D.M. Bennett, The Truth Seeker (Hardcover)

by Roderick Bradford (Author)
Key Phrases: vice hunter, arrest blotter, freethought movement, New York, Truth Seeker, Anthony Comstock (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Few historical figures were as controversial as DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818–1882). And few Americans were as courageous—and suffered more—in the search for truth and in the cause of "free speech, a free press, and mails free from espionage and Comstockism." D. M. Bennett was the most revered and reviled publisher-editor of the Gilded Age. Loyal supporters lauded Bennett as the "American Voltaire" while his Christian adversaries called him the "Devil’s Own Advocate." Inspired by Thomas Paine, Bennett founded the Truth Seeker in 1873, devoted to science, morals, and freethought. Bennett promoted birth control, supported women’s rights, and opposed dogmatic religion. In less than a decade, he became the country’s leading publisher of liberal literature. Mark Twain, Clarence Darrow, and Robert G. Ingersoll—"the Great Agnostic"—were only a few of the illustrious freethinkers who subscribed to the Truth Seeker.

Bennett took great pride in debunking the Bible and exposing hypocritical clergymen. He was the first editor in America to routinely report the misdeeds of ministers, compiling a list of crimes by clergymen that he published as "Sinful Saints and Sensual Shepherds." A prolific and provocative writer, Bennett was vilified by religionists for denouncing Christianity, which he called "the greatest sham in the world."

Bennett’s publications were censored, prohibited at newsstands, and denied access to the US mail long before the expression "banned in Boston" was heard. At the same time Bennett began publishing the Truth Seeker, free speech came under attack by Anthony Comstock, the US Post Office’s "special agent" and America’s self-appointed arbiter of morals. Comstock, who bragged of driving fifteen persons to suicide in his "fight for the young," was the chief vice-hunter of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization founded by wealthy and powerful purity crusaders including soap tycoon Samuel Colgate.

Bennett’s opposition to religion and puritanical obscenity laws infuriated Comstock, the self-proclaimed "weeder in God’s garden." Comstock arrested Bennett for publishing his incendiary "An Open Letter to Jesus Christ" and entrapped the elderly editor for mailing a free-love pamphlet. Bennett was prosecuted, subjected to a widely publicized trial, and finally imprisoned in the Albany (New York) Penitentiary. "The charge is ostensibly ‘obscenity,’" Bennett wrote. "But the real offense is that I presume to utter sentiments and opinions in opposition to the views entertained by the Christian Church."

Based on original sources and extensively researched, this in-depth yet accessible biography of D. M. Bennett offers a fascinating glimpse into the turbulent period of late nineteenth century America, a time when our nation was controlled by pious politicians, powerful manufacturers, and censorious clergymen. Roderick Bradford follows Bennett’s evolution from a devout Shaker to an unremitting skeptic and America’s most iconoclastic publisher. He chronicles the circumstances that led to Bennett’s historically significant New York obscenity trial and the monumental, though ultimately unsuccessful, petition campaign for a pardon that went all the way to the White House. Bradford examines Bennett’s prominent role in the National Liberal League, his affiliation with abolitionists, suffragists and the National Defense Association (a forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union), and his flirtation with spiritualism and theosophy.

Bradford has written a valuable historical contribution, a long-overdue tribute to a free-speech champion, and a colorful depiction of memorable characters and events during a period of great change in American history.

About the Author
RODERICK BRADFORD has written articles for American History magazine, American Atheist, Free Inquiry, Truth Seeker, and the Quest. He is a contributor to the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief also published by Prometheus Books.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 412 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books; illustrated edition edition (October 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591024307
• ISBN-13: 978-1591024309
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #723,304 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's Free Press Martyr, November 4, 2006

By	Kenneth Burchell "Historian/Antiquarian scholar" (Pacific Northwest, North America) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

D. M. Bennett was a great free speech advocate and reform campaigner whose career was an important milestone in the struggle for the freedom of the press. But The Truth Seeker is more than a biography. It also a tale of religious persecution, of an "American Inquisition." Bennett was targeted by the infamous postal censor, Anthony Comstock, a man who openly bragged of the innocents who he drove to suicide and ruin. But Bennett fought back and his legal case, The United States v D. M. Bennett, led to a landmark decision based on the Hicklin Standard that established the precedent for obscenity well into the late twentieth century. Bennett paid a high price for his defiance. At sixty years of age he was sentenced to hard labor in the Albany State Penitentiary. He only lived about a year after his release. In our own age of worldwide political and religious upheaval, it is more important than ever for historians to help rebuild our knowledge and sense of connection to the great democratic currents of the past. Roderick Bradford's book is an important contribution to that goal and a groundbreaking biography of the man he calls America's "free-speech martyr."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars God is Only as Great as is the Devil; One Cannot Exist Without The Other! , November 4, 2007

