DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818-1882) was 19th-century America's most controversial publisher and free-speech martyr. Bennett founded the 'blasphemous' New York periodical "The Truth Seeker" in 1873, and his publications were censored and prohibited from news-stands long before the expression 'banned in Boston' was heard. In less than a decade, the former Shaker and self-described Thomas Paine infidel became the most successful publisher of free-thought literature in America - perhaps the world. Mark Twain, Clarence Darrow, and Robert G Ingersoll, (The Great Agnostic), were only a few of the illustrious freethinkers who subscribed to the periodical devoted to: science, morals, free thought and human happiness. But Bennett's opposition to dogmatic religion and puritanical obscenity laws so infuriated Anthony Comstock, the US Post Office's 'special agent' and self-proclaimed 'weeder in God's garden', that the freethinking publish...
