Susan Jacoby profiles Robert Green Ingersoll, who travelled across 19th century America lecturing on behalf of secularism and the separation of church and state. His ingenious argument for Darwinism:
He told his audiences that when he first read On the Origin of Species (1859) and became acquainted with Darwin’s theory of evolution, his initial reaction was to think about “how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the Old World. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the duke Orang Outang, or the princess Chimpanzee.” This sentence demonstrates what a brilliant orator he was, here taking advantage of American hostility to Old World and especially British aristocracy—hostility that was still very much alive in the 19th century. He used the American disdain for unearned hereditary privilege (which, then as now, did not necessarily extend to inherited wealth) to make the idea of descent from lower animals more accessible and less threatening.
The Dish 