The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair [Hardcover]

Bryan F. Le Beau (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0814751717 | ISBN-13: 978-0814751718 | Publication Date: January 15, 2003

In 1964, Life magazine called Madalyn Murray O’Hair “the most hated woman in America.” Another critic described her as “rude, impertinent, blasphemous, a destroyer not only of beliefs but of esteemed values.”

In this first full-length biography, Bryan F. Le Beau offers a penetrating assessment of O’Hair’s beliefs and actions and a probing discussion of how she came to represent both what Americans hated in their enemies and feared in themselves. Born in 1919, O’Hair was a divorced mother of two children born out of wedlock. She launched a crusade against God, often using foul language as she became adept at shocking people and making effective use of the media in delivering her message. She first gained notoriety as one of the primary litigants in the 1963 case Murray v. Curlett which led the Supreme Court to ban school prayer. The decision stunned a nation engaged in fighting “godless Communism” and made O’Hair America’s most famous—and most despised—atheist.

O’Hair led a colorful life, facing assault charges and extradition from Mexico, as well as the defection of her son William, who as an adult denounced her. She later served as Hustler publisher Larry Flynt’s chief speech writer in his bid for President of the United States.

Drawing on original research, O’Hair’s diaries, and interviews, Le Beau traces her development from a child of the Depression to the dictatorial, abrasive woman who founded the American Atheists, wrote books denouncing religion, and challenged the words “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, “In God We Trust” on American currency, the tax exempt status of religious organizations, and other activities she saw as violating the separation of church and state.

O’Hair remained a spokesperson for atheism until 1995, when she and her son and granddaughter vanished. It was later discovered that they were murdered by O’Hair’s former office manager and an accomplice.

Fast-paced, engagingly written, and sharply relevant to ongoing debates about school prayer and other religious issues, The Atheist tells the colorful life-story of a woman who challenged America’s most deeply held beliefs.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Forty years ago Madalyn Murray O'Hair was so notorious for her role in the Supreme Court decision banning prayers from public schools that she was, in the words of one Life profile, "the most hated woman in America." Although she assembled a nationwide movement of atheists and remained a thorn in the side of America's religious conservatives for nearly three decades, this biography more than ably reveals her limitations as a public intellectual and a social activist. In the opening chapters, Le Beau, a historian of religion at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, provides a thorough account of O'Hair's struggle to eliminate morning prayer from her son's junior high school, deftly portraying the anti-atheist sentiment of the Cold War era and fleshing out the precedents set by earlier Supreme Court interpretations of the separation of church and state. The book then continues with a look at her "caustic, sarcastic, even outrageous" rhetoric. But the biographical account is interrupted halfway through with two chapters cataloging the philosophical and historical underpinnings of O'Hair's arguments, before Le Beau resumes the depiction of her downfall and the bizarre circumstances surrounding her disappearance in 1995 and the subsequent discovery of her body. The consequences of O'Hair's arrogance and combativeness will draw readers in initially, but in the end, there's only so much to say about her; even academics may find the account padded with quotations from political debates and O'Hair's fan mail. However, with the Pledge of Allegiance facing the same challenge O'Hair mounted against school prayer, her story couldn't be more timely.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“Clear-eyed and judicious.”
-The Women's Review of Books

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“The Atheist belongs on the short shelf of books on American atheism, church-state relations, and school prayer.”
-The Journal of American History

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“The Atheist is especially instructive today as issues of the separation of church and state continue to reverberate throughout our culture . . . well documented.”
-BOOK LOOK

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“Le Beau offers an informative and melancholy portrait of self-promotion and folly.”
-American Historical Review

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“Le Beau’s biography is the longer and better researched of two recently published lives of Murray.”
-The New Republic

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See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (January 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814751717
• ISBN-13: 978-0814751718
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,178,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am an historian trained in interdisciplinary studies - American studies to be more specific. As a result, although the subjects of my several books published vary, they find common ground in being historical, interdisciplinary, and by-and-large addressing subjects related to American cultural history, which is my primary interest.

By way of a brief introduction to my work, I will provide some background on two of my favorite books - at least thus far - and reference a third that may interest some of you.

The Story of the Salem Witch Trials

Perhaps it was inevitable that as a historian, a native of Massachusetts, and related by marriage to two of the accused I would develop an interest in the Salem witch trials. While still a student, I latched on to the subject whenever appropriate for a research paper. And upon becoming a professor, I took that interest with me -- ignoring the well intentioned advice of my usually wiser mentors not to spend my time on a topic about which so much had already been written.

