Tad Stoermer on the mythological retro-fitting of Thomas Paine

Brilliant summary here. This year, the 250th anniversary, there's going to be a lot of myth-reinforcement. Few will be interested in challenging the two and a half centuries of nationalistic baggage with which the American revolution has been subsequently packaged. Challenging orthodoxy is tricky when reinforcing orthodoxy pays the bills. 

There's been a bit of highly selective Paine-worship over the past week, marking the 250th anniversary of his pamphlet Common Sense. Here's a corrective dose of reality –

 

John Dickinson's writings were more influential than Paine (see previous post here), and had put in place a decade of thought and philosophy, grounded in the previous Glorious Revolution; Paine arrived very late to the party, in November 1774, and only publishing from spring 1775 - as Stoermer correctly says here "most of the real American revolution had already happened before Paine ever set foot on America's shores", between 1765-1775.

So, as Tad Stoermer explains above, the myth of Paine began almost at day one, when John Page selectively extracted the politically useful parts of Common Sense, and printed it in newspapers which had a far wider readership than the print run of the complete pamphlet itself. 

The Scots-Irishman poet, David Bruce, refers unfavourably to Paine in his 1801 collection. Check out Brother Tamie, A Song. 

• A more substantial Common Sense is the philosophy that emerged as part of the 1700s Scottish Enlightment (which sounds a bit fluffy as a term anyway) - Scottish Common Sense Realism. That's a subject for another day...