Starting off with a movie critique of HBO's mini series about John Adams, Associate Professor Bruce Dain said that a movie about Thomas Paine would have been a better story. Why? For starters, Dain said that Paine believed in divorce, was separated and was remarried, had many personal problems. He antagonized people, was the most famous writer in America, and supported the American Revolution.

And almost killed in the French Revolution, Paine was not freed by the US government in France. So he blamed George Washington; this caused a big public fight though Washington was not at fault. Eventually James Monroe had him released from French jail.

Paine also became infamous for writing The Age of Reason, a defense of deism. This writing was vilified by the American founding fathers, even though most of them agreed with him. For example, John Adams loathed what Paine wrote yet agreed with virtually everything but didn't think it was a good idea to express it in public.

Another interesting fact about Paine was that he died in NYC not quite impoverished but not well off either. Buried in a pauper-like grave, almost no one went to his funeral. Nearly a year passed before his followers and family moved him to a proper grave.

Though Paine's life would have been a much better mini series than John Adams, he is ignored although educated people may have heard about him, said Dain, and the question is why. Dain said he was actually grateful about giving this talk, motivating him to read about Paine and think about him.

Paine was an exceedingly popular writer in the 18th century, Dain said, but he doesn't seem to speak to us now, especially for the left, liberal, or university level. Something in Paine's tone appeals to the right wing, which is why Glen Beck just published Glen Beck's Common Sense. Unwilling to buy it, Dain said he went to a bookstore and read Beck's book, adding that there is something in Beck's tone that he got right about Paine.

Nevertheless there is much about Paine that does not fit into our sensibilities today, like his deliberate simplicity, radical anti-elitism, and contempt for protest against disinterest and objectivity in politics, which may be the biggest reason why he is forgotten. Paine identified himself completely with his ideas, never distinguishing between the private and public man, despising people who did; this set him apart from virtually all the other founding fathers. Plus he attacked them personally if he didn't like their ideas since he believed that the idea and the man were the same things.

One of the famous lines from Common Sense was Paine's belief that the American Revolution was important for all mankind. Interestingly, Paine disregarded "American" in American Revolution because America did not have hundreds of years of aristocracy; it was a democratic revolution first. To Paine, there was nothing special about Americans per se. In fact, they were only Americans if they acted out of principles that anyone could understand. Thus he thought he could and did export this idea to France and England.

Paine saw himself as a professional writer who owned his work, said Dain. As a result, he fought with the publisher of Common Sense for pocketing all the profit. Most publishers then believed that what the writer said and what his ideas were what was important, but the writer as a person did not own that; Paine despised this notion.

Paine cannot be admired as a learned man, continued Dain, because he was contemptuous of formal education believing it could lead to pride. Paine cannot be admired as a disinterested man who had a public persona different from his private person. He cannot be admired as a Founding Father; he hated class differences, lineage claims, and in many ways, nationalism. Paine considered himself universal and not as a real American.

Given all of this, it is surprising he is remembered though he is basically ignored, said Dain, adding that he thought it was undeserved because what he did was a major intellectual accomplishment and impressive in many ways. Furthermore, Paine had a sense of public leadership that did not exist then. In fact, Paine invented his own audience and spoke to it almost simultaneously.

Paine also invented a different way of writing that appealed to ordinary people who had a little education but could read and write. So his writing was not targeted to an audience of artisans, craftsmen, or farmers. Paine believed that ordinary people mattered and could shape politics just as much as anyone else. Simply to write a best selling political pamphlet was to create a new audience; what Paine did had never happened before in the US. Paine invented a political language of self-evident truths that was available to anyone.

According to Paine, the world's glory and its logic and the ability to apprehend both is universal. In other words, science is available to anyone, and science has to be the basis for everything in public life, including religion; every person is able to apply scientific reasoning and evidence to politics and even to religion.

As an aside, Dain commented that the word "American" did not exist in its current form until after Common Sense; it was a bad word then. Thus, the new meaning for "American" is to act rationally and to be against corruption.

Paine argued that anybody with common sense, meaning reason, and if they lived in America and acted rationally, then this person would be a true American, and a true American would be willing to fight a revolution to leave the British Empire.

Paine expounded on this very subtly in Common Sense, Dain said, not calling for a revolution in the beginning, not until the last paragraph. He argued that monarchy was irrational and that anyone with any sense who did not have an interest in it would not want to be in a monarchy. That is pretty much all Common Sense says, asserted Dain, adding that there are many biblical references so it is not even that secular.

Later Paine said he could convince the British themselves to overthrow monarchy and aristocracy and all people to abandon notions of miracle, heresy, and orthodoxy, wanting to make faith a matter of scientific investigation open even to ordinary people.

By inventing a language to do that, in essence Paine trusted his audience to be able to fulfill the entire promise of the Enlightenment. Dain said educated people then believed that was possible. It was unusual for men like Adams and Jefferson to see themselves as natural aristocrats. Such people were not born into privilege but received privilege because they were smarter; they would think like Newton and Shakespeare, the great examples of reason and imagination, who were exceptional, not a state most people had access to. This is why Adams said the following about Paine:

"I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Bonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine." --John Adams

Adams believed that society could even be destroyed if anyone could access the ideas of aristocracies. For society to hold together, it had to be based on an aristocracy of the gifted.

Dain said Paine believed that all truth is available to all people at all times for observation and reason, and everything true is the result of science. If people abandon their prejudices, all men could be scientists. Consequently, all of Paine's works seek to demolish all prejudices and to persuade people to put the American Revolution, French Revolution, a possible revolution in England, governments everywhere, and ultimately even all religions, on a rational scientific basis available to everyone.

Author's Note: To those who would like to hear Dain's entire speech, a cassette tape is available.

For more information about Paine, see this website

--Sarah Smith

More Pictures from Thomas Paine Day