“February 21, 2008: I have several favorite American revolutionaries. One was Thomas Paine, and my own email address, tompaine1917@yahoo.com, is taken from the admiration I have for Paine. This nice book by Harvey Kaye is not only biographical, but it extends beyond biography to investigate the philosophical, political, social, and economic influence of ideas Paine had in his life beyond the end of his life. It turns out his influence was considerable. Paine's influence extended into the 19th Century anti-slavery movement. It extended to embrace freethinking movements for not only freedom of religion, and freedom of conscience in areas of religion, but in favor of maintaining and hanging onto separation of religion and government, and separation of church and state, which Paine in his life firmly supported. Paine's influence also extended into the formation in the 19th Century of labor organizations and embryonic labor unions to raise the wages and salaries of working people and improve their working conditions. He himself had, in fact, originally organized one of the earliest efforts on behalf of labor when, as a younger British person, he had, while employed as a British tax collector inside England organized a petition drive to the British parliament to improve the salaries and working conditions of British tax collectors -- excise men -- whose conditions of labor were miserable. To some significant extent, Paine's interest in English economic, political, philosophical, and socially radical ideas, not to mention his efforts on behalf of English working class folk (of whom he himself always was a working class person), got him into considerable trouble with the British authorities, and he was more or less put into a position of having to flee England and come to the New World. He got to the American colonies at one of the most significant moments in our history, in 1774, right at the time when radical and revolutionary ferment regarding the imposition of British taxes onto the American colonies was causing great uproar here in the American colonies. Paine was fortunate in having previously met the American diplomat to England, Benjamin Franklin, who had written a letter of recommendation for Paine, so when Paine got to the American colonies, his letter of recommendation from Franklin, respected in the colonies, stood Paine in good stead. Paine looked around and did several kinds of work, but when he got into the printing trades here, that became his "take-off" point -- for Paine did not simply become a good printer, but he used his abilities as a writer of fiery propaganda, in addition to his printing abilities, to become within a relatively short period of time the most well-known revolutionary propagandist against the government and against the political domination of his former country, Britain, in the American colonies. When the armed confrontation with England first broke out in 1775, where in Massachusetts armed Massachusetts farmers confronted British red-coated troops, with some of the Massachusetts peasant farmers dying in those two confrontations at Lexington and Concord, for roughly the period from April of 1775 up to January of 1776, the war aims of the American side were as yet undefined. Indeed, the most privileged upper class elements of the American colonies, up through and including men like Thomas Jefferson, for instance (whose names would become synonymous with radicalism, something not quite nearly as well deserved as people conventionally think), were not yet firmly in favor of a hardcore separation of the American colonies from the British Empire. Thomas Paine changed all that with a little booklet he came out with in January-February 1776 named, Common Sense. This booklet became the argument of, particularly, the urban working people and the rural peasant farm people -- that is, the working classes of the American colonies of that day and that time -- for an unconditional separation of the American colonies from the British empire. Paine's arguments in Common Sense were anti-monarchy, and supportive of the principle of equality of nations (national equality) and of national self-determination (that is, the right of nations to form their own independent states) long before Jefferson and other men of property met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, America's first capital in the period of the Revolution, in July of 1776, and before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Paine argued for a Declaration of Independence six months before the July 1776 Declaration finally was written. He codified principles of natural rights, including the right of nations to form their own states, and the right of peoples to form republics and get rid of monarchies, early on. His position became the position of the masses of ordinary people, who met in pubs and bars in the colonies, which were often centers of popular political debate and discussion in the 1770s, and shared Paine's ideas with each other, passing his booklet from hand to hand. There was this enormous groundswell of popular plebeian urban and rural working class public opinion that formed the context pushing to the left the political debate over what the war aims of the American war against the British empire should be. And even those like John Adams, who did not like Paine, said that the age had become an age of Paine. Paine, however, did not stop there. He wrote in the 1777 period The American Crisis, often simply called The Crisis, at a time when the fortunes of Revolutionary America were at their lowest ebb and it looked like the American Revolution might lose to the British empire. The Crisis was read by George Washington to his miserably hungry, tired, and freezing troops at Valley Forge, and inspired them to a military victory in the days after this. Paine later on came out with one of the most economically and socially progressive and radical little pamphlets ever written, entitled Agrarian Justice, which could be said to be a kind of forerunner of modern-day calls for government-sponsored social welfare programs helping impoverished and poor people. He also visited England after the American Revolution, siding with and toasting in English pubs English radicals involved in supporting English reforms of British society, and found himself again hounded by the British police and having to escape to France -- which was just around that time having its own Revolution. Paine was welcomed with open arms into French Revolutionary society, and was elected by the French people as an honorary member of the first French national assembly or congress, the French Constituent Assembly, because of the fact his name was known to the revolutionary people of France as having been instrumental in helping the fortunes of the revolutionary people of America. Paine authored additionally a book favoring complete freedom of religion entitled, The Age of Reason, for which he was incorrectly and inaccurately called an atheist by many. Paine was not an atheist. He held a Deist viewpoint, and Deism was a quite popular view among educated men and women of the period of the later 18th Century on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It was secular and freethinking, but did not reject belief in a god. Rather, its conception of a god was of an impersonal god who had created a cosmos, then essentially walked away from that god's creation, never again to get personally involved in human affairs. But Paine, like Jefferson, advocated complete equality for not only all believers of all religions, but for nonbelievers and atheists as well, even though he was, as said before, not an atheist. In the 19th Century, the great revolutionary and anti-slavery printer and abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, himself also of working class background, essentially operated in a kind of Paine-like tradition forming his great Liberator journal that published every single week without interruption from January 1831 through December 1865 and favored the immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery, equal rights for women (including voting rights for women), and racial equality for blacks. Garrison began pretty firmly as a Christian, but later in his life became more all-seeing and enlightened and far-seeing after discovering the writings and works of Paine from the 18th Century. Kaye's book goes into the many enlightened kinds of movements and influences which Paine had beyond his life, and they extend even into the 20th Century, into the labor movement and into the socialist movement in the 20th Century. Paine favored equality pretty much for all. He opposed slavery long before and often against the wishes of others in the American Revolution of his own time. He was sympathetic to women's rights and the concept of women's equality. He was one of the most progressive and enlightend men of his time, and Kaye has written a lovely book about this great American. --Allan Greene a/k/a tompaine1917@yahoo.com
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Allan_Greene wrote this review Thursday, February 21, 2008.
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