By Harvey J. Kaye
To revive and advance the cause of labor, we also will have to revive and advance American democracy. It is time to redeem our fundamental principles and reinvigorate our own and our fellow citizens’ democratic impulses and aspirations. For too long, we have allowed the political “right” and its corporate chums to define what it means to be an American and to corral our political imagination. To reclaim America, we unionists must reclaim, and reconnect with, the memory and legacy of the revolutionary patriot Thomas Paine and the progressive tradition he inspired and encouraged. Doing so will remind us not only of what we stand in opposition to, but, all the more, of what we stand in opposition for….
The son of an English artisan, Paine had labored as a staymaker, a teacher, a preacher, a customs officer and a labor activist before coming to America in 1774. But as much as those experiences had taught him to despise British politics and society, especially kingly and aristocratic rule, it was America and its people that made him the greatest radical of a radical age. Impressed by American energies and possibilities, Paine set out to convince his new compatriots that together they could turn the world upside down.
Through his pamphlets
Common Sense and the
Crisis papers—and through such words as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” and “These are the times that try men’s souls”—Paine not only emboldened his fellow citizens-to-be to turn their rebellion into a war for independence, he also defined the new nation in a democratically expansive way and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.
America and its people turned Paine into an inveterate champion of liberty, equality and democracy and after the Revolution he went on to apply his pen to struggles in Europe. In Rights of Man, he defended the French Revolution of 1789 against conservative attack, called for democratic change in Britain and outlined a series of public initiatives to address the inequalities that made life oppressive for working people. In The Age of Reason, he criticized the power and influence of conservative churches and clerics. And in Agrarian Justice, he proposed taxing the propertied rich to provide grants to young people and pensions to the elderly.
Anxiously appreciating that Paine had turned Americans into radicals, the nation’s elites fearfully and continuously sought to banish him and his arguments from public memory. Still, Paine remained a powerful presence in American life. Recognizing the contradictions between the nation’s ideals and realities, diverse Americans—men and women, native-born and immigrant—recovered Paine’s life and labors and, inspired and encouraged by them, struggled to defend, extend and deepen freedom, equality and democracy.
Heartened and animated by Paine, we have organized unions and pressed for workers’ rights; insisted on the separation of church and state; demanded the abolition of slavery; campaigned for women’s equality; confronted the power of Big Business and created a New Deal for America; opposed Fascist and Communist tyrannies; fought a second American Revolution for racial equality; and challenged our own government’s policies, domestic and foreign, when we have found them wrongheaded and oppressive. Admittedly, we have suffered defeats, committed mistakes and endured tragedies. But we have achieved great victories and far more often than not, as Paine himself fully expected, we have transformed the nation and the world for the better.
Today, ever since Ronald Reagan recited Paine’s words in 1980, not only progressives, but also conservatives, quote Paine. Yet the latter really do not embrace him and his arguments—truly, they cannot. Furthering the interests of corporations over those of working people, they have subordinated the Republic to the marketplace and overseen a concentration of wealth and power recalling the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Carrying on culture wars, they have divided the nation and undermined the wall separating church and state. And lying or hiding the truth, they have corrupted American public life and jeopardized our standing in the world.
Still, those of us who might make the strongest claim on Paine have failed to truly make his vision and commitments once again our own. Too many of us no longer proclaim a firm belief in the nation’s exceptional purpose and promise, the prospects and possibilities of democratic change and our capacities to act as citizens, not subjects. We have lost the courage and conviction that once motivated our efforts.
But we ought not to despair. Paine would assure us that the struggle to expand American freedom, equality and democracy will continue, for as he proudly observed of his fellow citizens after they turned out the Federalists in 1800 in favor of the Jeffersonians, “There is too much common sense and independence in America to be long the dupe of any faction, foreign or domestic.” Indeed, we have good reason not only to hope, but also to act, for our continuing interest in and affection for Paine and his words signify that our generation, too, still feels the democratic impulse and aspiration he inscribed in American experience. Responding to those yearnings and embracing Paine’s spirit and vision anew, we might well prove—as Paine himself wrote in reaction to misrepresentations of the dramatic events of 1776—that “It is yet too soon to write the history of the Revolution.”
Harvey J. Kaye is Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, a member of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981 and author of the newly-published book, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Hill & Wang, 2005).
