Tag: American Revolution

Thomas Paine Was History’s Greatest Hater of the British Crown / by Ryan Zickgraf

English-born American philosopher Thomas Paine’s Common Sense savaged British royalty. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

Originally Published in Jacobin, 09.10.2022

The American Revolution was inspired by ruthless criticism of the British monarchy. Why stop now?

Since news broke of Elizabeth II’s death at age ninety-six, US social media has been awash with tributes, memes, and merciless dunks on the deceased queen — the latter of which have ruffled some feathers.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO who helped modernize empire for the age of the corporation, took offense to linguistics professor Uju Anya describing the late queen as the monarch of a “thieving raping genocidal empire.”

“This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow,” Bezos tweeted in response. Twitter appeared to agree; its moderators deleted Anya’s post.

Bezos and other American royal sycophants could use a reminder that Anya has a kindred spirit in the Founding Fathers — especially one in particular. No one savaged the English throne quite like Thomas Paine, an eighteenth-century magazine writer and editor, whose forty-seven-page pamphlet Common Sense went viral in the American colonies when it was published in January 1776.

Part of the popularity of Paine’s prose was the biting edge of his takes on the mother country, which now read like cantankerous tweets.

In Common Sense, he called England’s King George III “the Royal Brute of Great Britain,” who “hath wickedly broken through every moral and human obligation, trampled nature and conscience beneath his feet, and by a steady and constitutional spirit of insolence and cruelty procured for himself a universal hatred.”

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776.

Paine wasn’t just contemptuous of one particular British ruler but of monarchs in general.

“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy,” he wrote. “It first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.”

Absurd, useless — even evil. Monarchy “was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.”

The inherent nobleness of royalty, Paine wrote, was bullshit. “It is more than probable, that could we take off the dark covering of antiquity and trace them to their first rise, that we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who, by increasing in power and extending his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenseless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.”

To Paine, it was also no coincidence that countries without kings suffered fewer wars. “It is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion,” he remarked. Part of the confusion, he argued, is the folly of hereditary succession. “Nature disapproves it; otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”

It’s the kind of line that may have gotten Paine canceled in 2022 (“He who dares not offend cannot be honest,” he once responded to his critics), but in 1776, Common Sense was crucial to inspiring the American Revolution.

“Without the pen of the author of Common Sense,” John Adams once admitted, “the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Hear, hear.

Ryan Zickgraf is a journalist based in Atlanta.

Langston Hughes: Let America be America again / by Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes. | Painting by Winold Reiss (c. 1925) / National Portrait Gallery

As people in the United States mark the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution of 1776, People’s World presents the poem, “Let America be America again,” by Langston Hughes (1902-67). One of the great American poets and fiction writers, Hughes’ work was known for its powerful depiction of the lives of the working class in our country—particularly the lives of working-class African-Americans. As he once said, “My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all humankind.”

In this poem, published in the 1938 International Workers’ Order pamphlet, A New Song, Hughes issues a call for the nation to live up to its great ideals of freedom and equality. He looks to a time when America will be a land where liberty is not crowned with a “false patriotic wreath,” but rather becomes a place where “opportunity is real” and “equality is the air we breathe.”

In our own time, when demagogues try to divide people using nationalism and try to convince us that America needs to be “great again,” it is appropriate to turn to Hughes. He reminds us of the dream of what America could be, but not yet is.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed –
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-

And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean –
Hungry yet today despite the dream.

Beaten yet today – O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.

O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home –
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay –
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again –
The land that never has been yet –
And yet must be – the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine-the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME –
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose –
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,

America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath –
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain –
All, all the stretch of these great green states –
And make America again!

Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called “Jazz poetry” and was a leader of the “Harlem Renaissance” in New York City. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (at Yale University Library) holds the Langston Hughes papers (1862–1980) and the Langston Hughes collection (1924–1969) containing letters, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the life of Hughes. The Langston Hughes Memorial Library on the campus of Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) as well as at the James Weldon Johnson Collection within Yale University also hold archives of Hughes’ work.

People’s World, July 4, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/