DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett

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Bennett, DeRobigne Mortimer (1818—1882)

Bennett lived in Cincinnati for a number of years in the 1850s, manufacturing proprietary medicines and becoming wealthy. He had been born two months prematurely in Springfield, New York, and had a lifelong limp. He made and lost money on start-up businesses and investments in metropolitan areas around the country.

Bennett worked in a printing office and joined the New Lebanon Shaker community at 15. By the age of 27 he was working as the community's physician. He shook off the celibate Shakerism in 1846, when he and Shakeress Mary Wicks fell in love and decided to marry [[1]]. Their marriage and apostasy shocked and demoralized the remaining believers for years.

For a decade during the Gilded Age, D. M. Bennett was arguably both the most revered and the most reviled publisher in America. His devoted subscribers to the Truth Seeker, numbering in the tens of thousands, practically venerated the Shaker-turned-freethinker.

But he also had powerful enemies. In 1877 he became the target for America’s self-appointed arbiter of morals - Anthony Comstock. With the support of some of the country’s most powerful Christian citizens, Comstock, the self-described “weeder in God’s garden” went after the “infidel” publisher with a vengeance. Comstock had Bennett arrested for sending a pamphlet by Ezra H. Heywood, a birth-control work, “Cupid’s Yokes,” through the mails. A tract entitled “An Open Letter to Jesus Christ” was read in court to bias the jury. A petition bearing 200,000 names was presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes, asking Bennett’s release but not acceded to. Bennett was jailed in Albany Penitentiary.

Upon his release, he was greeted by a large reception at Chickering Hall, then selected as U. S. delegate to the International Freethought Congress at Brussels. His admirers sent him on a voyage around the world, after which he wrote A Truth Seeker Around the World (1882).