” speech) set the standard for American political rhetoric for years to come.

A distinguished veteran, a prominent lawyer, and arguably the greatest speaker of his day, Ingersoll might have been governor of Illinois or even president. But his path to power was barred by his own stubborn integrity; he wouldn’t moderate his opinions to win votes.

On top of being an early feminist and civil rights advocate, Ingersoll was an agnostic. An honest doubter, he respected honest faith. But he was merciless with cant, humbug, and bigotry. When a prominent freethinker named Charles B. Reynolds was arrested in New Jersey under that state’s archaic blasphemy law, Ingersoll was outraged. Defending Reynolds pro bono, he declared in his closing speech to the jury: “I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips – to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.”

Ingersoll lost the case, but had the last laugh on the New Jersey law. When he arranged, over the vigorous protests of local clergy, to give a lecture in Hoboken, ministers turned out with police detectives in tow, ready to arrest the Great Agnostic the minute he uttered a single heretical word. Undismayed, Ingersoll began his lecture by pointing out how certain passages of the Bible, if taken literally, contradicted each other. Did that mean the Bible was not in fact the Word of God? “I don’t know,” he answered with a bland smile. “I don’t know. If it were not for the Jersey blasphemy statute I might know. As it is, I don’t. The Hoboken parsons know. Ask them.” Even the police were guffawing by the time he finished.

Robert Ingersoll died a hundred years ago this month, on July 21, 1899. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery -- a fitting resting place for a champion of liberty.