An under-attended founder
Zadek opened the dedicated episode by stating the problem with Paine’s reputation: “Most of us know—what do we know about Tom Paine? We know about two sentences. We know that he wrote Common Sense. … Tom Paine is little more than a name because, for whatever reason—Harlow may help us understand it—Tom Paine has not gotten the attention of many historians” Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021). His opening question to Unger was deliberately adversarial: Paine wrote two books, one of which made him widely disliked, so what warrants the attention?
Against the divine right of kings
Unger’s answer was that Paine wrote for people no other founder addressed: “He grew up in the working class, and when he learned to write, he wrote for everyman—literate or not, poor, rich, noble or ignoble.” The question Paine put to them was “Why … should someone rule over us simply because he is someone else’s child?” — a claim Unger traced to William the Conqueror’s bargain with the Anglican Church, and which Paine answered by calling it absurd. To it Paine added a second absurdity: “Why should people on a little tiny island across an ocean govern a huge continent?” Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021)
Unger argued that the ideas reaching the Declaration’s preamble came through Paine to the common man, and that the shift in the famous triad from property to “the pursuit of happiness” was made because “most people did not own property, so they changed the words … to engage the common man in the fight for independence.”
Who the revolution needed
Zadek supplied the arithmetic that makes Paine’s audience decisive: at the start, by the rough figures he cited, about a third of colonists supported the revolution, a third were neutral and a third remained loyal. “So we needed a battle to be successfully waged for the hearts and minds of the common residents of the colonies. And that missing piece was supplied primarily, I think it’s fair to say, by Thomas Paine and his writing” Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021). Unger described the sequel: Paine brought a draft of American Crisis to Washington’s Delaware encampment, officers read it aloud to the troops — “These are the times that try men’s souls” — and the army crossed the river on Christmas night and took Trenton. Thirty-one such essays followed, each signed “Common Sense.”
Poverty and The Age of Reason
“Thomas Paine could have made a lot of money from these essays. He turned every penny over to Washington to send to Congress to buy food and supplies,” Unger said; at the war’s end Paine was as poor as when he arrived, and New York eventually gave him a confiscated Loyalist farm at New Rochelle, the only home he ever owned Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021). Zadek noted that The Age of Reason, a polemic against organized religion, “did not endear him to the American public at large and certainly not to many in the American elite,” and that Washington remained a supporter. Unger corrected the chronology — Washington died in 1799, before the controversy peaked — and described Paine’s imprisonment in France for opposing the execution of the king.
Afterlives
In the episode on anonymous speech, Zadek placed Common Sense in the founding era’s habit of publishing unsigned: “most famously at all is Common Sense written by Tom Paine. … He wrote it and only later—he didn’t aggressively disguise it, but he didn’t sign his name to the book” The United States of Anonymous (2022). Jeff Kosseff added that the Supreme Court, from 1960 onward, traced the constitutional right of anonymous speech “to Thomas Paine, to the Federalist Papers.” Paine’s title also supplies the name of the California third party discussed in Restoring Common Sense to California (2021), where Zadek noted the parallel: both the party and the country were “formed around an ideal, around a set of principles.” The episode on Benjamin Rush groups Paine with Rush and Franklin as founders who refused to profit from their work Founding Healer (2019).