Evening times-Republican (Marshalltown, Iowa), March 20, 1909
President Roosevelt is to be requested to publicly withdraw the harsh reference made by him in his “Life of Gouverneur Morris” to Thomas Paine, the revolutionary soldier and counselor of George Washington. In that work Roosevelt refers to Paine as a “filthy little atheist.”
M. M. Mangasarian, lecturer for the Independent Religious Society of Chicago, left last evening for Washington, commissioned by that society to present to President Roosevelt resolutions passed by 2,500 of its members, asking him “to withdraw publicly this regrettable and indefensible censure of one of the first citizens of the republic, who helped to make the world freer by his genius and grander by his heroism.”
“Tom Paine was neither filthy, little, nor an atheist,” said Mr. Mangasarian recently. “He was not a perfect man, but we have no record of his being either dissolute or unprincipled; he drank, but so did Washington drink, and Jefferson, and Franklin; and I am not aware that Roosevelt is a teetotaler. Physically, Paine was a bigger man than Roosevelt; religiously he was a deist. He believed in a God and hoped for immortality, and has so stated repeatedly in ‘The Age of Reason.’
“We feel that it is up to the president to justify his criticism of Thomas Paine; or, failing to do that, to publicly withdraw it.”