The Age of Paine
Thomas Paine has sometimes had few readers beyond those students who are required to read his great revolutionary pamphlet “Common Sense,” the firebrand Paine wielded to spread the flame of independence throughout the British colonies in America.
By Scott Tucker
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in “Common Sense,” the revolutionary pamphlet published in January 1776. Ronald Reagan quoted those words on July 17, 1980, when he addressed the Republican National Convention and accepted his party’s presidential nomination. Reagan led a coalition of corporate oligarchs, imperial crusaders and Christian fundamentalists to power, and to this day Reaganism remains the official gospel of the old guard in the Republican Party. The republican and social democratic ideals of Paine are long lost to many modern partisan Republicans and Democrats, but many memorable phrases of Paine still fill the mouths of career politicians.
When the Iraq war, a broken health care system and a plunging economy gave the Democratic Party a political advantage, Barack Obama raised hopes and promised change. When Obama gave his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009, he too quoted Paine, this time from the first of 13 articles collected in “The American Crisis”—an article Gen. Washington ordered read to his troops before crossing the Delaware River on Christmas 1776 to fight the Hessian mercenaries of King George III: “Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.” Reagan and Obama each lifted some good lines from Paine for their own rhetorical purposes; but each likewise cared more for stagecraft than for the original script.
Thomas Paine was born Jan. 29, 1737, in Thetford, England, and died on June 8, 1809, in Greenwich Village, New York. He was an active participant in the American and French revolutions, and once said to George Washington, “a share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.” Through his writings he also left a lasting legacy in the British working-class movement. During his life, his books and pamphlets became instant best-sellers, since he was a pioneer in addressing a wide public in plain language. He is, in fact, sometimes described as a “pamphleteer,” and it is true that even his books are written in the style of pamphlets writ large. This is entirely to his credit. In 1943, Orwell wrote a short piece titled “Pamphlet Literature,” and claimed “that the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organized lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form.” In the age of Murdoch and Berlusconi, the traditional print and broadcast media often serve as megaphones of phony populism. Nor does organized lying cease to exist simply because the Internet carries a cacophony of voices. In this sense, “plugging the holes in history” is still the aim of political writers, and Paine is still good for morale and instruction.
In the United States, Paine wrote “Common Sense” and “The American Crisis,” rallying citizens to support independence, and then literally rallying the troops for battle. When Paine went back to England to promote his own design for a bridge, history had a bigger design for him. He had become acquainted with Edmund Burke, who argued in the British Parliament that lenience would preserve the loyalty of the colonists, and who finally added his qualified support to the American Revolution. In a famous speech Burke gave in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775, he said, “In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature. … This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth.”
So long as Burke and Paine had that much common ground, Paine was even glad to visit Burke at his country home. But in 1789 the French Revolution broke out, and by the next year Burke was making deeply conservative arguments for hereditary rule and property in his book “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” The leading British radicals and republicans, whom Paine knew well, waged a literary war against Burke. William Godwin wrote his “Inquiry Concerning Political Justice,” and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her “Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” But once again, the runaway best-seller proved to be the first part of Thomas Paine’s “The Rights of Man,” published in 1791 and dedicated to George Washington. Paine defended the French Revolution, and renewed his attacks against monarchy and all hereditary privilege. Arguing pointedly against Burke, Paine wrote: