The moment I finished this book (at four in the morning) I couldn't wait to call Harvey Kaye and leave a message that I was suing him for inducing insomnia. I couldn't put the thing down! The story of Thomas Paine—then and now, for the man and his ideas are very much alive today—stirs the heart, moves the mind and routs the demon of despair. The best political book of the year!” —Bill Moyers
“Thomas Paine has at last found a worthy defender in Harvey Kaye, a gifted historian whose account of Paine is nearly as lively and feisty as its subject. Readers of all political persuasions will find this book of compelling interest, and will find it much harder henceforth to deny Paine's importance—not only in his own time, but in the entire sweep of American history.” —Wilfred M. McClay, SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America
“If the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason. Harvey Kaye's lucid work helps create the free citizen's memorial to Thomas Paine, who is still shamefully unacknowledged by the democratic republic that he lived and died to bring about.” —Christopher Hitchens
“For two centuries, Americans have fought for possession of Tom Paine's soul at least as vigorously as our ancestors fought over his literal bones. Harvey Kaye tells the tale well, and a revelatory tale it is. Along the way, he demonstrates how much, in this time that tries men's and women's souls, the resurrection of Paine could still do for America's flagging radical imagination.” —Todd Gitlin, author of The Intellectuals and the Flag
“In this stunning portrait of Tom Paine and his legacy across the political spectrum, Harvey J. Kaye recovers 'common sense' for our own time. This is a major contribution to understanding the American promise of freedom, equality, and the revolutionary tradition.” —Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Women's Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
“In this fascinating study, Harvey Kaye rediscovers Thomas Paine's central place in an American radical tradition stretching from the Revolution to the present, and reminds us how Paine's words still resonate in American society today.” —Eric Foner, Columbia University
“Harvey Kaye provides a radical eighteenth-century founder for Americans in the Twenty-First Century. Moreover, Kaye convincingly shows that for two hundred years Americans have not only constantly read and quoted Tom Paine, but also, in their repeated invocations of him, kept the radicalism of their great political experiment forever alive.” —Isaac Kramnick, Professor of Government at Cornell University
“Harvey J. Kaye has given us the Tom Paine that Americans urgently need, a fearless, rabble-rousing radical who hugely advanced the cause of freedom. Scrupulously researched, wonderfully written, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America is a book that has found its time.” —Paul Buhle, Brown University and co-editor, The Encyclopedia of the American Left
Kaye's core argument, however, goes far beyond the claim that Paine was a great journalist. Writing with the passion of a defense attorney whose client has been wrongfully sentenced to obscurity by what he calls a plutocratic phalanx of ''the powerful, propertied, prestigious and pious,'' Kaye contends that Paine, alone among the founding generation, saw to the very heart of the American promise embodied in the principles of 1776. Even more than Thomas Jefferson, whose revolutionary vision was blurred by the stigma of slavery, Paine was a cleareyed radical.
— The New York Times
Kaye offers a masterful and eloquent study of the man he reestablishes as the key figure in the American Revolution and the radical politics that followed it. Focusing on close readings of Paine's major writings, Kaye devotes the first half of the book to Paine's role in the seething fervor for American liberty and independence and his influence on the French Revolution. In Common Sense (1763), which sold 150,000 copies in just a few months, Paine advocated self-government and democracy in the colonies, accused the British of corruption and tyranny, and urged "Americans" to rebel. He championed representative democracy and argued that government should act for the public good. Paine's contributions were not limited to his own time; Kaye traces Paine's influence on American rebels and reformers from William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs in the second half of his book. In 1980, Ronald Reagan quoted him-"We have it in our power to begin the world over again"-in his acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention. As historian Kaye (The American Radical) points out, Paine-"the greatest radical of a radical age"-would have been surprised to learn that conservatives, whose values he opposed, had used his words in their cause. 25 illus. not seen by PW. (Aug.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
This provocative book is as much a call to action as a standard biography. Through roughly the first half, Kaye (social change & development, Univ. of Wisconsin, Green Bay; The British Marxist Historians) treads on familiar ground, discussing Paine's profound impact in America and Europe from the 1770s to the 1790s. By the turn of the century, Paine's support of the French Revolution and deistic attacks on established churches made him anathema to many in America. Kaye then charts Paine's subsequent reputation during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when most political, religious, and business leaders condemned him (erroneously) as a drunkard, anarchist, Socialist, and atheist. At the same time, labor organizers, farmers' alliances, abolitionists, civil rights leaders, suffragists, populists, and individuals from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Eugene V. Debs were deeply influenced by him. Last, responding to the current tide of conservatism in politics and religion, Kaye urges readers to revive Paine's fervent espousal of tolerance and social justice. He goes a bit too far in finding Paine's influence in everything "good" that has happened in the past two centuries, but he does a fine job of tracing Paine's impact upon a wide variety of causes. Highly recommended.-T.J. Schaeper, St. Bonaventure Univ., NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
How the essence and works of the American Revolution firebrand have been lionized, vilified, largely ignored and strangely reclaimed. Kaye (Social Change, Univ. of Wisonsin, Green Bay) marshals the essential life details of Paine (1737-1809), erstwhile British corset-maker turned privateer and an immigrant to the Colonies on the eve of what he himself would indelibly characterize as "the times that try men's souls." But this is not a towering biography; instead, the author focuses on the impact of Paine's writing, among the most widely circulated printed material both in America and Europe in his day, and on the politics and statesmanship of a revolutionary age. Paine's ability to instantly make enemies was evident even in 1776, when his "Common Sense" pamphlet was rallying the cause for independence; John Adams, for instance, was so opposed to Paine's radical democratic ideas as to openly suggest that the circumstances of the latter's parentage involved a wolf bitch in rut with a wild boar. Unrelenting, however, whenever he perceived a drift toward Federalist concentration of power, Paine even produced material insulting George Washington. But in repudiating Christian scripture with terms like "mythology" in later works, Paine set the all-time negative example for American political figures (including his like-minded friend, Thomas Jefferson) to avoid. With open bias, Kaye laments the fact that Paine spent some two centuries alienated from the mainstream. It was not modern Democrats who rediscovered Paine-the original proponent of limited government, welfare support for the indigent and, yes, even social security-it was Ronald Reagan. Invoking the line from "Common Sense" that "We haveit in our power to begin the world again" at the 1980 Republican Convention, Reagan reinvented Paine for the party, an act the author avers has actually subordinated Paine's ideals. First-rate analysis of original American political thought that has survived deep ecclesiastical enmity.
