When we hear the name Theodore Dreiser, we think of his novels, Sister Carrie (1900) or An American Tragedy (1925), adapted into George Stevens’ film, A Place in the Sun (1951). We tend to forget Tragic America (1931) or America is Worth Saving (1941), his commentaries on Depression-era America. 

Tragic America was almost immediately banned from bookstores and libraries. The Carnegie Library in Pennsylvania reportedly burned all copies. America is Worth Saving was critically dismissed with few reviews. The fact Dreiser joined the Communist Party in 1945 made his political ideas all the more suspect and suppressed. 

Did Dreiser draw upon the ideas of Common Sense, Rights of Man and Age of Reason? In the spirit of Thomas Paine, Tragic America and America is Worth Saving reflect upon the undue political and economic might wielded by the wealthy and powerful, and its repercussions. One may view them as the American Crisis papers for those times that tried the souls of Depression-era Americans. 

A century before Occupy, Dreiser in Tragic America declared, “…this system — which the capitalists would have us believe to be the work of sheer fate — is actually no more and no less than the absolutely planned and executed method by which the banks bring on a state of prosperity for only 1% of the people.” 

Dreiser, like Paine, viewed oligarchy as a serious threat to ordinary Americans, who were sacrificed to rich overlords by a complicit government. Dreiser, like Paine, urged populist action: “We want a government for all the people! No enormous wealth in private hands! We want efficient managers for the benefit of all Americans!” 

Undeterred by the repression of Tragic America, Dreiser wrote America is Worth Saving (1941). His Paineite invective railed against European aristocracy and American corporate leaders poised to gain large profits from the war, whatever their view of Hitler. 

Dreiser saw little difference between Hitler’s armies and the British imperialist armies that enslaved and decimated Indians, Chinese, and South African blacks. He opposed U.S. military involvement until Germany invaded Russia and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. 

Dreiser’s ideas appear to echo Paine’s criticisms of British imperialism in Pennsylvania Magazine and The Crisis. While Dreiser’s interpretations run counter to Paine’s belief that war is a threat to commerce, a similar pacifism and desire for enlightenment resonates.

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Part One of Two Parts 

Thomas Paine is the founder of modern democracy. In word and deed, he crafted the democratic movement in three countries, and it spread on its own around the world. As a result, Paine was slandered, attacked and marginalized for 200 years, a victim of the largest disinformation campaign in history. His image and words were actually banned, right up to and including the McCarthy era in America, when his books were banned, even the fictional accounts like Citizen Tom Paine (1943) by Howard Fast. 

The pre-eminent founder of American democracy was not recognized as such for centuries. “But such is the irresistible nature of truth,”Paine said, “that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.” 

The Thomas Paine Historical Association was founded to correct this situation. In 1884 New York City, dozens of leaders of the progressive era came together under this organization to hold up Paine as the symbol of democratic rights and government. United by their commitments to civil rights, free speech and women’s reproductive rights, they were key suffragists, socialists, anti-clericalists, antimonopolists, anti-imperialists, and idealists. An organization with Paine’s name on it must have the soul of Paine as its engine. 

We cannot discuss the roots and ideology of democracy without Thomas Paine. The literal origin of modern democracy is Common Sense, Paine’s call for revolution against British rule, in particular, and against monarchy itself. Among all the Whigs (the name back then for the progressive-leaning political figures), only Paine endorsed this qualitative leap of ending monarchical government. Paine started and popularized among people the idea of democracy without kings — not Locke, not Montesquieu, who looked after their class, not common people. Paine later followed up with Rights of Man, which became the bible for the Age of Democratic Revolution. 

Paine himself, in his life and works, is the “Democratic Manifesto.” In 1777 Philadelphia, in the heat of defeating not only Britain but also the American Tories, Paine formed the Whig Society, the first revolutionary party in the world. He followed it up in 1791 Paris by forming the Social Circle of anti-monarchical activists, the second revolutionary party in the world. [For clarity, The Sons of Liberty was not a political party. 

The militant Boston group in the early 1770s focused on disrupting the British militarily, but it lacked an ideological foundation or vision of government to be a real political party.] In Philadelphia and in Paris, Paine helped craft the world’s first two truly democratic constitutions. The first lasted 14 years in America before succumbing to the oligarchic structures of the Federalist Party’s new constitution. The second was never enacted due to the 1795 counterrevolution in France. These documents reveal the origins of today’s struggle.

Do not be confused by the antiquated structures called “democracy” from ancient Greece, where every landed elite sat together and made laws as slaves served them food and drink. Modern democracy could not emerge until the Enlightenment took root, and the political theory of Paine was deeply rooted in it. The emerging new classes coming out of the Dark Ages would contend for dominance. Paine stood with the lower classes, where he came from, and never wavered. 

The very word “democracy,” as we use it today, originated with Paine’s Rights of Man. Before that, “democracy” only referred to the Greek’s elite government. The term is still used in that context today, when we hear oligarchs using it to defend their privileges while the majority still languishes in need.

See part two here.

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