AOF Activities & Events
Who was the forgotten freethinker of the Gilded Age? Who was the biggest thorn in the side of the 19th-Century Religious Right, more so than Mark Twain, more than Clarence Darrow, more than Walt Whitman, more even than Robert Ingersoll? Come to our July general meeting to find out. AOF will host a free screening and discussion of D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker, a new one-hour documentary produced by Roderick Bradford. Based on original sources, it tells the fascinating life story of DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818-1882) and his wife Mary Wicks. The list of his admirers reads like a litany of freethought heroes. Unfortunately his enemies were stronger. Catching the ire of Anthony Comstock, infamous censor and bluenose, harassed and persecuted in a controversial and widely publicized obscenity trial, Bennett took his fight for freedom all the way to the White House, inspiring the largest protest of its kind until then. Ultimately he failed. And he suffered grievously for speaking out. But few Americans were as courageous in the search for truth and in the cause of “free speech, a free press, and mails free from espionage and Comstockism.” The video also investigates Bennett’s prominent role in the National Liberal League, his interactions with leading suffragists and the National Defense Association (forerunner of the ACLU), and his flirtation with spiritualism and theosophy. Free as always. Please bring friends to help AOF grow.
A former Shaker, DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett had an intellectual rebirth to become the ”American Voltaire,” the revered and reviled freethinker, the “blasphemer” and free-speech martyr who published The Truth Seeker, and the most successful American freethought publisher of the day.
"Roderick Bradford reintroduces a significant nineteenth-century reformer whom mainstream historians have unfairly neglected. D. M. Bennett was the most influential publisher during America's Golden Age of freethought. Even more important, through his dogged opposition to morals campaigner Anthony Comstock - and the high price he eventually paid for it - Bennett mounted a heroic defense of freedom of expression, in the process helping to shape twentieth-century free speech standards in ways that few appreciate today. Displaying a masterful command of the historical material, Bradford deftly rescues the memory of D. M. Bennett, truly an American none of us should forget."
~ Tom Flynn, Editor, Free Inquiry Magazine