Charles Smith

From Philosopedia

Smith, Charles (1887–1964)

Smith from 1926 to 1964 edited the Truth Seeker, a rationalist journal in New York City. He is one of the foremost American Atheist leaders of the century. With W. L. Oliphant he authored the Debate on Atheism, a debate in the Shawnee, Oklahoma, Church of Christ (1929).

Although Smith wrote extensively, little has been written about him. Gordon Stein, however, compiled many stories about Smith’s having gone from Harvard to Vladivostok to Little Rock. In Arkansas, when he was found guilty of distributing obscene, slanderous, or scurrilous literature, he insisted upon working off the $25 fine by serving time in jail at $1 per day - he then commenced a hunger strike and was hospitalized. When the case was dismissed, he again opened his bookstore and again was found guilty, this time being sentenced to ninety days in jail. Smith’s intent was to “nullify the anti-atheist laws of this country,” and Arkansas suffered from publicity in newspapers which painted it as some sort of primitive backwater.

In 1925 he and Freeman Hopwood founded the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (the 4A’s), which soon had over 3000 members and chapters on twenty college campuses. The 4A’s conducted an Ingersoll Forum and brought suit to stop such things as the employment of chaplains in Congress and the reading of the Ten Commandments in schools.

In 1930 he purchased the Truth Seeker, which in the 1950s was converted into a small monthly. Smith had an antipathy to Jews and non-whites which (perhaps because of the influence of his assistant, Woolsey Teller) became increasingly apparent in the journal. “In a sense,” Stein has written of the famed libertarian, “Smith was born at the wrong time in history. He would have done much better if he had lived as an adult during the last half of the 19th century, when freethought was in its Golden Age.” Negative about the subject of humanism, Smith wrote as follows:

That is Humanism: an all-over-the-lot gush-out that hopes to cure the world’s ills by a flood of sentimentalism. There is only one kind of "atheist plus" or "atheist minus"; it depends on whether he believes in full steam ahead for atheism or in rumbling along at slow-freight speed. This is an age of specialization, and the atheist, as an atheist, is a specialist, with one objective in mind: the smashing of the God superstition. What he may do apart from this, in matters of social interest, is a matter of individual taste. The atheist can be just as interested in art, music, architecture, literature, drama, finer human relations, public health, new housing, and the making of a better noodle soup as the most enthusiastic “Humanist,” but he does not have to become a cultist to do it, nor splatter his “humanitarianism” onto public billboards. It is precisely this sentimental rhapsodizing that causes my distaste for Humanism, which, apart from its desire to do good, is burdened by wishy-washy methods and an old-maid’s outlook.

Smith’s Manhattan office was a dark, seemingly disorganized clutter of books, magazines, and papers, according to Warren Allen Smith. Just before his death from a heart attack, he responded to Smith's request for an updating about his views on humanism and responded:

Sensism, to be published about the end of next month (1956), may contain usable material [about atheistic humanism].

In that book, he restated his lifelong acceptance of the logic of and need for Atheism.

Correspondence

Following are letters from Charles Smith to Warren Allen Smith (no relation) that were donated to Harvard's Houghton Library:

{EU, Gordon Stein; WAS, 26 March 1956, 15 August 1956, 18 August 1956}