By	Ronald A. Malloy (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Since I had set out on a project to research ancient civilizations, their religions and their rise, decline and fall, and related matters after obtaining a Research-Reader's authorization to enter into the "Stacks" at the Robart's Library in 1970, I have read and studied many works of DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett! Here is where I first came across a Hardcover Volume of over 1100 pages called "Champions of the Church" and other works of this author -- including Bennett's "An Infidel Abroad!" While over the years I have expanded the original "Champions of the Church" into four volumes (with over 2000 pages), since I am not an author per se, I have simply added these volumes to my own personal library of some 25 Books.
I have always wondered if someone with the ability and courage not only recognize but understand the effects religious bigotry in 19th century New England would come across the history of Mr. DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett and decide to write a biography! Therefore, I cannot fully express how pleased I was when I recently learned that Mr. Roderick Bradford had done just that! I have now read this amazing book "word for word from cover to cover"; and, since I felt I'd been quite familiar with the details of Bennett's life prior, I soon learned that I really did not know as much as I had thought!
Thus, I found Roderick Bradford's work not only an "Excellent Read," but since it was flowing with a more realistic perspective of the kind of "Comstock Insanity" of the times under review [times, sadly, once again appearing to return] describing events and places that seemed to come back to life [at least in my mind], I could hardly put the book down without longing to continue ASAP! I can, and will, personally recommend this book to anyone [many friends over the years have heard me praise Mr. Bennett] who desires to understand just how such religious bigotry existing in the so-called "Age of Reason" has affected the mental growth of humankind today!
As author Christopher Hitchens, in his Book "god is not GREAT" asserted "... God did not make us; we made God!"
All books have purpose -- some more purposeful than others! The rationale of Mr. Bradford's work is obvious; to offer a contentious point of view unhindered by any religious rhetoric in the hope that those who may have concerns about the current state of affairs in the U.S. (and Canada) has offered some guidance to survive what we now perceive is a growing and insidious entangled web of religious revivalism among otherwise educated peoples.
Sincerely Expressed,
Ron Malloy.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Valuable Piece of American History, February 5, 2007

By	Daniel M. Kane - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Roderick Bradford of Allentown, Pennsylvania, author of the complete biography of DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818 - 1882), is a freelance writer and independent video producer who has also written articles for American History magazine, The Quest, and American Atheist.

Bennett, the first of three children to poor farming parents, encountered differences in faith at a young age, with a father who was "moral" but didn't attend church and a mother who was a devout, church-loyal Methodist.

His ethic of hard work developed when he was very young; he began working for a publisher of mostly Bibles when he was twelve years old. When his father abandoned his family, he shared his 1830 salary of $1.50 per week with his mother.

His life changed when he joined the Shakers, a communitarian, strictly celibate offshoot of the Quakers. Officially, the Shakers were known as The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, or more simply, The Millenial Church. Originally from England, the group became known as the Shakers due to their ecstatic and often violent shaking contortions during their religious services. The less respectful of society called them the Shaking Quakers, although they preferred to be known as the Alethians, for "children of the truth."

Occasionally the vows of celibacy, harshly enforced by the Elders, did not mesh in young minds, and the urge for companionship outweighed the safety of the simply, communal life of the ever-productive Shakers. On September 12, 1846, Bennett shocked the Shakers, who denounced him for leaving them to elope with Mary Wicks, another heretic Shaker, when he was twenty-seven years old. DeRobigne and Mary visited the Shakers without exception every five years thereafter.

The mid-1840s, a time when the orthodoxy was strong, and the Victorian-style Christian, God-fearing Idiocracy was in control of the religious and a majority of the secular media, was an unsettled period if there ever were one. In 1848, the first women's rights movement organized in Seneca Falls, New York, under Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, both public critics of the Bible.

People were reading Thomas Paine and Voltaire, of all people.

The year 1848 also saw the beginning of the spiritualist movement, led in Rochester, New York, by Margaret and Kate Fox. The beginning of the movement quickly led to a national pseudoscientific craze, which wasn't appreciated by the orthodoxy either.

When the women and many of the men began embracing feminism, the orthodoxy became further perplexed.

Anthony Comstock, America's "self-appointed arbiter of morals," began, with the sanction of the City of New York, to clean up the mails by arresting those who would dare send obscene (PG-rated by today's standards) materials through the U.S. Postal Service. Comstock, an icon among conservatives, had thousands of people arrested during his career, including Bennett, with nary a second thought: "Some of the country's most powerful and pious citizens backed Comstock, who bragged about driving fifteen people to suicide in his Christian-sanctioned mission to `save the young.'"

Bennett considered himself a freethinker as of 1850. Freethinkers at that time were called "infidels," defined by Webster as not-faith, not faithful, or not full of faith. Freethinkers at that time called themselves "liberals," and were the founding fathers and mothers of the Liberal party. A liberal during the post-slavery Reconstruction Period was defined as "one who does not acknowledge the authority of the Bible or admit the supernatural character of the Christian system," and was not limited to far-left politics or atheism but also included free religion and agnosticism.

When in 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published, the conventional Victorian society was shocked, the intellectuals were stunned, and the religionists were infuriated.

After the election of President Grant, the alarmists began to sound their bells: "Some of the nation's most widely read publications printed articles about the frightening prospects of an irreligious world."

D. M. Bennett added to the irreligious world by founding the Truth Seeker in 1873. He and it were devoted to science, morals, freethought, and human happiness, and he and it were inspired by Thomas Paine. The literal title of the publication was the "Truth Seeker: Devoted to Science, Morals, Freethought, Free Discussion, Liberalism, Sexual Equality, Labor Reform, Progression, Free Education, and whatever tends to elevate the human race. Opposed to Priestcraft, Ecclesiasticism, Dogmas, Creeds, False Theology, Superstition, Bigotry, Ignorance, Monopolies, Aristocracies, Privileged Classes, Tyranny, Oppression and Everything that Degrades or Burdens Mankind Mentally or Physically."

He worked from pre-dawn to late at night seven days a week, and the length of his periodical's title is characteristic of his writing: his premise on most platforms became known in the occasionally retrospective, often descriptive, occasionally mud-slinging, and frequently inflammatory articles. He was outspoken with a gift of gab, and developed friends and enemies in high places.

His issues were many, his thoughts well documented. Often embroiled in heated arguments with his opponents in the press, he left diplomacy behind and let his enemies receive his temper with both barrels. He was both revered and reviled.

Bradford gives this biography special impact with his expertly handled flow of words, a precise, rhythmic literary zoom into the character and back out to society to give the reader a seamless, omniscient view of the man and the culture. I highly recommend this action-packed book to the lover of biographies as well as the lover of history, and especially freethought history.