Free Thought

FREE THOUGHT. An English-language anticlerical free-thought movement revived in post–Civil War America parallel to the labor and socialist movements. Although no merger took place, these movements converged on issues of atheism, secularism, free love, and some aspects of women’s rights. In organized free thought, sympathy for labor’s cause dates to the debates at the Free Thinkers’ Convention at Watkins, New York, in 1878 in the aftermath of the Great Strike of 1877. Such leanings continued into the Haymarket era with free-thought organs such as the Truth Seeker (New York), Lucifer (Kansas), and the Word (Massachusetts) speaking out for the Chicago anarchists.

These publications were associated with the names of their libertarian founders—D. M. Bennett, Moses Harman, and Ezra Heywood—who were forceful critics of both church and capitalist state. Other notable thought leaders within the left free thought milieu included Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Emma Lazarus, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Josephine Tilton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Helen Keller. Their thought was regularly published by the leading leftist publishers of the time, including the Charles H. Kerr Company.

Indeed, Free Thought advocates and publications advanced an anarchist feminist political philosophy, which defined itself against the ostensibly hierarchical and communal nature of religious institutions, and preached the fundamental equality between men and women. An overwhelmingly white movement intrinsic to Free Thought was often a belief in a triumph over “superstition” (often associated particularly with Catholicism and other “primitive” religions) and just as often a belief in the “racial” inferiority of non-white peoples. Though there existed a robust Black tradition of left free thought, it was largely segregated from its white counterparts. The rejection of authority and dogma, however, spanned all emanations of Free Thought.

Free thought flavored the rebirth of the radical labor movement with the forming of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. The Wobblies, most notably songwriter Joe Hill, aggressively attacked the theory of religious compensation in many writings and songs. It also was a central feature of the turn-of-the-century women’s rights movement, underlying, famously, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s attempt to rewrite the bible as a secular, feminist text. Freethought was also central to African American radicalism of the era, as in the secular organizing around the communist party and the in “New Negro Renaissance,” in which such disparate leftists as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and W. E. B. DuBois combined freethought with committed socialist politics.

Avrich, Paul. An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine De Cleyre. Chico: AK Press, 1978.

Cameron, Christopher A. Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019.

Hayden, Wendy. Evolutionary Rhetoric: Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth‑Century Feminism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.

Jones, Jacqueline. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Kern, Kathi. Mrs. Stanton's Bible. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2001.