Citizen Paine

THOMAS PAINE is the Founding Father who makes everyone uncomfortable. Indeed, many Americans probably don’t think of him as a Founding Father at all. Craig Nelson’s lovely new biography provides cogent reasons why the man who wrote “Common Sense” has often been neglected by the cheerleaders for the American Revolution. Paine wasn’t just a radical, Nelson reminds us (all the Founders were that, whether they liked it or not); he was a working-class radical, a type from which America’s leaders have been keeping their distance ever since the Federalists began lobbying for a government run by what John Adams called the “natural aristocracy.”

Nor were the Federalists’ opponents any fonder of the upstart lower orders. Thomas Jefferson’s ideal common man was the independent farmer, not the urban “mechanics” among whom Paine worked, argued and educated himself in London during the 1750s and ‘60s. The only leading member of the revolutionary generation who was born in Europe, Paine arrived in late 1774 as a man of 37 whose political thinking displayed a sharp class consciousness more commonly found in Britain. Generations of progressives in his adopted country have shared his militantly egalitarian sentiments, a legacy nicely analyzed in Harvey J. Kaye’s 2005 study, “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America.” Yet for long stretches of our complacent, affluent history, Paine’s pugnacious strictures against the rich and powerful have struck many as, well, un-American.

In his heyday, however, he seemed to speak for all Americans. Nelson’s narrative plunges readers into the flux of a revolutionary situation, where everything is in question and everyone is making up the answers as they go along. No one improvised better than Paine, a genius at changing the terms of the debate. Most Americans were loyal subjects of the king and just wanted better treatment, until the January 1776 publication of “Common Sense” made them ardent republicans who rejected monarchy along with unjust taxes. At the revolution’s lowest point, in December 1776, after a string of American losses made it seem only a matter of time until Britain would bring the Colonies to heel, Paine’s first “Crisis” paper rallied Gen. George Washington’s dispirited troops with his most famous and stirring words:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

Who could “shrink from the service of their country” after Paine so ringingly affirmed the righteousness of their cause? For 11 more years, he took Enlightenment ideals -- the natural rights of individuals, the superiority of science and reason to ignorance and superstition -- and trumpeted them in plain language.

Had Paine stayed put after American independence and let Washington and Jefferson wangle him a sinecure with the new government, he could have become a respected elder statesman. But he returned to Europe, and the book he wrote to defend the French Revolution caused him to be labeled a dangerous subversive in his native England. “Rights of Man,” Paine’s outraged reply to Edmund Burke’s negative “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” pointedly observed that Britain’s unwritten constitution, based on tradition and inherited privilege, offered few liberties to ordinary people. Envisioning a broad-based social democracy that terrified even reform-minded Whigs (Part II advocated health insurance, old-age pensions and a graduated income tax), “Rights of Man” remained the bible of English radicalism for more than a century. In 1792, it got Paine convicted of sedition by a London jury.

He fled to France, where, as a member of its national convention, he voted for the abolition of the monarchy but against the execution of Louis XVI. The king’s death, he argued presciently, would enable reactionaries the world over to depict the French as bloodthirsty barbarians. Paine clung to the belief that if France stayed true to the principles of the constitution he’d helped draft, then soon “all nations shall be as free as herself ... revolutions shall be universal.” Instead, the revolution was engulfed by the Terror, in which many of his friends were executed. Paine narrowly escaped the guillotine in 1794. He would be bitter to the end of his life about the 10 months it took the American government to respond to his pleas for help and get him out of a French prison.

“The Age of Reason,” a controversial treatise on religion he completed in 1796, led many Americans who had viewed him as a patriot and prophet to denounce him as an atheist. In reality, Nelson makes clear, Paine was a deist; the nonsectarian faith he expressed was shared by most European intellectuals and every Founding Father. (The author pointedly cites a 1797 treaty signed by neo-conservative idol Adams declaring that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”) Nelson argues that Paine’s sin was to couch his trenchant criticisms of organized religion in terms anyone could understand: “[M]y own mind is my own church.”

As Enlightenment ideals became associated with the excesses of the French Revolution, those who continued to voice them were pushed to the fringes of public opinion. When Paine returned to America in 1802, the Federalist press attacked him as “a lying, drunken brutal infidel, who rejoiced in ... bloodshed, rapine, and murder.” In 1806, former Tories who controlled elections in New Rochelle, N.Y., where Paine lived, denied the author of “Common Sense” the right to cast a ballot. His service in the French Revolution, they claimed, had invalidated his American citizenship. He died three years later.

“Almost all of Thomas Paine’s Enlightenment colleagues spent their last years as he did, believing that their revolutionary programs had failed,” writes Nelson. His desire to portray Paine as no more extreme than any other Founding Father has unfortunate consequences. To make his case, the author provides an enormous amount of background material that slows the narrative and takes the focus off Paine’s tenacious adherence to increasingly unpopular values. Nelson’s hasty wrap-up, with its superficial comments about how many countries today have democratically elected governments, suffers in comparison to Kaye’s more thoughtful assessment of the role Paine’s writings continue to play in “the struggle to expand American freedom, equality, and democracy.”

What Nelson does well is capture Paine’s blunt, combative style of argument that either inspired or alienated, the sublime self-assurance that struck some as arrogance, the inability to compromise his beliefs that made him a great revolutionary and a lousy politician. How we feel about “Citizen Tom Paine” (as blacklisted Communist Howard Fast dubbed him in a book banned from libraries in the 1950s) depends on what we think the nature and extent of democracy should be. And that means new biographies of the Founders likely will be written for every new epoch in U.S. history. *