By Barbara Crane

Invited by President Monroe to commemorate the American Revolution and to celebrate America’s friendship with France, the Marquis de Lafayette sailed back to America in 1824 and devoted a year to his “Farewell Tour” of all 24 states at the time. He was accompanied by Fanny Wright. 

Celebrating the 2024 bicentennial of Lafayette’s visit to New Rochelle, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association (TPNHA) and the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association (H&NRHA) in cooperation with the American Friends of Lafayette (AFL) and the City of New Rochelle will offer free events on Sunday, August 18, such as a re-enactment of Lafayette’s welcome in New Rochelle and Westchester County.   

The community gathering will feature local dignitaries, a Lafayette re-enactor, ceremonies, and family-friendly fun from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., all at Ruby Dee Park in front of the New Rochelle Public Library.  

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette (Lafayette) and Thomas Paine were closely aligned in the period leading up to the French Revolution.  Paine lectured Lafayette and Jefferson in Paris in 1789 on democratic principles. In 1790, Lafayette sent the Key to the Bastille to George Washington through Thomas Paine.   

All Lafayette Tour events in New Rochelle are free. 

For details, visit CelebrateLafayette200.org

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I find in Thomas Paine’s writing his active humanity, intelligence, principles of fairness, action, courage and responsibility for his actions a continuing satisfaction that attracts me to his “voice” every day. 

His original, outrageous ideas and arguments in defense of social fairness — regardless of conventional authoritarian obstacles and punishments — were a boon to the human condition. 

Then as now, people are people, who need food, clothing, shelter, health, and justice. Why withhold their access to the means for living when a practical solution already exists for ubiquitous fairness? Paine in his 1797 work, Agrarian Justice, proposes a real-world system for funding a universal basic income. He starts with the headline, “Means by Which the Fund Is to be Created.” 

Paine’s writing in Agrarian Justice most resonates with my own personal sensibilities. He says, “Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated two ways, to make one part of society more affluent, and the other part more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.” 

Paine’s human conscience and experience enabled him to see the forest for the trees. He saw the many benefits of social innovations versus loyalties to the unnecessary cruelties of the status quo, then and now.

As fair to fairness as fair can get, in my own opinion, a social justice system needs to be redirected to benefit its participants, not mostly the system itself . 

In his 1802 letter to Samuel Adams about Rights of Man, Paine explains why in France he opposed the execution of the King. He was “laboring to show they were trying the monarchy, and not the man, and that the crimes imputed to him were the crimes of the monarchical system.” This shows Paine’s strong, clear vision of societal justice over mere punishment and hate. 

For instance, in Agrarian Justice, Paine writes, “Practical religion consists in doing good; and the only way of serving God is, that of endeavoring to make his creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.” 

Indeed, Mr. Paine, even in the 21st Century, in my experience, religions tend to want to make God happy, not make his creation happy. Hence their flaw and the source of their injustice! 

As far as I can tell about any important idea, Thomas Paine always said it first and better, much to my admiration, gratitude and enduring benefit. 

Doing good work, indeed, Mr. Paine! 

Harvey Simon, MPA, works in public administration. He lives in New York City.

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Part Two of a Three-Part Historiography 

Historians are challenged to remain ambivalent when writing about multi-layered Paine. We have Paine the political strategist, the enlightened idealist and utopian, the religious heretic, the economist, the journalist, the inventor, and humanitarian. Paine was vilified, idolized and all in between. 

Many early accounts of Paine’s life were scurrilous attacks that painted him as drunken, filthy, cheap, selfaggrandizing, and a wife-beater. Scholars did not offer elevating views of Paine until the late 19th century 

Moncure Daniel Conway’s 1892 The Life of Thomas Paine attempted to rescue him from the rubble of distorted historical memory. Rather than quote unreliable earlier documents, Conway started anew, traveling across England, America and France to walk the streets where Paine lived, worked, fought, and faced death. Conway’s aim was to pull Paine from the historical gutter and lift him up to the pantheon of great revolutionaries. 

Paramount among 20th century studies was Philip S. Foner’s 1945 Life and Major Writing of Thomas Paine. Previous biographers focused almost entirely on Paine as a political disruptor. Foner offered other sides of Paine as an economist, philanthropist, deist, scientist, and poet. Foner gave us Paine as a radical ideologue grappling with the fractures between aristocracy and meritocracy as the walls between the two crumbled, calling Paine “the right man at the right place, at the right time.” 

Alfred Owen Aldridge’s 1959 Man of Reason was less favorable, placing Paine on the other side of greatness as a man whose out-sized personality self-sabotaged his public career. He described Paine as having a “solitary manner of existence” and “an undeniably difficult personality.” Unlike Foner, Aldridge saw Paine as a historical accident, undeserving of his fame. 

The Foner-Aldridge divide (saint or sinner) was characteristic of almost every 20th century Paine biography, revealing how little the debates about Paine’s character had changed since the early 19th century. 

As the American bicentennial approached, several Paine biographies emerged. Audrey Williamson, a British theater journalist, became enamored with Paine by writing a 1963 biography of George Bernard Shaw, an admirer of Paine. Her 1973 Thomas Paine: His Life, Work, and Times unearthed new information on Paine’s metamorphosis from a young political fledgling to a polished polemicist. Like Conway, Williamson built her framework by studying the times, places and faces, and then situating Paine in the midst of them. 

Samuel Edwards’ 1974 Rebel! A Biography of Thomas Paine attempted to psychoanalyze Paine, beginning with the assertion Paine had “mommy issues” that led to a distrust of women unless they were cheap blondes. Scholars were united in their dismissal of Edward’s book In fact, Aldridge, no fan of Paine, called it a work of “perversion and deception.” 

