My First Revolutionary

“If there’s anything we know about Thomas Paine, it’s that he gets no respect.”

***

Maybe my first revolutionary was Thomas Paine. Because O ye that love mankind! Stand forth! Because These are the times that try men’s souls. Because we don’t have to go looking for the right time, as he said, for the TIME HATH FOUND US [sic]. And because…mother.

Paine was my mother’s revolutionary, definitely. A history major, she loved all the stories of the American Revolution, but Paine came up again and again simply because her favorite Greenwich Village bar had been on the ground floor of his last home. It was a piano bar even then, and so it remains, a full-on piano bar crowded with men singing late into the night. Alan Cummings reportedly visits to let off steam after a performance. Fun girls love it, too, so much that bachelorette parties were recently banned. My husband and I stopped in for a soda a few months ago, or years, and I took the picture of the plaque outside. My mother walked out of there at thirty, pregnant with me, and remained homesick for it until the day she died. Maybe she went back a few times. Not much. These are the times that try men’s souls.

(And all those years, the automatic noun change in my head. Women’s souls, women’s souls; surely Paine knew women have souls too, women’s souls are terribly tried.) (My mother.)

The bar was not named for “Common Sense,” Paine’s January 1776 pamphlet that sold half a million copies and sparked the revolution—THE TIME HATH FOUND US! Or, not sparked but translated the revolution, its thick, luscious loathing of monarchy, its longing for liberty. A hatred of taxes. This bar was named for his “The American Crisis,” written in December of the same year, the one that begins These are the times.  The one that begins with the soul. Marie’s Crisis is its name.

***

If there’s anything we know about Thomas Paine, it’s that he gets no respect. The Rodney Dangerfield of the founding fathers, Teddy Roosevelt called him “a filthy little atheist;” normally he doesn’t attract even that much rancor. He’s a lowly pamphleteer, an easy read for grade-schoolers just as he’d been for farmers back in the day. The neglect was planned. The Quaker-born, anti-slavery Paine was also an Enlightenment man, like most of the founders. But he was unable to rein in his anger at the corrupt church, could not hide his indifference to God, and wouldn’t stop suggesting that we replace revelation (aka the Bible) with direct observation of the natural world.

Deism, it’s called, and it’s laid out in his 1796 “Age of Reason,” an essay written in France for the French revolution. Reason was his third slam-dunk, but reason sort of ruined him in three countries at once: he was locked up in France, his publishers went to jail in England, and his reputation was ruined in the brand-new USA. Jefferson, who was always getting burned for the same general anti-religion, pro-science beliefs, had begged Paine not to publish. Paine, a man who once wrote, My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light, did as he saw fit. Big surprise.

But back to The Crisis, our revolution, and its necessary war. In the far-ranging essay, Paine quotes Voltaire to praise General Washington, calling him a man who never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action. Paine writes of his own military service, from Fort Lee to Delaware. He whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles to death. The American Crisis is a literary ride of Paul Revere, waking people up. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination, wrote Paine. I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes. And, of course: My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light.

***

How we loved America, mother and I, and her mother, too. Once I came home from a faraway college with a new word: imperialism. It meant America is wrong, is a cruel and rapacious king. And Nicaragua. We were in my grandmother’s kitchen when I told them. My grandmother, the daughter of immigrants, cried, Where else? Where else? 

She was as mad as I would ever see her.

And my mother reminded me of Paine, of he whose heart is firm, and of the others who tried to give us the layout for justice and freedom, who pursue his principles to death.

I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes.

Another lesson from that college: Mock those who speak of truth.

Thomas Paine died alone and unpraised on Grove Street, in my mother’s bar. He was her revolutionary, definitely. But she told me all about him, and no one can sidestep all of her mother’s A B Cs.

—

Photo: Bruce Porteous

If you like our article, please share it. And thanks!