J. M. Robertson

From Philosopedia

Robertson, John M(acKinnon (14 November 1856 - 5 January 1933)

Robertson, who was born on the Isle of Arran, has been called “the most successful of all the [freethought] leaders at making his way in the world.” At first a railroad telegraph clerk, then a clerk in an insurance office, he became active in the 1880s in the Edinburgh Secular Society. In 1884, he moved to London to work on the National Reformer, of which he became editor on Bradlaugh’s death.

Robertson is credited with having led Annie Besant to socialism, although he himself became a “New Liberal.”

In his Pagan Christs (1903), Robertson wrote,

• Petronius was surely right in saying Fear made the gods. In primitive times fear of the unknown was normal; gratitude to an unknown was impossible.

In 1906 he was elected Liberal M.P. for Tynemouth, having previously failed to win Northampton. In 1911 he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Board of Trade, a position he held until the fall of Asquith’s government in 1915. Losing his seat as an Asquithian Liberal in 1918, he devoted himself to freethought literature until his death.

The breadth of his writings on both freethought and political topics was enormous, and he became one of the most important of latter-day Liberals and Secularists. Robertson believed that Jesus never existed, and he wrote a five-volume series on the subject. The Gospels, he reasoned, were actually derived from morality plays. Although few historians and scholars now agree, his concepts stirred much discussion.

He used “freethought” almost as a synonym for progress in the liberalization of the philosophy of religion, states Gordon Stein. His editorship of Reformer was from 1893 to 1904, prior to which he had been an editor of The National Reformer, upon which Charles Bradlaugh and Joseph Barker had also been editors. During his time with Bradlaugh, Robertson professed atheism but later, according to Joseph McCabe, preferred to be called an agnostic.

Following Moncure Conway’s departure from the South Place Ethical Society in 1899, he along with Herbert Burrows and J. A. Hobson served as a panel of lecturers there.

In 1895, Robertson wrote Modern Humanists.

He then wrote Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (1915), which is a major and authoritative book on the subject. His two-volume History of Freethought and his History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (1929) are major reference works.

Robertson’s wide interests included Walt Whitman, about whom he published a study in the “Round Table Series,” Mithraism, socialism, Toryism, and barbarism. He also wrote a pamphlet, “Thomas Paine: An Investigation,” a scathing exposure in 1900 of Christian calumnies regarding Paine’s alleged deathbed recantation.

For some months before his death, Robertson’s health had been failing. He attended a meeting of the Bradlaugh Centenary Committee in December. On Thursday January 5, 1933, he was at work on two books which he was writing, and in the evening was listening to a wireless talk on “Saving,” a subject in which he had long been keenly interested. Shortly afterward he had a “stroke” and died. His remains were cremated on January 7, and in accordance with his own often-expressed wish there was no ceremony of any kind at the funeral.

(See the entry for D. H. Lawrence.)

{BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FFRF; FO; FUK; JM; RAT; RE}