I found there were some things yet to be discovered concerning the events of 1692, and much to be learned from the episode about the human condition. I also discovered a seemingly endless fascination with the topic among my students. But I faced a challenge. I found it impossible to come up with a reasonable amount of reading for my undergraduate students, which would provide them with a detailed overview of the trials, historical context, and information on the major schools of thought on the subject. What I needed was a single volume which would accomplish all three goals, to which I could add trial records and other primary sources that would provide breadth and depth of understanding.

The Story of the Salem Witch Trials, the first edition of which appeared in 1998, is a relatively brief book written primarily for college students but also appropriate for the general reader. The text runs just over 200 pages, to which I added endnotes, a select bibliography (including electronic resources), and information on the accused. The first two chapters of the book situate what happened in Salem in 1692 in the larger scope of the centuries old Great European Witch Hunt. I then provide a narrative approach to the events of 1692, making the point, as one reviewer put it, that the decisions and actions people make matter and often lead both to intended and unintended consequences. And it includes references to the leading scholarship on the subject, placed throughout the book in locations that present evidence for each school of thought. A brief epilogue addresses the history of witch hunts in the United States after we stopped believing in witches, a subject students find endlessly interesting. Prentice Hall published a second, revised and updated edition of The Story of the Salem Witch Trials in 2010.

The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Intended for a more general audience is The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair (New York University Press, 2003) -- my most widely reviewed book. In 1964, Life magazine called Madalyn Murray O'Hair "the most hated woman in America." It was hardly an exaggeration at the time, given her role in the 1963 US Supreme Court's ruling declaring Bible reading and prayer recitation in the nation's public schools unconstitutional. Unlike other litigants in that and other related cases, it was a role and responsibility she embraced and parlayed into becoming the most visible atheist in America for the next three decades - until she and two of her family members were murdered. This first full-length biography of O'Hair approaches this fascinating figure on two levels. It tells the story of her public life as leader of American Atheists. Making use of her unpublished diaries for the first time, it also provides insights into her largely unknown personal life, which helps us better understand what she did and why.

Currier and Ives: America Imagined

Currier and Ives: America Imagined (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001) is no longer in print, but it is widely available for purchase or through your local library. Lithography was the leading source of visual communication for most of the nineteenth century, and Currier and Ives were by far the leading producers of lithographs - at one point accounting for 95% of all lithographs sold in American. If you are among those, including me at one point, that think that Currier and Ives produced only pretty pictures of an idealized life in America, think again. Check out this book and you will find a window on life in nineteenth-century America, through which you will glimpse a much more realistic portrait of the nation, including "the good, bad, and the ugly."

One Last Note

Most of the edited volumes you will find under my name (commonly co-edited) contain essays presented at conferences in which I had the honor of being involved. Some of these may interest you, as well.

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Bryan Le Beau earned his bachelor's in history from North Adams (MA) State College (now the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts), a master's in United States History from the Pennsylvania State University, and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. He taught at Creighton University, where held an endowed faculty chair in the humanities. He also served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri - Kansas City and Dean of Institutional Services at the Kansas City Kansas Community College. Currently he is Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, Kansas. He has been active in several professional organizations and created and served for seven years as host of the national public radio program, Talking History, which was supported by the Organization of American Historians. He is a regular newspaper columnist and public speaker. He has appeared on C-SPAN's Booktv and been a consultant and contributor to various video documentaries.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Informative, but..., January 7, 2004

By 

Mark C. Aldrich (Carlisle, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair (Hardcover)

This biography is informative and I found the Introduction and first two chapters to be particularly well done. However, the author's writing fairly quickly becomes tedious. His style is flat, unengaging and repetitive. Once he has covered the initial case that brought notoriety to Murray O'Hair, the rest is just slogging through a sad and difficult life. For example, the time when Murray O'Hair was debating the evangelist Bob Harrington in the 70s should have made for fascinating reading, but the narrative here is disappointingly superficial.
The tragic end to Madalyn Murray O'Hair's life is reported. There are lots of details, but that's it. It is tedious and Le Beau's sometimes excellent insights are overshadowed by uninspired prose.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Informative But Not Especially Engaging, March 3, 2003

By 

Max Varazslo "zine publisher" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair (Hardcover)

Whether you're an ardent fan or a bitter foe of world-renowned atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, once widely known as "the most hated woman in America," you've probably read most of what Bryan Le Beau's biography has to tell you already, whether it's in O'Hair's own books, such as "All the Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American Atheists -- With All the Answers," in her elder son William J. Murray's critical autobiography "My Life Without God," or in other third-person accounts of her life's work such as Lawrence Wright's "Saints & Sinners." I credit the author with bringing together a comprehensive compilation of facts, figures, observations, and quotations, but unfortunately not with presenting a unified portrait of a major figure of late 20th-century American free thought.

