Since his death in 1809, the legacy of American revolutionary pamphleteer and philosopher Thomas Paine has been highly contentious. While the words of his iconic works Common Sense and The Crisis certainly galvanized the cause of American revolution, his systematic critique of religion in The Age of Reason left Paine alienated from the generation of leaders who used to celebrate him. Nearly a century later, American figures such as Theodore Roosevelt took this even further, calling Paine a “filthy little atheist” and expunging from history his role during the revolutionary era.
Nevertheless, there were many who championed Thomas Paine and the indelible legacy that he left on American life. Robert Green Ingersoll, the late nineteenth century orator and freethinker known as the “Great Agnostic,” routinely praised the pamphleteer in his speeches and writings. “He gave his life for the benefit of mankind,” Ingersoll wrote in 1892:
Day and night for many, many weary years, he labored for the good of others, and gave himself body and soul to the great cause of human liberty. And yet he won the hatred of the people for whose benefit, for whose emancipation, for whose civilization, for whose exaltation he gave his life.
In fact, one of the only photographs we have of Ingersoll speaking was at a rally in 1894 in Rochelle, New York, where he gave a stirring oration at a Thomas Paine memorial gathering. Encouraged by his father, the Presbyterian minister and abolitionist John Ingersoll, Robert Ingersoll started reading Paine as a young man and routinely gleaned inspiration from the pamphleteer for the “rights of man.”
A generation later, another prominent freethinker named Joseph Lewis elaborated on the significance of Thomas Paine, especially during the revolutionary period. Taking a cue from Paine, Lewis wrote a rather controversial book of history that claimed the pamphleteer was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and not Thomas Jefferson. Additionally, Lewis called Common Sense “the greatest single literary achievement in the history of the printed word,” and helped erect a statue to Paine in New Jersey in 1950.
However, there was a lesser-known freethinker and political radical who sang the praises of Thomas Paine: the early 20th century anarchist and feminist Voltairine de Cleyre. Born in Michigan in 1866, and with a name honoring the 18th century French Enlightenment figure Voltaire, de Cleyre exemplified the term “freethinker.” Called the “most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced” by fellow freethinker, anarchist, and feminist Emma Goldman, de Cleyre challenged all the orthodoxies of her day— capitalism, the state, and even the institution of marriage. Her rejection of religion was due in no small part to her experience as a teenager living in a convent school; it was here that she “developed a deep animus toward dogma and forced obedience”, according to Michael B. Dougherty in his “Overlooked” obituary of de Cleyre for the New York Times. When she left the school at 17, as biographer Sara Baase wrote, “she [had] totally rejected religious dogma and hypocrisy. She was a freethinker, without ever having ‘seen a book or heard a word to help’ her.”
One writer that did help her, though, was Thomas Paine, whom she read very early on in life. His notions of liberty, equality, and freethought left a profound impression on de Cleyre, so much so that her first public address was on Paine— when she was only 19 years old. Given in 1886 or 1887, the speech was reproduced in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published in 1914 by the Mother Earth Publishing Association, co-founded by de Cleyre’s long-time friend, Emma Goldman. In this speech, she recognizes the important role that Paine played in the development of freethought in America, but also reasserts his critical role in the development of a revolutionary consciousness in the minds of the American people. “For just as the orthodox have forgotten, so have many freethinkers forgotten,” de Cleyre wrote, “his immense labors in the field of active struggle against the domination of man by man.”
One particular avenue that personified Paine’s own fight against domination was his fervent abolitionism. As de Cleyre described:
When he first came to this country he wrote a number of contributions to the Pennsylvania Magazine, in one of which he pleaded justice for the negro, basing his plea then as always upon the natural equality of man irrespective of color. Afterwards when the constitution was framed, he objected that nothing had been done for the negro, and in his letters to the American people, written after his imprisonment in France, in which the constitution was caustically reviewed, he cries out again for this yoked man not yet to be freed for more than half a hundred years,—foreseeing that nothing good can in the end come from slavery, that every evil must bring a compensating evil.
Paine was one of the only founders not to have owned enslaved people or represented enslavers in court, and for this steadfast devotion to the cause of human freedom he was alienated from history. “He had seen all through the battle, had fought his fight and won his victory, only to see it lost through cowardice of thought,” wrote de Cleyre. The “loss” referred to above was the enshrinement of slavery, among other usurpations of liberty, in the development of the Constitution, which Paine (and later de Cleyre) saw as a harbinger of despotism. As de Cleyre elaborated, “It is we who experience those ills, we who know what a gigantic tool of oppression the constitution and the cumbersome machinery of the lawmaking power have become.” In these remarks, de Cleyre, much like Paine before her, represented a time-honored tradition in American political thought, known as left libertarianism. Their political commitment to liberty represented a further desire to expand equality to all people, regardless of race, religion, or social class.
de Cleyre does devote the latter portion of her speech to the legacy of Paine’s legendary book, The Age of Reason. In her analysis, she relied heavily on the work of Paine biographer Moncure Daniel Conway, whose interpretation of The Age of Reason de Cleyre considered enlightened. She declared:
We are no longer to view the book as an attack upon religion but as its defense,—the defense of what is beneficial, permanent, necessary, in the religious element of human nature against the scribes and pharisees on the one hand and the philistines on the other. It was the plea for the redemption of the edifice from the dirt and cobwebs, the protest against smashing the stones to kill the spiders.
In essence, Paine’s deism and emphasis on human agency represented a humanistic religion, one that placed moral beneficence and cooperation above immorality and selfishness. This tracks well with de Cleyre’s own freethought. Marion Leighton, a de Cleyre biographer, wrote that “even after her rejection of religion and her turning to freethought, her view of life was strongly tinged with a basic religious idealism, a belief that the long-suffering and compassionate individual ‘will win out,’ having been supported against the evils of materialism, conformity, and apathy by the march of history.” de Cleyre’s estimation of Paine fits this description aptly.
Her speech on Paine also introduced her to the ideas of socialism, as one of the other speakers at the event was none other than the legendary trial lawyer, freethinker, and socialist Clarence Darrow. As she wrote of it later in “The Making of an Anarchist” (1903):
In the evening I sat in the audience to hear Clarence Darrow deliver an address on Socialism. It was my first introduction to any plan for bettering the condition of the working-classes, which furnished some explanation of the course of economic development. I ran to it as one who has been turning about in darkness runs to the light.
She’d quickly drop the label of socialist in favor of anarchism after debates with anarchists and reading the works of American anarchist Benjamin Tucker, and would not commit to qualifying her anarchism with any other label. “Liberty and experiment alone can determine the best forms of society, “ she wrote, “therefore I no longer label myself otherwise than as ‘Anarchist’ simply.”
Despite all of the political and ideological shifts during her career, moving from socialist to anarchist and nearly everything in between, Voltairine de Cleyre continued to find inspiration in the work of Thomas Paine. In “The Economic Tendency of Freethought,”, an 1890 article written for Benjamin Tucker’s periodical, Liberty, de Cleyre quotes Paine’s influential pamphlet, The Rights of Man, to emphasize the importance of ideas on the development of social change: "The mind of the nation [France] had changed beforehand, and a new order of things had naturally followed a new order of thoughts." However, the means of transmitting said ideas are subject to material conditions. She expanded on this theme in an 1894 address defending her friend, Emma Goldman. She wrote:
When Thomas Paine, one hundred years ago, published the first part of "The Rights of Man", the part in which he discusses principles only, the edition was a high-priced one, reaching comparatively few readers. It created only a literary furor. When the second part appeared, the part in which he treats of the application of principles, in which he declares that ‘men should not petition rights but take them’, it came out in a cheap form, so that one hundred thousand copies were sold in a few weeks. That brought down the prosecution of the government. It had reached the people that might act, and prosecution followed prosecution till Botany Bay was full of the best men of England.
She made a fairly sophisticated argument about free speech in this passage, arguing that speech is often limited in its impact by the unequal barriers imposed on it by the marketplace. As de Cleyre wrote, “Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal. And unless there is equality (and by equality I mean equal chances for every one [sic] to make the most of himself) unless, I say, these equal chances exist, freedom, either of thought, speech, or action, is equally a mockery.” In other words, liberty in the abstract is often meaningless unless there’s a concrete establishment of equality— something Paine also emphasized.
Furthermore, she tied her brand of Anarchism to the American revolutionary tradition in her essay, “Anarchism and American Traditions,” published posthumously in 1932. In it, she castigates the American public school system for erasing the contributions of Thomas Paine, especially his critique of government:
Ask him if he ever heard that the man who sounded the bugle note in the darkest hour of the Crisis, who roused the courage of the soldiers when Washington saw only mutiny and despair ahead, ask him if he knows that this man also wrote, "Government at best is a necessary evil, at worst an intolerable one," and if he is a little better informed than the average he will answer, "Oh well, he [Tom Paine] was an infidel!"
This outcome was the logical outgrowth of decades of invective thrown on Paine by all who rejected his freethought, his abolitionism, and his distaste for the centralization of government.
Nevertheless, de Cleyre championed the efforts of American revolutionaries and asked those who understood their fight to extend it even further to the cause of Anarchism. “As to the American tradition of non-meddling,” de Cleyre wrote:
Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; it knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible; but it teaches that by all men's strictly minding their own business, a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs, wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will result.
de Cleyre’s interpretation of Anarchism upheld the best ideals of the American revolution— liberty, equality, individual rights— while expanding their reach to those not originally considered at the beginning of the American experiment, notably blacks, women, and those without property or wealth. In her own, radical way, de Cleyre reaffirmed the legacy of Thomas Paine by championing the causes and values that he cherished, ones that continually inspire and shape the modern world today.
Voltairine de Cleyre died in 1912 at the age of 45, after years of battling various illnesses and chronic pain. She reflected often on whether her efforts as a political activist and writer amounted to anything. As she wrote to a friend late in life, “I can see no use in doing anything. Everything turns bitter in my mouth and ashes in my hands.” Despite her anxieties, she did leave a lasting mark on American political thought, especially in the realm of women’s liberation. Her lecture “Sex Slavery”, wherein she argued that the oppression of women in society could be owed almost exclusively to the state and to the church, continues to be cited by historians and political theorists. Her writings influenced numerous feminist intellectuals, including Emma Goldman, Marion Leighton, and Wendy McElroy.
Additionally, her work carried the torch of freethought and radicalism exemplified by Thomas Paine, an iconoclasm infused with deep moral righteousness and an unrepentant sense of individualism. She defined her struggle for a stateless society in many of the same terms that Paine defined the fight for American independence, emphasizing political liberty, individual rights, equality, and mutual cooperation. She also stressed the importance of his character in her work. de Cleyre wrote of Paine that “he stood firm, proclaiming what he believed, not counting the cost. We may not believe as he; most of us do not. But that is the man we love: who has something in him superior to the judgments of men; who holds steadfast—steadfast even in persecution, even to death.” Likewise, we may not always agree with the convictions of Voltairine de Cleyre, but her own steadfastness echoed the legacy of America’s most underappreciated, and perennially misunderstood, founding father.