Eva Ingersoll Wakefield

From Philosopedia

A rare photo of the Wakefields

Courtesy of Warren Allen Smith

Wakefield, Eva Ingersoll (1891–1970)

The granddaughter of Robert G. Ingersoll , an atheist who called herself a naturalistic humanist, Mrs. Wakefield succeeded Warren Allen Smith in 1954 as president of the New York City Humanists, which then affiliated with the American Humanist Association. As was her husband Sherman, Wakefield supported liberal causes and was outspoken as a freethinker. In 1959, she edited the work of her famous grandfather, whose letters she previously had edited. Typical of her activism, Wakefield took part in a 1953 “squabble” over a New York City Health and Welfare Council decision, observing,

• I am happy to report that the fight waged by the Planned Parenthood Federation’s Committee of Mothers’ Health Centers for reinstatement on the Health and Welfare Council of New York City, has finally been successful. A majority of the Board of the Council has recently voted to admit the Planned Parenthood agency to membership. In consequence, the fifty-three Roman Catholic agencies have resigned from the Council. This controversy is merely another in the endless series of controversies pointing up the vast and irreconcilable differences between this mighty totalitarian institution, the Roman Catholic Church, and the liberal religious and secular institutions and principles that form the substance and spirit of the democratic way of life. Roman Catholicism, no less than Soviet Communism, is seeking world domination, through political and social, as well as religious, channels. It infiltrates every governmental, economic, and social agency, and works unceasingly in every direct and devious manner to achieve its objective of total control of the minds and destinies of mankind everywhere. Humanists must be alerted to this Catholic menace, and must come out of their intellectual cloisters into the heat and turmoil of the market place of ideas, and take up the challenge uncompromisingly and courageously that this totalitarian church has presented to us.

When she wrote Mayor Elect Robert F. Wagner Jr., a Catholic, on behalf of the New York Humanists for his views on the separation of church and state, she received his response:

• In connection therewith, I wish to advise you that I am fully in accord with the constitutional problem (doctrine?) of separation of church and state and I am opposed to using public funds for the support of private and parochial schools. I deeply appreciate your writing to me about this matter.

Wakefield was humiliated late in life, fleeced out of a sizable amount of money in a Gypsy bajour, but to all who knew her she was a generous, wise, kind, and stately person. Her interests included world federalism, euthanasia, Indian affairs, civil liberties, and the separation of church and state.

(See entry for Sherman Wakefield, her husband. And see entry for K. M. Whitten.)

{FUS; HNS; The Humanist Newsletter, November-December 1953; WAS, numerous conversations}