Etta Semple

From Philosopedia

Semple, Etta Donaldson (1855–1914)

Semple (nee Martha Etta Donaldson) was born into a Baptist family in Quincy, Illinois. After being left a widow with two sons in 1887, she married Matthew Semple, of Ottawa, Kansas, and they had one son.

Etta became Ottawa's town radical, espousing freethought, feminism, opposing racial bigotry, capital punishment, and "blue laws." Her pro-working class novels included Society and The Strike.

She helped found the Kansas Freethought Association to "fight ignorance, superstition and tyranny" and in 1879 was elected its president. She also served as vice-president of the American Secular Union. From her parlor she published the bimonthly Freethought Ideal, an 8-page newspaper with a 2,000 circulation. Etta, a community celebrity who supported temperance, amused Ottawans in the summer of 1901 by strolling arm-in-arm with Carry Nation, prompting a local wag to quip: "One believes in no saloons, and one believes in no god."

In a 23 February 1895 article in Truth Seeker, Semple wrote,

• I never yet have seen the person who could withstand the doubt and unbelief that enter his mind when reading the Bible in a spirit of inquiry

She wrote in 1898,

• If I deny the existence of a God—if I deny the idea of a gold-paved city with pearly walls and jasper gates somewhere out of knowledge and space and prefer to die and trust to the unfaltering laws of nature - if, in plain words I don’t want to go to heaven. whose business is it but my own?

In 1902, Etta opened a "Natural Cure" sanitarium with 31 rooms. "No tramp ever went away hungry, and no fallen woman has been kicked down by us," she once wrote.

The Evening Herald (Ottawa) hailed Etta as a "Good Samaritan" and "one of the greatest benefactors Ottawa has ever had."

However, in her newspaper, The Free-Thought Vindicator, on the front page, she had published,

• A Reward of $1,000 will be Given to the Man, Woman, or Child, who will Furnish Positive Proof Of A God, the Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ (as a savior), the Soul, the Devil, Heaven or Hell, or the Truth of the Bible.

No takers appeared, but her unpopularity led to her attempted assassination (another woman was killed instead, and authorities believed she was the intended victim).

When Etta died of pneumonia at age 59, court was adjourned and crowds filled the cemetery for a godless oration in the spring sun. The Ottawa Herald's banner headline read: "Good Deeds of A Good Woman Are on the Tongues of Ottawa Today." Mourners sang one of Etta's favorite secular songs, "Scattering Seeds of Kindness," which the local newspaper called "emblematic of Mrs. Semple's life." “I never yet have seen the person who could withstand the doubt and unbelief that enter his mind when reading the Bible in a spirit of inquiry.”

[A photograph and excerpts of Semple’s freethinking are found in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier (1992)].

{EU; E. Graham Waring; WWS}