Without Thomas Paine, there would have been no American Revolution. Until Paine’s pamphlet, “Common Sense,” the drive for independence was not a popular one. Originally titled, “Plain Truth,” Paine’s treatise made a case for how independence would benefit the common people. He attacked the monarchy in terms far harsher and damning than Jefferson. He spoke of human rights as not the province of birthright or property but as an innate entitlement.
His words were so compelling and convincing that John Adams allowed, “Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”
Thomas Paine was a staunch abolitionist, and a strong advocate for workers’ rights. He proposed a system in which workers had ownership in their labor. He was a loud supporter of the French Revolution because that revolution was led by the common people, while our Founding Fathers were suspicious of it for the same reason.
While the heralded of our founding fathers were happy to exploit the outcome of Paine’s text, they were equally loathsome to adopt many of the ideas within it. They were quick to condemn Paine and any suggestion that common people should have rights equal to those of the landed gentry. The promotion of abolitionism was particularly taboo and regarded as political poison. Even Benjamin Franklin, who had come to abolitionism late, refused to argue for it during the founding of the nation. These founding fathers were among the elite, and they envisioned a nation ruled by the elite. Citizenship and codified rights for anyone who was not rich, and male, would come slowly in the new nation and only through the sweat and blood of those affected by this slight.
Paine persisted in his call and wrote many subsequent works that outlined the notion that “all are created equal.” He became ignominious for this and was slandered and persecuted by the same founders who had momentarily praised him. He was so reviled that he died in poverty. Only six people attended his funeral. Three of them were Black. The other three was a woman and her two sons that he had saved from persecution in England. Our Founders would describe him as a man who did a little good, but much more harm to the nation. Even his remains were treated with commensurate disrespect. It was impossible to find a cemetery in which he could be buried. And his bones were exhumed so passed around so many times, they were eventually lost.
Ironically, it is Paine’s vision that prevails as the myth of the Founding of America, when it was anything but.
Paine understood that advancing human rights involved two essential things: Education and Agitation. He was an unthwartable practitioner of that truth. He gave his life and everything he had.
Education and Agitation are equally essential. No progress toward human rights has been realized without both. Still, and even today, it can be difficult to find those who realize this. Most people don’t want to do anything. They want to be consumer citizens who shop the ideas of others and opine or vote for the ones the like best, or, in modern times, for the things they hate the least.
The few who are willing to act tend to fall into two camps. Those who want to agitate and those who want to educate. The Educators tend to believe we can do this nicely and win through reason alone. The Agitators just want to shake things up and believe the populace will understand what they’re doing through osmosis or something.
I’ve witnessed this in my own puny efforts for justice. Those few who find reason to praise me often look to the times I’ve been in the streets or in handcuffs. They don’t see me sleeping less than four hours a night for years while I was up writing pamphlets for our cause. They don’t see me passing a hat and spending money I didn’t have to get them printed or the hours I spent on street corners and in government buildings distributing them. I have memorized for all time the click a windshield wiper makes when you stuff propaganda beneath it and pray the rain holds off until the driver returns to that car. I’ve spent far more time submitting op ed columns and letters to the editor than I have at demonstrations. And, yes, there are some who praise my prose while condemning my disrupting public events.
The people never mobilize until they know the reason to mobilize. They must be told those reasons again and again and again. Concurrently, the people will never mobilize until the see others putting their bodies on the line for that cause in public again and again and again.
People remember King for being in jail and giving eloquent speeches. (Speeches primarily written by a gay man few remember.) They don’t remember the countless teaching sessions held in countless churches and homes of those affected by racism. King could only be in one place at a time. Thousands of visionaries gave their all in all the others.
And there is something else. There is no glory in this work. You don’t get a community award for telling truths people don’t want to hear or stirring some pot. It’s hard and dirty and more apt to leave you in poverty and reviled or even killed. It will leave your body exhausted and your spirit wounded. King knew this. Paine knew this. Every single soul who has ever gotten traction for justice knows this. None were revered until they were dead. And, most not even then. Their living bodies were subjected to death threats and public condemnation.
My working-class father often said to me, “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days.”
I would say, “Oh, God, Dad, if only what I do or say ever has that much influence. I’m pretty your daughter is safe.”
I’m an anonymous barely perceptible cog in the wheel with a lot of other cogs who will never be remembered at all. We are fine with this. The struggle for justice is not a do-gooder activity. It is a call. Those who have this call know what I’m talking about. Those who don’t just don’t. Those called are flawed and common human beings, usually broken in some way. Justice is not won by those we coddle or praise into it. It’s won by those you can’t talk out of it. We can’t even talk ourselves out of it. It’s like breathing. It’s a reflex, even in your darkest moments, something will speak to your soul and before you even think, you’ll find yourself going after that something.
May we honor the ghost of Thomas Paine and continue to educate and agitate.
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