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Introduction
**** Thomas Paine and the Promise of America Harvey J. Kaye New York: Hill and Wang (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 2005.

Prof. Kaye has written an excellent book about an underrated and oft-forgotten American hero, Thomas Paine. Prof. Kaye makes clear why conservatives and spiritualists have gone to great lengths to malign Paine during the last two centuries. The nearly successful attempts to bury Paine are a reason I have known little of him until now.

In reviewing my book, the Graduate Student's Question (GSQ), Burt Alpert asked me whether I had read Tom Paine? The answer was "no" until now. Except that I knew he wrote Common Sense, a pivotal document leading to the 1776 Declaration of Independence, I knew little else about the man or his thoughts. Prof. Kaye reveals I should not have been ignorant of Paine, as much of what I invented in GSQ was previously advocated by Thomas Paine and his many followers. But my independent re-invention of many Painite thoughts is an important fact: it demonstrates convergence in intellectual evolution. That the same pattern of ideas keeps cropping up, shows the underlying conditions producing them has not changed, and suggests that someday those ideas can take hold and grow.

Thomas Paine's pamphlet, Common Sense, was the catalytic factor in changing public opinion to favor American independence. Until Paine's arguments inflamed people against the Crown, the events of 1775 - Paul Revere, Lexington and Concord - were not part of a meaningful pattern. The rebels were rebels, not law abiding citizens. Paine's writing transformed a few rebels into an army of opposition, defending the legitimate rights of the people from an oppressive Imperium. It was the creation of a Continental power - eventually the United States - in the mind's eye that legitimated those who stood their ground at Lexington. Legitimacy is finally a matter of opinion, but an opinion that made all the difference in Philadelphia, 1776.

Thomas Paine was responsible for storing the seeds grown in many later seasons, that were set aside in his own time. Since the beginning, Paine's belief in the people and democracy has been the agony of Federalists, Aristocrats and Capitalists. John Adams despised Paine. Thomas Jefferson admired him, but at a distance. Jefferson extracted Paine from imprisonment in France, but got criticized for that mercy. Tom Paine was especially hated by preachers because of his work, Age of Reason, debunking religion. Many commentaries on Paine were written falsely claiming he was a drunkard, and that he renounced his unbelief in Christianity on his deathbed. Sen. John McCain's hero, Theodore Roosevelt, described Paine as a "filthy infidel."

Prof. Kaye gives us the short version of Paine's personal life, but spends most of this book on Paine's real life after his death in 1809. Despite the best and most ardent efforts of conservatives and spiritualists, Thomas Paine was not kept in his grave. He seems to have risen again and again, as does Spartacus, for many of us say "I am Spartacus." Paine was familiar and inspiring to many Americans who lived on behalf of the American Dream, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain and many, many others. Paine was an early advocate for women's equality and rights, freeing the slaves and the universal franchise, working people's rights, Unions, government regulation of corporations, "production for use," regulation of property and separation of church and State. Paine invented the basic ideas of the Welfare State, many of which were implemented in the Social Security Act of 1935. Almost two hundred years after Paine's death, we are only now beginning to acknowledge and act upon his important contributions to our social well-being.

Fulfillment of Paine's agenda is still not complete. Under the present Bandit Administration, purveyors of Authoritarian Capitalism (that's Fascism, a term not invented until long after Paine's death), Paine's work is in retreat. Paine was anathema to clergymen, plutocrats and most conservatives because he advocated government "by the people, for the people and of the people," as Lincoln so beautifully said. In summarizing conservative rejection of Paine's ideas, Kaye writes,

... Bolstered by capital, firmly in command of the Republican Party, and politically ascendant for a generation, they have initiated and instituted policies and programs that fundamentally contradict Paine's own vision and commitments. They have subordinated the Republic - the res publica, the commonwealth, the public good - to the marketplace and private advantage. They have furthered the interests of corporations and the rich over those of working people, their families, unions, and communities and overseen a concentration of wealth and power that, recalling the Gilded Age, has corrupted and ennervated American democratic life and poltiics. And they have carried on culture wars that have divided the nation and undermined the wall separating church and state. Moreover, they have pursued domestic and foreign policies that have made the nation both less free and less secure politically, economically, environmentally, and militarily. Even as they have spoken of advancing freedom and empowering citizens, they have sought to discharge or at least constrain America's democratic impulse and aspiration. In fact, while poaching lines from Paine, they and their favorite intellectuals have disclosed their real ambitions and affections by once again declaring the "end of history" and promoting the lives of Founders like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who in decided contrast to Paine scorned democracy and feared "the people." (pp. 260-61)

What is clear from Kaye's telling of Thomas Paine's story is that wherever you find a democrat, someone who breathes and works and lives among and with the people, you will also find Tom Paine. He has been the pure energy powering the American Dream since the beginning. He hasn't died and gone away. He is still with us, everyday and everywhere, urging us on, giving us hope, and the assurance that, no matter what, We, the People, will not only survive, but triumph.

I thank Prof. Kaye for taking the time and trouble to write this very revealing and uplifting book. I strongly recommend it to everyone who wants to know more about Thomas Paine, and what the American experiment proposes for ordinary people.