Ingersoll

At No. 117 Gramercy Park, Manhattan, an old house was torn down a few months ago and builders began to put up an apartment. Last week a company of notable people in high hats and frock coats gathered to unveil a tablet in memory of the man who used to live in the vanished brownstone edifice -- Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, "the famous infidel." Onetime Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, Actress Julia Marlowe, Poet Edgar Lee Masters, made speeches, and those who read the proud colophon upon the tablet and listened to the eloquence of Col. Ingersoll's admirers, reflected how, 40 years ago, the State of Delaware had offered him an entertainment on its whipping block, and how the bitter attacks of his many enemies filled the newspapers.

Robert Green Ingersoll was born in Dresden, N. Y., in 1833. To awaken faith in God, his father, a Congregational minister, taught him to reason, with the unhappy result that Ingersoll became an agnostic, and all his life continued to champion his faith in no faith. He studied law, was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1857. In the Civil War he raised a regiment of cavalry, used in his recruiting speeches a natural eloquence unsurpassed in his generation. But it was not until his speech in the Republican Convention of 1876 that he came to national fame as an orator.

Robert G. Ingersoll was straight and tall; he had a rolling voice and the gestures of a king; words, cadences, images, poured from him like an endless golden cable unwinding from his mouth; when he addressed a jury he could make the twelve spellbound dolts do whatever he told them, and he often used his genius for the weak, the defenseless, the depraved. After his Convention speech, he could have held political office; men in the Administration asked him politely would he like to be Minister to Germany ? Attorney General? Would he, sometime, care to run for President? Said he: "I do not believe in your God. . . . I do not wish to bring the rancor of religious discussion into politics. . . ." He gave lectures which brought him a vast fortune; he gave his money away. A famous man called his speech on "The Gods" at Cooper Union, N.Y., "the boldest, strongest, most vivid utterance of a century." But thousands of others were displeased with him. He died in 1899.