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Introduction WILSON R. BACHELOR,WHYS AND WHEREFORES The nineteenth-century Arkansan on whose life and work this book focuses, Wilson Richard Bachelor (1827–1903), will hardly be a household name for most of those who read this collection of his writings. Even scholars who have a more than passing acquaintance with the state’s history would probably be hard pressed to place him in its historical narrative. Bachelor did author a monograph of some sort, a work on freethought entitled Fiat Flux, which he published in 1884. Almost nothing is known of this work, however, and it appears not to be extant any longer. As a result,we don’t know whether Fiat Flux was a book,a pamphlet,or one of those brief compendia of information on selected subjects that social reformers and some academics of the latter half of the nineteenth century enjoyed writing for the education of popular audiences.The influential Chautauqua movement pioneered such adult education (as educators might now call it) for ordinary citizens whose schooling had not gone beyond elementary levels.At the time Bachelor published Fiat Flux, Chautauqua had also pioneered the widespread use of brief instructional monographs for such adult education.1 As his essays and occasional pieces published in this volume will indicate, Bachelor had a pronounced interest in such community-oriented educational initiatives, and a large percentage of his published articles that have survived were written to bring notions like women’s rights, the need to abolish the death penalty, or the philosophy of freethought—his favorite subject—to a wide popular audience. Both the occasional pieces themselves and the fact that Bachelor evidently published them in local newspapers indicate such an educational interest on his part. To be specific: the sparse bits of information about Fiat Flux that have survived suggest that Bachelor produced it with the intent of disseminating information about the freethought movement to readers in the area of northwest Arkansas in which he lived in the latter decades of his life.An autobiographical statement he wrote in 1889 for Goodspeed’s history of northwest Arkansas states plainly that Fiat Flux was “a work of free thought” that he had published as “one of the leading Liberalists in Western Arkansas.”2 3 As Susan Jacoby’s recent overview of the American freethought movement notes, the term has had elastic significance over the course of American history and has been used to denote both those within various religious communities who have questioned orthodox tenets of their religious groups and those who reject religion altogether.3 Jacoby notes that the movement reached its heyday in American culture in the period from 1875 to 1914, and that in this period, the disparate groups calling themselves freethinkers were bound together by a shared social progressivism and a belief that human affairs should be guided by reason and empirical evidence rather than reliance on the supernatural.4 This definition of freethought—a commitment to socially progressive ideas with an emphasis on science and reason that eschews appeals to the supernatural —certainly characterizes Bachelor’s outlook throughout most of his written work that has survived.The commitment to freethinking also appears to have been sufficient to create problems for him in the community in which he lived.Whether book, pamphlet, or instructional manual, Fiat Flux elicited a negative response, for instance, from the Masonic chapter to which Bachelor belonged (and which he helped to found) in Franklin County, Arkansas, Lowe’s Creek Lodge No. 346.After his death, the lodge issued a eulogy noting that he had published Fiat Flux in 1884, and that the work “disputed the divinity and authenticity of the Bible, the great light of Masonry and the world, for which he was tried by the lodge and expelled about the same year.”5 It is very likely that Bachelor’s 1884 monograph was in the vein of brief summaries and defenses of freethought produced in the same period by one of his heroes, the leading American freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll, whose picture, clipped from a magazine article and pasted into the inside cover of the scrapbook in which Bachelor preserved his published essays of the 1890s, is among the first items one encounters on opening the scrapbook.6 From the 1870s through the 1890s, Ingersoll published one small monograph after another, pieces often originally delivered as lectures, about the predominant concerns of the freethought movement, including The Gods and Other Lectures (New York: D. M. Bennett, 1876), Some Mistakes...

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