Blast From the Past
In the late 1820s, Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright were active in
supporting the radical freethought and workingmen's parties in New York,
Piladelphia, etc. As such, they were forerunners of the dreaded secular
humanists of today. The opposition to them in the establishment press
was so violent as to become demented: "Lost to society, to earth and to
heaven, godless and hopeless, clothed and fed by stealing and
blasphemy--such are the apostles who are trying to induce a number of
able-bodies men in this city to follow in their course... to disturb the
peace of the community for a time; go to prison and have the mark of Cain
imposed upon them; betake themsselves to incest, robbery and murder; die
like ravenous wild beasts, hunted down without pity; and go to render
their account before a God, whose existence they believed in their
miserable hearts, even while they were blaspheming him in their ignorant,
siveling and puerile speculations. Such is too true a picture, in all
its parts, oof some of the leaders of the new political party which is
emerging from the slime of this community and which is more beastly and
terrible than the Egyptian Typhoon." So reads an editorial from the
Commercial Advertiser, October 31, 1829 (perhaps influenced by
the fact that it was Halloween?). Cited from Philip S. Foner, History
of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (New York:
International Publishers, 1947), p. 133.
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