The most successful bicentennial biography was David Freeman Hawke’s 1974 Paine. He gave no detours into sexual suggestiveness like Edwards, no mini-travelogues like Williamson. Instead, Hawke found new primary sources, particularly papers from the American Philosophical Society’s Gimbel Collection. He presented Paine as an inventor as well as a writer. He plumbed the entire Paine historiography, sifting through everything written — even disputed early “biographers” — with a fresh eye. 

However, Hawke found it impossible to write about Paine without forming an opinion of the man and expressing it, a bias that critics of the work have pointed out. Williamson wrote with admiration, Hawke with a disapproving smirk. Williamson tried to place us in Paine’s world, Hawke in Paine’s mind. Little attention was paid to Paine as a man dependent on his connections to others, both negative and positive. The move to see Paine as more than an ideologue was beginning to occur, but the idea of important human connections was still not being made. 

The most foundational bicentennial work was Eric Foner’s 1976 Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, The nephew of Philip Foner focused on 13 crucial years in the life of Paine and the fledgling United States, 1774 to 1787. Foner suggests that Paine was constantly trying to define who he was and who he would become. The topic of personhood was beginning to percolate as a line of study. Foner strived to ensure Paine was “successfully located within the social context of his age.” His acknowledgment of Paine’s personal connections to peers in his community is a link to the importance of interpersonal relationships in Paine’s life. 

Foner’s work concentrated on America during its fracture with Great Britain. The unrest in France was a different beast, and Paine’s response to that revolution was different, but it was not Foner’s focus.

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By Gary Berton

Frances Wright has been called the “female Thomas Paine.” In important ways, she was. Fanny Wright was the first American feminist, a radical abolitionist, labor champion, powerful public orator, and one of the first philosophers making a public case for freethought. But it does her a disservice to be seen in terms of someone else’s achievements. Even if it’s the incomparable Thomas Paine. 

Fanny Wright deserves her own standing as an American hero and her own place of honor in American memory. 

Frances Wright was born 1795 in Scotland to radical parents who supported the French Revolution and disseminated Rights of Man. Orphaned by three, she was raised by a progressive aunt in England who schooled her in the Enlightenment ideas of French materialists like Denis Diderot, who believed the world is made up of one substance, matter, which can be studied and understood. 

By age 18, Fanny wrote her first book, the classic freethought treatise, A Few Days in Athens, which supported the ideas of Epicurus, the foundational touchstone for Western freethought and the ideals of free government. Inspired by Democritus, Epicurus asserted all matter is made up of tiny particles, called atoms. Wright finished writing her book in 1813, but it was not published at that time. 

In 1818, she traveled to America and toured the new nation for two years, meeting and exchanging views with many of America’s progressive minds. That experience became Views of Society and Manners in America, the 1821 analysis of U.S. society and government that offered insights well ahead of De Tocqueville’s 1835 Democracy in America. The success of Views enabled Wright to get Athens printed in 1822. 

Society and Manners opened doors for Wright. She was introduced in Europe to Lafayette, who admired the book. After a conversation with the author, he admired Fanny’s talent and worldview, as well. 

Wright accompanied Lafayette on his trip to America in 1824. They developed a platonic yet close relationship that led to her meeting Robert Owen in Indiana and visiting New Harmony, America’s first socialist community. Wright embraced the ideals of socialism. She also embraced the need to end slavery to save the soul of America. After Lafayette returned to Europe, Wright stayed and became an American citizen. 

She launched two projects that would define her for decades to come. With Owen, she started The Free Inquirer, the first freethought newspaper in America, and she began a failed attempt to liberate America’s slaves held as chattel property. 

The Free Inquirer set the standard for future freethought periodicals. It served to unite into one philosophical movement the components of progressivism: women’s liberation (including the right to contraception and sexual freedom), abolition of slavery, labor liberation (including socialism), and free universal education. Wright and Owen both embraced these tenets, which were rooted in the works of Thomas Paine. 

Although Paine did not specifically spell out these movements, his legacy led to the birth of these 19th century forces, evidenced by early annual celebrations of Paine’s birthday held in the centers of these movements, a trend Wright herself helped to create. 

In 1825, Wright helped form a multi-racial community near Memphis on land gained through Lafayette. To justify her plan to educate slaves for freedom. Wright wrote, “A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South.” The experiment was plagued with problems — the cost of transporting slaves from Haiti, a free-love atmosphere stirring personal relationship crises, and mismanagement — all leading to its early demise. 

Frances Wright is most renowned for being the first woman orator in America. at a time when women were not accepted as public speakers. Starting in 1829, cresting 1833 to 1836, she toured the USA, speaking on women’s sexual and educational liberation, the abolition of slavery, socialism and the evils of capitalism. Tying it together, she spoke on freethought and the absurdity of organized religion. 

Drawing thousands to her speeches, She spoke in every major city in America, where “Fanny Wright societies” sprang up as centers for a growing social and political movement. Wright’s success made her the target of an alliance between the clergy and press to oppose her. 

Her movement was stymied by being too far ahead of its time, but it produced activists and laid the intellectual groundwork for the latter half of the 19th century when these movements reached maturity. 

Wright married in 1838, at age 43 bearing one child. She soon divorced and spent her remaining years in Ohio, releasing compilations of her lectures. She remained inactive except for her involvement with women’s health issues. She died at age 57 in 1852 and was buried in Cincinnati.

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