Beacon #3 January 1, 2022
By Gary Berton
When our Association was formed, it was on January 29, 1884, on Paine’s birthdate. The people involved had gathered every year on Paine’s birthdate, to meet at the Liberal Club in New York City. Rod Bradford at The Truth Seeker has discovered that the physical location was at the German Masonic Temple in New York City, (see article on next page), and we were called the Paine Historical Society, soon to be changed to Paine Historical Association, and then to the present name.
It was a regular occurrence across the country for groups to celebrate Paine on his birthday. The first recorded celebration was in 1825 in New York City, then it spread to Boston, Cincinnati, and Rochester. Soon it was commonplace to hold Paine Birthday events across the country.
The first celebrations were hosted by both labor groups and freethought groups, and attended by the leading progressives, such as Frances Wright, “the female Thomas Paine,” who toured the country as the first female orator, the first feminist activist and freethinker in the 1830s and 40s. All of these celebrations ran counter to a culture of racism, religious fanaticism, and suppressed speech. And they endured on and off for the last nearly 200 years.
Celebrations in New York City in the post WWI era were held at dining rooms in NYC’s largest hotels, and hundreds attended, and organized by TPNHA. After moving to New Rochelle in 1925, and after most of the leading men and women of the TPNHA founders had died, the celebrations became sporadic, but were revived in the late 1990s. Since then the tradition has reestablished the original practice of giving toasts to Paine and what he stood for and accomplished.