Washington Needed His Pen More Than His Musket
By Stuart Mitchner
The two most memorable novels I read in high school were Howard Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield’s free-swinging attitude engaged me from the beginning, when he dismissed his personal history as “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” In Fast’s opening scene, the rudeness and shabby personal appearance of Tom Paine cut right through everything about history that had bored me, as when Ben Franklin asks him how long since he’s eaten, and Paine says “That’s none of your damned business. I didn’t come for charity.”
Paine in Wartime
Fast’s novel was greeted with a page one rave in the April 25, 1943 New York Times Book Review headed “Tom Paine, Prophet of Liberty,” accompanied by an illustration of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. My sympathies were less with the historic influence of Paine’s pamphleteering than with the embattled author who, as the review points out, “had the bad taste to continue his attacks upon privilege, upon economic injustice, upon slavery; and since his touchiness, rough manners and untidy habits laid him open to irrelevant but effective personal attacks, his apologists had a hard time of it.”
250 Years Ago
On January 10, 1776, Paine published Common Sense with an opening statement that still resonates: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” The 47-page pamphlet sold 120,000 copies in the first three months. Paine followed it with American Crisis, which he signed Common Sense, the nickname given him by his fellow soldiers after he joined the Pennsylvania Volunteers. George Washington, who told Paine he needed his pen more than his musket, inspired his exhausted troops on the frigid Christmas Eve of 1776 by having his officers read them American Crisis.
In Thomas Paine: Crusader for Liberty (Knopf 2014), after quoting the pamphlet’s legendary opening lines — “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman” — Albert Marrin pumps up the prose for his audience of younger readers (“12 and over”): “If there was ever a time when the written word rallied spirits, it was that dismal December…. Paine’s words went to the soldiers’ hearts like fiery arrows. Ragged men, many with tears rolling down their cheeks, looked at one another in silent agreement…. Deep down they understood that they represented something new and wonderful: free people fighting for what they believed made life worth living. “
Although I’ve lived half a century in Princeton, taking walks on the battlefield and along the Delaware at Washington Crossing, only now do I find out that a 39-year-old English immigrant named Thomas Paine was actually there, on the scene, musket in hand, making history along with the soldiers energized by his words. This stunning discovery would not have been possible without books I found at the Princeton Public Library thanks to a librarian who lives in Bordentown, not far from Thomas Paine’s house, which he bought in 1783 and lived in periodically until his death in 1809.
Paine In Person
In his introduction to Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence (Grand Central 2019), Harlow Giles Unger pictures his subject as “a warm jovial man.” In Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005), Harvey J. Kaye refers to Paine’s “full head of dark hair and striking blue eyes.” Perhaps the title of Kevin Phillips’ 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (Viking 2012) excuses the fact that Paine receives only a passing mention, such as a quote from The American Crisis): “…to be independent, we need only ask this simple, easy question: ‘Is it in the interest of a man to be a boy all his life?’” Otherwise, Paine’s Common Sense is merely “fast-paced and highly influential,” with “more king-bashing than elevated discourse.”
In the opening pages of Crusader for Liberty, Marrin brings young readers uncomfortably close to the physical reality of the man: “…he was not handsome; many thought him downright ugly,” with his “blazing-red face dotted with purple blotches” and “a large red nose that nearly covered his upper lip.” Marrin balances this portrait with reference to Paine’s “strongest feature, his blue eyes.” Benjamin Franklin “was fascinated by ‘those wonderful eyes of his.’” Another man “thought them the eyes of an apostle.”
A “Must Read”
Called “Ingenious and enthralling” by The Guardian, J.C.D. Clark’s Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (Oxford 2018) is, according to the Journal of the American Revolution, a “must read for any who are seriously interested in political theory, the American Revolution, and Thomas Paine and his legacy.”
For the 250th
The University of Virginia Press, publisher of The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding, due in April, has announced “From Pamphlets to Podcasts: An Institute for Thomas Paine Studies Series,” that takes its cue from Paine, who wrote that “America … replenished the world with more useful knowledge and sounder maxims of civil government” than any other society. According to the publisher, “Books in this series will advance a new and innovative approach to scholarship on the contests over knowledge making and the pursuit of informed, democratic citizenship in Thomas Paine’s time, and about these processes’ relevance to our own.”
Also slated for spring 2026 publication are America: 250 Years of Freedom (Humanix Books) by Jack D. Warren Jr. and Gary Nash’s The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (Penguin).
“Glowingly Human”
I probably read Citizen Tom Paine in paperback, not the hardcover edition (Duell, Sloan and Pearce 1943), with its striking cover art, shown here. A national bestseller the New York Herald called “a glowingly human picture of Tom Paine and America in Revolutionary days,” Fast’s novel gives us, according to Library Journal, “a vivid picture of Paine’s mode of writing, idiosyncrasies, and character — generous, nobly unselfish, moody, often dirty, frequently drunken, a revolutionist by avocation.”
Flunking History
Although I got an A on my Citizen Paine paper, I barely managed a C in the class, which was at least better than Holden Caulfield, who flunked history. One of my favorite scenes in The Catcher in the Rye is Holden’s visit to his history teacher “Old Spencer,” who, after reminding him of his well-deserved F, reads aloud from his essay on the Egyptians: “Modern science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries.”
New Yorkers All
Howard Fast (1914-2003) and J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) were both native New Yorkers. Fast credited his early appetite for reading to a part-time job in the New York Public Library, which Salinger frequented during his youth. In 2019, the library honored him with an impressive centenary exhibit, where I got my first look at the original typescript of The Catcher in the Rye. Due in part to the pandemic, that was my last visit to my favorite city. My Indiana friends used to ask me how I could feel that way when New Yorkers were so “rude.” No doubt Thomas Paine (1737-1809) felt right at home. Although he was born in England, he lived in New Jersey and died on Grove Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. Today the site is occupied by Marie’s Crisis Cafe, its middle name a subtle tribute to the author of American Crisis. Billed as “the world’s only sing-a-long showtunes piano bar,” Marie’s has “always prided itself on being a safe place people from all walks of life, particularly the LGBTQIA+ community.”
