The Freethinkers’ Pictorial Text Book was artist Watson Heston’s attempt at exposing the abuses of a union of church and state in the United States. The book was published in the year 1890 in New York by Truth Seeker Company. Heston cites fact, history, statistics, and the opinions of scholars alongside his daring illustrations in order to maintain his argument about the abuses of the church. The book aims to show the absurdity and untruthfulness behind the Church’s claim to be a divine and beneficent institution. It contains two-hundred full-page illustrations.
Heston was born in Ohio, but spent much of his adult life in Carthage, Missouri. He was an editorial cartoonist and his work gained popularity in the 19th century during the Populist political movement. This movement consisted of a coalition of agrarian reformer in the Midwest and South that campaigned for economic and political reforms. Throughout the 1880s, Farmers’ Alliances sprang up as farmers grew frustrated of the difficulties of crop failures and falling prices and the lack of governmental support for these struggling farmers. Heston’s work was written at a time of frustration and distrust of the government and other institutions.
