Talk:Robert G. Ingersoll

Untitled

Below text moved from "Robert Green Ingersoll", since made into redirect to here. Any new info below should be incorporated into the existing article. -- Infrogmation 05:05, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

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Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), “the Great Agnostic,” was best known for both his supreme oration skills and his skepticism of religion and gods. A lawyer by trade, Ingersoll gained his fame touring America giving lectures that were, by all accounts, masterful in both content and delivery.

Ingersoll was born in Dresden, New York on 11 August, 1833. His father, John, was an itinerant Presbyterian Minister, and Ingersoll was raised with his father’s firey Presbyterian views. Later in life Ingersoll would recall his religious upbringing less than fondly. During these years Ingersoll received little formal schooling. He did much learning on his own, and later apprenticed himself to two Peroia, Illinois lawyers so that he could practice law.

Ingersoll spent a brief period in the Union Army during the early days of the American Civil War, as a Colonel. He was captured by the Confederacy and then released upon the condition that he not return to military service. Ingersoll complied, returning instead to a small but thriving legal practice he had founded with his brother, Ebon Clark, in Peoria.

Ingersoll’s reputation as a public speaker grew after his return to Peoria. He flirted briefly with a career in politics, holding a single political post as Attorney General of Illinois. His radical views on religion, slavery, woman’s suffrage, and other issues of the day, however, effectively prevented him from ever pursuing or holding higher offices. Instead he became a public speaker, using his skills with oration to earn a reputation and a fortune.

Many of Ingersoll’s speeches advocated for freethought and humanism, and often poked fun at religious belief. For this the press often attacked him, but neither his views nor the negative press could stop his rising popularity. At the height of Ingersoll’s fame, audiences would pay $1 or more to hear him speak—a giant sum for his day.

Ingersoll died of heart failure at age 65. Soon after his death, Clinton P. Farrell, a brother-in-law, collected copies of Ingersoll’s speeches for publication. The 12-volume “Dresden Editions” kept interest in Ingersoll’s ideas alive and preserved his speeches for future generations.

Wikiquote tag

I don't know my way around Wikiquote well enough to track down the quotations on this page and get them properly transferred, but the quotation-to-article coefficient seems untenably high.

Thanks, Johndodd 04:46, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Ingersoll's dealings with James Reavis

I noticed that the fact that Ingersoll represented James Reavis, an enterprising forger knwon as the "Baron of Arizona". Having recently performed a major expansion of the Reavis article, there are a few details I think should be mentioned. While it is true that Ingersoll was fooled by Reavis' forgeries, the claim that Reavis' forgeries were detected due to a watermark from a Wisconsin paper mill is a fiction created after Reavis was convicted of fraud and forgery (see James Reavis#Later life for supporting citations). It should also be noted that there is no evidence that Ingersoll, or any of the other influential lawyers, politicians, and business leaders whom Reavis fooled, ever traveled to the Mexican and Spanish archives holding the forged documents. He would instead have based his opinion upon photographic and certified copies provided to him by Reavis. By everything I have seen while working on the Reavis article, Ingersoll disassociated himself from Reavis as soon as he learned the truth.

I will leave it to others to determine if Ingersoll's association with Reavis should be mentioned in the article. The popular fiction about watermarks revealing the fraud has however been removed. --Allen3 ^talk 23:00, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

2013 Biography

• Susan Jacoby (2013). The great agnostic : Robert Ingersoll and American freethought. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300137255. OCLC 785864725.

would be a good resource for this article.

-- Javaweb (talk) 11:33, 10 January 2013 (UTC)Javaweb

Pronunciation

How ist the name Ingersoll pronounced? Can someone add IPA? --Neitram (talk) 09:18, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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Dead link: http://www.robertgreeningersoll.org/

FWIW: The link http://www.robertgreeningersoll.org/ points to expired domain. I'm not a Wiki editing expert, so I'll leave any changes in more capable hands. BornRightTheFirstTime (talk) 01:26, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Structure of article

It is a shame to see a man who has had such an influence on US thought have such a cobbled together article. Almost every paragraph is a single sentence and the text in general has a lack of any structure or narrative. Surely there are bios of him that could be used to synthesize a nicer history of his life and work. Ashmoo (talk) 08:26, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Add something showing what influence he might have had on US thought. 2A00:23C3:E284:900:7520:A02C:72FA:FC97 (talk) 11:47, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Indeed.

This article is in need of reorganization and overhaul.

--CmdrDan (talk) 02:21, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Whitman

How is his eulogy for Whitman consistent with his attitudes towards homosexuality? More info needed.2A00:23C3:E284:900:7520:A02C:72FA:FC97 (talk) 11:47, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Daughter's name inconsistent

Daughter shown as both Eva Ingersoll Wakefield and Eva Ingersoll-Brown — Preceding unsigned comment added by Daksol (talk • contribs) 19:06, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Contemporary view of Ingersoll

Found in Chapter Seven of “A Strange Discovery” (1899) by Charles Romyn Dake; available from amazon and all over the Internet for free, such as the copy at gutenberg.com. It is an account of an Englishman, gone to the USA in 1877 to find the truth of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Narrative of A. Gordon Pym’. The story has a good deal about the USA of the time; Greenbackers, Prohibitionists, Samuel J. Tilden, the recently concluded Civil War, etc. Chapter Seven has an extended discussion of Ingersoll. A few things are changed, such as calling ‘Mistakes of Moses’ ‘Mistakes of the Gods’ instead, but it is him; even mentioning he was AG of his State at 33. The discussion, support and criticism of Ingersoll are all as they would have been at the time, and give real insight into the subject. Anyone wanting to improve the article should look there. 2A00:23C3:E284:900:7520:A02C:72FA:FC97 (talk) 12:10, 7 April 2020 (UTC)