Ben Macintyre: Welcome back Tom Paine, unsung American hero
[Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large for The Times.]
A drunken and dishevelled English journalist, a rebel once condemned as a Godless rabble-rouser, played a starring role in the inauguration of Barack Obama this week. This strange man had been, in his time, a pirate, a maker of ladies' corsets, a schoolteacher, a failed tobacconist and a jailbird. He first set foot in America at the age of 37, and died 200 years ago this year, poor, cantankerous and all but unmourned.
Thomas Paine was not mentioned by name in Mr Obama's speech. But Paine's words formed a central plank of his oration, and the ideas of that great radical thinker, the unsung Founding Father of America, enemy of slavery and rousing trumpet of the revolution, ran through every passage. “These are the times that try men's souls,” Paine wrote in 1776.
With the souls of men being sorely tried once more, Paine's common sense is back at the heart of US politics. America, and the world, have never needed him more.
Paine appeared in Mr Obama's speech in the final, rousing crescendo, by far its most memorable part. “In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood.”
“At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it'.”
The words are from Paine's pamphlet The Crisis, perhaps the most sinew-stiffening journalism yet written. George Washington had the stirring article read to his troops before they crossed the Delaware at Christmas in 1776, to do battle with King George's Hessian mercenaries encamped at Trenton.
The new President has fudged the history here a little. His speech has sparked a fierce nitpicking debate among historians as to which “capital” he could mean. The patriots did not camp by the river, let alone light fires, but sped across in secret, as fast as possible. And the enemy were as not so much advancing as sleeping off their Christmas hangover...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
A drunken and dishevelled English journalist, a rebel once condemned as a Godless rabble-rouser, played a starring role in the inauguration of Barack Obama this week. This strange man had been, in his time, a pirate, a maker of ladies' corsets, a schoolteacher, a failed tobacconist and a jailbird. He first set foot in America at the age of 37, and died 200 years ago this year, poor, cantankerous and all but unmourned.
Thomas Paine was not mentioned by name in Mr Obama's speech. But Paine's words formed a central plank of his oration, and the ideas of that great radical thinker, the unsung Founding Father of America, enemy of slavery and rousing trumpet of the revolution, ran through every passage. “These are the times that try men's souls,” Paine wrote in 1776.
With the souls of men being sorely tried once more, Paine's common sense is back at the heart of US politics. America, and the world, have never needed him more.
Paine appeared in Mr Obama's speech in the final, rousing crescendo, by far its most memorable part. “In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood.”
“At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it'.”
The words are from Paine's pamphlet The Crisis, perhaps the most sinew-stiffening journalism yet written. George Washington had the stirring article read to his troops before they crossed the Delaware at Christmas in 1776, to do battle with King George's Hessian mercenaries encamped at Trenton.
The new President has fudged the history here a little. His speech has sparked a fierce nitpicking debate among historians as to which “capital” he could mean. The patriots did not camp by the river, let alone light fires, but sped across in secret, as fast as possible. And the enemy were as not so much advancing as sleeping off their Christmas hangover...