Freethought Children's Literature and the Construction of Religious Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century America

"Dear Miss Wixon," wrote ten-year-old Susie Cox from Minnesota in June 1893, "I heard about you from papa. He said I should write a letter for the Children's Corner. … Papa takes The Truth Seeker, Investigator, Secular Thought, and the Freethinker's Magazine. We have the 'Freethinker's Pictorial Text-Book' and 'Old Testament Stories Comically Illustrated.' … My teacher here said we were wicked people, because we did not read the Bible. I send best wishes to you and all friends."¹ One of the thousands of children who sent letters to juvenile periodicals during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Cox is significant because she represents part of a critically understudied population: the children of freethinkers. In the past decade, historians of freethought Lori D. Ginzberg, Susan Jacoby, and Evelyn Kirkley have begun the process of reconsidering the movement's significance in American cultural life, but their focus has been on the experiences of adults.² This essay expands and complicates our understanding of freethought's history by examining it through the prism of children. Drawing upon children's books and periodicals, published children's letters, adult discussions of children's reading, and manuscript population census records, I argue that adult freethinkers used print culture to counter the Christian worldview permeating late-nineteenth-century American schools and communities and, in the process, provided children with the tools they needed to explore and construct their religious identities, become part of an imagined community of freethinkers, and navigate the conflicting messages they received about the relationship of religious belief (or nonbelief) to citizenship in late-nineteenth-century America.

Never ideologically united, the late-nineteenth-century American freethinkers who contested the power and practice of organized religion ranged on a spectrum from atheist to agnostic to advocate of such a heterodox religious belief as Spiritualism. Shaped by antebellum Spiritualist, utopian, abolitionist, and feminist ideas, freethinkers included such noted individuals as Jewish feminist and abolitionist Ernestine Rose and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, known for her work on The Woman's Bible.³ The last quarter of the nineteenth century, scholars concur, was a golden age of freethought, a time when freethinkers across the nation gathered each January 29 to celebrate Thomas Paine's birth, when Robert G. Ingersoll became known on the lecture circuit as the "Great Agnostic," and when such organizations of freethinkers as the Free Religious Association (1867), the National Liberal League (1876), and the American Secular Union (1885) exerted national influence. Movement leaders tended to reside in eastern urban centers, but thousands of adherents were scattered throughout rural America, linked by such nationally circulated freethought periodicals as the Boston Investigator (founded in 1831), The Index (founded in 1870 as the official publication of the Free Religious Association), and Truth Seeker (founded in 1873), and by a number of short-lived, locally circulated titles. Recognizing the value of using printed works to transmit their ideas, freethinkers also aggressively published thousands of freethought tracts in an effort to rival the ideological campaigns of such religious organizations as the American Tract Society.

Reading and the Socialization of the Young

The late-nineteenth-century women and men who wished to raise their children as freethinkers faced a daunting challenge because children's literature of the era tended to be a conservative medium. At a time when the rapid change wrought by industrialization, immigration, and urbanization threatened to destabilize society, argues historian Gail Schmunk Murray in American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood, many Americans looked to children's literature as a tool for the transmission of traditional values to the next generation. Even though mainstream publications for children tended to feature "good girls" in family or domestic novels and "bad boys" in adventure tales, both varieties contained an internalized moral that stressed the "ingenuity, persistence, practicality, and independence" needed by successful citizens.⁴

Between...