Robert G. Ingersoll - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• In his Devil's Dictionary American journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce included his own version of the Decalogue in which the second commandment is, "No images nor idols make/for Robert Ingersoll to break."
• In A.B. Simpson's 1890 book, Wholly Sanctified, the prominent New York City pastor and founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance writes of wanting to read Ingersoll's lectures with a view to answering them, but was so repulsed after reading one page that he "dared not go farther." Simpson referred to Ingersoll as "this daring blasphemer."
• In William Faulkner's short story Beyond an old man leaves his body at the moment of death and visits a sort of ante-purgatory where he encounters the shade of a man who may be Robert Ingersoll. The old man accosts Ingersoll, "So you too are reconciled . . . to this place." Ingersoll replies, "Ah . . . reconciled."
• In Sherwood Anderson's 1920 novel Poor White, "Robert Ingersoll came to to speak . . ., and after he had gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens."
• In Sinclair Lewis's 1927 novel Elmer Gantry, a burly college student named Elmer Gantry who is heavily under the influence of his agnostic friend Jim Lefferts undergoes a seeming miraculous conversion to Baptist Christianity and is immediately invited to speak before an audience. At Lefferts' suggestion, Gantry uses as inspiration for his first sermon a speech by Robert Ingersoll which commences, "Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud". Gantry decides not to credit Ingersoll, who would be infamous to his audience, and reflects, "Rats! Chances are nobody there tonight has ever read Ingersoll. Agin him. Besides I'll kind of change it around."
• The town of Redwater, Texas, was originally named Ingersoll in honor of Robert Ingersoll when it was founded in the mid-1870s; the current name was adopted after a revival meeting held in the town in 1886.
• Ingersoll's "After Visiting the Tomb of Napoleon" is quoted in Born Yesterday.
• In P. G. Wodehouse's book "The Mating Season", PC Dobbs, who happens to be a fervent Agnostic/Atheist, left the County Talent Show at the local hall early because he didn't like the entertainment and went home to "smoke a pipe and read Robert G. Ingersoll".
• Colonel Bob Mountain in Washington state was named for Robert Ingersoll.
• His birthplace, known as the Robert Ingersoll Birthplace, or Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
• The following Ingersoll statement is quoted on the inside cover of the Godley and Creme album "Consequences":

"There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences."

• Ingersoll's brand of agnosticism was labelled "Ingersollism" by his intellectual contemporaries, including congregationalist Lyman Abbott, Congregationalist minister John P. Sanderson, Illinois scholar and lawyer George Reuben Wendling and others (such as a collection of refutations of Ingersollism published in 1879 by Chicago publishers Rhodes and McClure).