Humanities | Always Question Authority

Photo credit: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Robert G. Ingersoll, shown between 1865 and 1880.

What was Robert Ingersoll’s address? Answer Man is confident many readers are wondering, “Who the heck was Robert Ingersoll?”

Well, he is the most famous American you never heard of.

Col. Ingersoll — he fought for the Union in the Civil War after raising a cavalry regiment from Illinois — was a lawyer who counted the wealthy and powerful among his clients. He was a committed Republican who stumped for GOP candidates. He was a silver-tongued orator whose lectures drew thousands — and earned him thousands of dollars a pop. He was also, by all accounts, a really nice guy.

And Ingersoll accomplished all of this without believing in God.

Ingersoll’s disbelief was the quality that most fascinated the 19th-century audiences that packed theaters to hear him speak. He was known as the Great Agnostic. Some called him blasphemer or infidel.

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h/t: The Atheism News Magazine

The following is an excerpt from “Hello Goodbye Hello” [Simon & Schuster,26.95]:

J.D. Salinger seeks out Ernest Hemingway The Ritz Hotel, 15 place Vendôme, Paris Late August 1944.

The twenty-five-year-old Jerry Salinger is experiencing a terrible war. Of the 3,080 men of the 12th US Infantry who disembarked with him at Normandy on D-Day, only a third are still alive.

His regiment is the first to enter Paris. They are mobbed by happy crowds. Salinger’s job as an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps entails weeding out and interrogating Nazi collaborators. As they go through Paris, he and a fellow officer arrest a collaborator, but a crowd wrests their prisoner away and beats him to death.

Salinger has heard that Ernest Hemingway is in town. A writer himself, with a growing reputation for his short stories, he is determined to seek out America’s most famous living novelist. He feels sure he will find him at the Ritz, so he drives the jeep there. Sure enough, Hemingway is installed in the small bar, already bragging that he alone liberated Paris in general and the Ritz in particular.

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