UNCLASPING THE EAGLE'S TALONS: MARK TWAIN, AMERICAN FREETHOUGHT, AND THE RESPONSES TO IMPERIALISM

Abstract

This article situates Mark Twain's anti-imperialism within the wider atheist and freethought response to debates about the American turn to empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While historians have been alert to the ways in which religion influenced debates around empire at this time, there have yet to be any studies of the views of American atheists and freethinkers on this question. I examine Twain and Robert Ingersoll, the leading American freethinker of the era, as well as some of the major freethought periodicals in the United States, the Truth Seeker, the Blue-Grass Blade, and the Free Thought Magazine, and argue that their irreligious views informed their responses to imperialism, from the initial support for a war against Catholic Spain, to opposition to the war against the Philippines motivated in large part by a hostility toward organized religion and its role in American expansion. More broadly, I argue for the need to move beyond a simplistic understanding of anti-imperialism within an American religious landscape that was basically Protestant, to a more nuanced understanding that incorporates the diversity of religious and nonreligious perspectives.