Le Beau's exposé begins promisingly enough as we're treated to invaluable excerpts from O'Hair's diary entries covering the early days of her adult life, when she was still wrestling with many of the iconoclastic ideas that would later make her famous, and which are more a part of our present worldview than most people probably want to admit. She left her first husband for another man during the conformist McCarthy era, for instance, nearly twenty years before such behavior became socially acceptable, and refused to marry the father of her second son because she considered him her intellectual inferior. The book shows us the genesis of her mission against the influence of organized religion in the lives of unbelievers as well as her family's exodus from persecution and hostility. All too quickly, however, we move into the realm of religious polemics and lose sight of the colorful personality behind the Murray (and later O'Hair) family's struggle to protect what Madalyn regarded as her First Amendment right to freedom not only of but also from religion. She had only begun her fight when she won her 1963 landmark victory in the Supreme Court to have mandatory prayer and Bible reading removed from America's public schools, and wasn't about to stop there. By the book's midpoint, quotes from O'Hair's radio and television broadcasts are presented out of chronological sequence without a unifying theme that might show us more of the real motivation behind the message. In William Murray's autobiography, which for the most part depicts O'Hair as a heartless villainess, she at least emerges as a three-dimensional flesh-and-blood human being who for better or worse held sway over a coterie of non-conformists and freethinkers who, apparently like her son, began to resent and ultimately to rebel against the extent of her influence. He honestly exposes his own flaws as well, at least up to a point, explaining how he virtually abandoned his daughter to his mother's care as he struggled with drugs and alcohol. For him, religion was the cure-all. For Madalyn O'Hair, we learn, it was just another soporific intoxicant best avoided by responsible individuals. Le Beau's analysis presents Madalyn O'Hair more as the often cold, analytical brain behind the operation than its warm, pulsing heart, even though it offers us random detailed glimpses of her emotional vicissitudes -- courage, bitterness, determination, panic -- and while it is more impartial than Murray's book, it never takes us very far beneath the surface. We learn little about O'Hair's second marriage, which lasted more than a decade, or her relationship with her family after her notoriety began to wane in the 1980s, when her son William became a Christian and when she began to alienate many of her former supporters with her increasingly outrageous behavior. Even most of those who stood by her to the end are only mentioned in passing.

For nearly eighty pages (and through more than the usual number of typographical errors), Le Beau's O'Hair remains only a figurehead to us, even as he discusses her mysterious disappearance in 1995 and her eventual murder, which even those who had long hated her found inexplicably brutal. Even though we may admire O'Hair as an indefatigable pioneer of secularism (or hate her as a foul-mouthed exponent of irreligion), we only occasionally feel we really know her as the driven human being she unquestionably was. While the astute reader can discover how O'Hair managed to distill the ideas of other freethinkers from Socrates to Carl Sagan into a refreshing elixir of liberating unbelief, the book remains more journalism than true biography. If you like cold facts, though, presented dispassionately, this is the book for you.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There are two sides to every story, April 17, 2003

By 

E. M. Finkelstein (Westchester County, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair (Hardcover)

and then there is the truth. Bryan Le Beau gets to the truth beautifully in this informative and interesting book.

Trying to understand Madalyn Murray O'Hair was always difficult. Her message was sometimes lost in the chaos of her showmanship. Le Beau presents quotes and arguments in a cohesive form that help the reader understand her point of view in a way that eliminates all the emotional button pushing that O'Hair needed to do in order to get the attention of the press. Without O'Hair's personality interfering with her message it becomes infinitely easier to understand what the message actually was and how the prevailing mores of the time affected the various media, and even personal, events in O'Hair's life.

I found the examination of O'Hair's controlling personality and it's effects on her life and her cause particularly interesting and it was presented in an unbiased way - something that is rare when reading and trying to understand about O'Hare and her views. The historical overviews of Madalyn Murray O'Hair's lifetime were nicely written and ultimately necessary to fully understand what it was that was propelling O'Hair through her life.

After reading "An Atheist Epic" by Madalyn Murray O'Hair and "My Life Without God" by William J. Murray it was difficult for me to really understand where the truth lies. I was pleased to find it in "The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair".