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This week we're joined by Harvey J. Kaye, author of Thomas Paine and The Promise of America, who talks about Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner's recent interest in Thomas Paine, how one pamphlet changed the reason for the American Revolution, and the importance of the Founding Father religious zealots and billionaires want you to forget about.
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Rosie Tran
Rosie Tran is one of the fastest rising stars in the entertainment business! Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, she moved to Hollywood to pursue her career as a professional entertainer. The stand up comedian, writer, podcast personality, and actress has toured internationally, at comedy clubs, colleges, and overseas for the USO in Europe and the Middle East.
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Stupid Sexy Privacy is a miniseries about how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos. Your host is comedian Rosie Tran, and the show is written by information privacy expert B.J. Mendelson. Every episode is sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. Tune in every Thursday night βor Friday morning if you're nasty β at 12 am EST to catch the next episode.
00:00
Hi Harvey, would you like to take a moment to introduce yourself to our listeners? I'm Harvey Kay. I'm professor emeritus of democracy and justice at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. And I'm also an active writer. I've nine books, edited nine books. I've been active in politics these last number of years, not as a candidate, but I've been advising candidates most currently.
00:29
uh Someone who has befriended me and I've befriended him in return, Graham Plattner up in the state of Maine. Sure. What's happened like? A blast. Well, what brought us together was he was a fan of my Thomas Payne. Well, can tell you it's going to take time out of our if I tell you. That's That's OK. OK. So last autumn oh when I was.
00:58
uh I've got this slight post-nasal drip which I've got to take care of with the candy. No problem. This past autumn, when I was checking social media, most actively on what I still call Twitter, I saw a video of his introducing himself and so on in his candidacy for the US Senate for Maine as a Democrat.
01:23
And he announced that he was having a, he was launching a book club as part of his campaign. And among the books he named in his book club was Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. And I said to myself, I should, I should talk to this guy if he liked my book that much. And then just a few days, and I didn't, hadn't acted on it yet, but a few days later, I saw that he was, he had remarked that it's a shame that we never did an act or FDR never had a chance to push through.
01:53
his call for an economic bill of rights in 1944. And I said, wow, that's my other, I mean, I've written a lot of books, but my other really major book in American history is The Fight for the Four Freedoms, What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great. I said, all the more reason I should probably talk to him. So I contacted two good friends, one older, one younger. And I said, you probably know someone in the Democratic Party in Maine on the progressive end of the spectrum.
02:23
Can you help me get in touch with Graham Plattner? And at least one of them did, because next thing I knew, I had a phone call from Plattner's campaign manager saying to me that Graham's gonna be really excited to be able to speak to you. He's a big fan of your work. And he set up then a Zoom meeting for the two of us, during which Graham made it very clear that he had read both books, knew them very well, and from his conversation, that was pretty apparent.
02:50
So we started a daily sort of texting exchange. mean, it was too busy to keep doing Zoom meetings and stuff like that. And then I think it was, I'm trying to remember the exact dates, but it's sort of mid-March. I got a text from him saying, I really want you to come out to Maine next week. We're launching our policy platform.
03:10
And my wife loves booking flights and she, not so much to send me away, usually for the two of us, but it turned out that it was quite a haul to go from one place to the other. I could send you an article by the way that I wrote in reflection on that. And when I eventually got to Maine after this bizarre all day flying experience, it wouldn't normally be that way, but it was that day.
03:38
I got to Graham and his wife's home in Maine at like 1 a.m. of 1 a.m. And it was agreed next day, I'd go on the trip with him. He was gonna be going up to another town, was gonna be holding an outdoor rally, and then there'd be a town hall and things like that. And his campaign manager was driving us. And they made it clear they really wanted me to speak at the rally. So I was decidedly progressive, if not truly radical.
04:08
historical terms, which is exactly what they wanted by the way. They actually told me, you're here because you're then so I talked about 15 minutes and Graham talked for another 20 minutes or more, whatever it was. And we just had a great time. And so whole day was very successful. Then the next day we spent two hours at a cidery in Maine that a friend of his owned. uh they recorded the two hour conversation.
04:36
And I can send you the link to that too, because it's kind of, it really, it was a lot of fun to do. what I said to him when I told people who asked me, what are you doing here in Maine? I said, well, I've been waiting for a long time, not simply for a progressive candidate. And we've had many a progressive candidate. But what really is striking to me, and I really wanted to embrace his campaign, is that he somehow knew how to take hold of American history.
05:07
not that he would lecture, but he would know how to create the story from it. And I have to say that that's exactly what my work has been about for a long time. In fact, a recent book of mine, a collection of my speeches and essays from the, I guess you'd say from the Obama through early Trump had to do with, in fact, it's titled, Take Hold of Our History, Make America Radical Again. So if this was video, somebody will edit this, right? Yes.
05:37
Nobody's going to see this other way. This was the book of my. Nice. I'll make sure there's a screenshot with the interview. So, so anyhow, so we got along just great. So we've stayed, we're in regular touch. I don't know if I'll be going back during the campaign or not. They kept saying, we're going to bring you back. It was so successful. And as you may know, he won. Well, he won the primary by default. His opponent, the governor of Maine.
06:04
uh well-known political figure in Maine, she dropped out because he had a lead that was insurmountable over her. Now, what made that possible specifically was the fact that he really is speaking as a working man, okay, not just simply bemoaning the state of America, but also offering ideas, which in fact are inspired by pains, radicalism, progressivism, whatever you want to call it, and FDRs, New Deal years.
06:33
and so on and so forth. And so my role was in essence to enhance his confidence, I guess, in that in some ways, because he already, he didn't need confidence to speak, period. Okay, he was a Marine and then Army infantry veteran. The key thing was that he just really did articulate the kinds of things I've been working on all those years. And he did it in favor of hopefully winning the Senate seat.
06:59
Yeah, we're cheering for him. We're all progressives here. I mean, our Christmas episode was, we want for Christmas is a second Bill of Rights, which was exactly the presentation FDR made. Man, I wish that we would have time to talk about that. Maybe we could do this again. Well, I'd be happy to come back and do that. In fact, I'm in the middle of co-authoring a book that is subtitled. We don't have a final... Well, the title right now, it's a working title, is The Last Hope for Democracy.
07:28
the case for an economic bill of rights. And in fact, all the stuff around me, I didn't think I'd be writing another book so much about the economic bill of rights, because I did the Four Freedoms book, which included that. But I had been writing some articles about it with this fellow who's the head of the Progressive Democrats, he's executive director of Progressive Democrats of America. And he said, oh, you we really should do a, we should do a book on this. I had sworn I was finished writing books because I just,
07:56
They're emotional. It's not the work itself. They were just so emotionally demanding. I'm constantly editing myself. So anyhow, I've got all the FDR stuff here. I mean, I've got everything since, because it's not about FDR, the book. That's just one chapter. It's really about the struggles to sustain the memory and secure the economic bill of rights and why we need it now, especially. And so the thing that I keep coming back to, tell me about the relevance of
08:26
What made Thomas Paine something that a Graham Plattner would think about in the first place? Why was that the first book? Other than it's a great book because I just finished it a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it. But other than being an outstanding book, what was it that made Plattner pick Thomas Paine? Well, I can tell you when we were on the phone, when we were on the Zoom call together, I said to him, I think it's great that you're quoting Thomas Paine on the campaign trail. Because seriously speaking, in fact, the only other person who's
08:55
really done that in my time, you might say, and I'm 76 now, in my time was, this is bizarre, and that we would get to eventually in our conversation anyhow, it was Ronald Reagan. But Reagan sort of grabbed all of this one particular line, shocked the hell out of Republicans when he did it. George Will, as I think you may have read in the book, George Will was outraged that, you know, George Will,
09:25
National conservative columnist, probably the leading figure of the last 20 years on the conservative side of things as a writer. He said, you know, no, you're supposed to be quoting Burke, Edmund Burke, not Thomas Paine. OK, so and by the way, not only shocked conservatives, it shocked a lot of us on the left. How dare he poach. Right. And that speech, by the way, that he did that in was his acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention.
09:52
And of all things, he quoted three heroes of working people on the left, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. And all of which he pulled just the right lines from each to really proclaim what the media would later call the Reagan Revolution. But of course, it was a revolution of a very reactionary sort. His goal was to bring an end to what was the long age of Roosevelt.
10:21
pain, oh, by the way, I mean, before that Roosevelt had cited pain and, but not, no one had actually cited pain after in public speeches of, you know, from a presidential podium, so to speak, after Jefferson until Franklin Roosevelt. Wow. In other words, well, first thing to understand, and I know this is upside down to the way we approach this. The first thing to understand is that pain was a small R, small D radical Democrat.
10:52
eh who had literally turned an American colonial rebellion into an American revolution for independence and especially a democratic republic. And he made it clear at one point, he actually said, if it was just a matter of independence, wouldn't have been worth it. was the fact that basically they were gonna start the world over again by trying to truly, he doesn't use the term democracy at that moment, he's using the word republic.
11:22
But when he then describes what should be the constitution for the Republic, you can tell he's talking about a democracy, unquestionably. In fact, a democracy that will involve, um first of all, a recognition of rights. And the rights themselves are not specifically American rights. The idea was that these were universal rights, which is why really when we get to the declaration, follow Common Sense is published in January,
11:52
of 1776 and the declaration of course is coming on in July. And when Jefferson opens, you know, with the words that he does about, you know, basically the rights granted by the creator, know, fundamental equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the declaration, these are clearly the words of these highly educated elite founders. However,
12:21
And they weren't necessarily hypocritical, which is too easy to write off. The most important thing to understand is that Paine had already written Common Sense. Okay? And it really was significant. So if we take Common Sense, and by the way, this is Paine who's literally an immigrant. He only came to the United States, sorry, to America, wasn't he, at the United States a year before. But he fell in love with America on his arrival. I mean, he just couldn't.
12:49
he saw incredible, really radical, revolutionary possibilities, a promise that he had never seen before in his life. And he had grown up in what we would today call a sort of skilled working class family that lived very humbly. They really had very little money to spare. He had education up to about 13, then he was an apprentice to his own father as a corset maker. And I guess corset maker, otherwise known as a stay maker. He ran away from...
13:17
Well, he sort of ran away from the apprenticeship when he was 19, 20 to sail on a privateering ship. And a privateering ship was legalized piracy. It's when the British Crown or another power would license a captain to go out and attack enemy shipping as if they were operating like a pirate, but they were licensed to go do that. And then he had had whole very uneven career. And his last element of a career in Britain, he was a tax collector.
13:47
an excise officer, a duties customs officer. But he had gotten involved in sort of making appeals and lobbying parliament to try to get a raise for the, not just for himself, but for all excise officers around the country. And that was illegal to do, by the way. That was basically, that was like labor organizing, which was definitely illegal. So he's sacked, he's fired as the British say, sacked.
14:14
and he's advised by somebody he had gotten friendly with in London while he was petitioning Parliament, and that's Benjamin Franklin. And Franklin at that time, this is still when the rebellion has already begun, it's not always talking revolution, but it's, but in many ways Franklin who's representing American interests over in London, he's, he's has an undeclared interest. One of which was to send to America people who might be able to contribute to the rebellion.
14:41
Now, we don't know if that's what he saw in Paine, because Paine at this point was approaching his late 30s. And though he did have some military experience in the sense of serving on a privateer, he was not a career soldier or anything like that. But Franklin saw something in him. Okay. And, you know, it was important that he did, because Paine comes to America, falls in love with America, is horrified by the events at Lexington and Concord. Also a bit shocked he...
15:10
makes it clear by the existence of slavery in America. How can a people talking liberty enslave people? uh And one of the members of the Continental Congress, named Benjamin Rush, came to see him. And because he was impressed by Payne's own call for the abolition of slavery, which was under a pseudonym by the way, nobody would have written that publicly. Nobody in those days wrote anything without a pseudonym attached. So Rush suggests to him that he write a pamphlet
15:39
calling for separation from the empire. And Paine said, well, why don't you write it? And Rush says, well, I can't do it. I have too much at stake. I'd lose too much if I were discovered to be the author of that kind thing. But it's astounding. And all Paine could have thought was, what the hell's wrong with you, I mean, what kind of, know, whatever. And by the Rush had reason to be fearful in some ways, because he had called for abolition of slavery himself in an article.
16:08
and had suffered a a tax as a consequence. Not taxes, but a tax, A-T-T-A-C-K-S. So anyhow, he spends months writing this pamphlet pain. He even took, he also left the job that he had secured with Franklin's introduction in America. He had become the editor of a magazine. This is the most amazing career pain. It's astounding. And he writes the pamphlet Common Sense.
16:37
And when it's published, nobody knew Thomas Paine. He didn't have his name on it. He said written by an Englishman in the first edition. um People thought maybe it was John Adams, maybe it was Franklin, maybe, mean, a whole host of names appeared. And it sold like hotcakes. It just sold, absolutely. Sold out in no time at all. And they brought out another edition. His name's still not on it, but the word gets out. This is this newcomer, Thomas Paine. um
17:06
In fact, he becomes known as Common Sense. It's like that's his nickname. Now, the interesting thing about that is I wanna make this clear to everyone that we think of that, you know, most people get taught the revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Key Document, but actually Common Sense was at the time of the revolution and through the revolution, the document that was most critical was Common Sense. And it sold in its like first,
17:36
know, season, like 120,000, it was excerpted into newspapers and periodicals of all sorts. Payne took no royalties for what he wrote, because he wanted the money to buy mittens for Washington's troops. And it's astounding. And then by the end of the revolution, it's said that a half a million copies went into circulation. so not to mention the copies that
18:02
went into circulation in translation back over when it got shipped over to Europe almost overnight. Philadelphia where he was living was a town populated, incredible diversity of people. And there was a large German population. over literally, I think it was overnight, it got translated and placed on a boat to Hamburg. And in fact, for decades, whenever Germans considered leaving the country, especially after the 1848 revolution that failed,
18:32
they had been reading common sense as if that was the promise of America and they were gonna come to America. And they did. In fact, I live in a state which is the most German-American state historically, Wisconsin, and discovered that there were, there was a feature, there were literally chapels and churches named, or at least created with Thomas Paine as the intellectual hero. I could go on and on about this, but to come back to Paine himself. So, and in this pamphlet, what he does,
19:02
in the briefest form, I could put it this way, Americans had already staged a rebellion after the Boston Tea Party in December 73, Britain imposed the coercive acts or intolerable acts, which pissed off these colonists north to south. And they basically joined together and set up, know, basically associations and correspondence committees and all of this.
19:31
and effectively threw out British authority. It wasn't a revolution. just, because they were asking for the rights that they deserved as freeborn Englishmen or freeborn Britons. And parliament, as far as they were concerned, they said, what are you talking about? You have those rights. And what they meant is we want representation. But parliament was filled with, I mean, all the members of parliament were barely elected. I mean, maybe only one out of 20 men.
20:00
no less, one out of 20 men could vote over there. You had to pay a certain amount in taxes or own a certain amount of property. In fact, in America, the assemblies were more democratic than parliament itself, these colonial assemblies. But the point was the assemblies could only legislate on a limited basis. And now all of a sudden parliament, ever since the mid 1760s, it's legislating taxes, it's legislating rules and regulations about trade.
20:28
It's setting up lines beyond which no new settlements can be established. Payne says to these, holds up this, in essence holds up a mirror to them and says, look.
20:40
You've already created this rebellion. Think of your possibilities. he had already in the pamphlet, he doesn't even get to the question of independence to like halfway through. He opens up by talking about, he attacks a monarchical and aristocratic government. Everybody thinks he's a libertarian. Anarchists loved him and libertarians loved him. But actually what he's doing is he's attacking governments as they were constituted through most of human history. And he says to them,
21:09
Look, think about it, people are sociable, they'll gather together and naturally they're almost, they're like they have democratic instincts. So he shows the degree to which democracy is inherently human and everything else is an imposition. And then he turns to the question of the British King in particular, makes a mockery of it. And, you know, obviously specifically George III. And he gets to the point of, look, we're Americans.
21:37
Okay, if we travel abroad and we run into each other, we see each other as Americans, not as Virginians or New Jersey folk or anything like that. And he says, and the time has come, given the abuses we've suffered and the wars that we get dragged into by Britain, it's time, he doesn't use the word independence, it's time basically to separate. Now, curiously, he says, and maybe what's been keeping us from doing so is the lack of a plan.
22:06
And he then lays out the basis of what we would think of as a constitution. And it's a very democratic plan that he's offered and includes basically what would later, excuse me, would later become an economic, not an economic, a bill of rights. Two things that he would necessarily include. One is the fact that people cannot take away your property without due process. It's the right to own property. The one.
22:35
And two.
22:38
separation of church and state, freedom of worship. I'm paraphrasing a lot here, but I'll get close to what he said. Brings this up three times in common sense, the imperative of the separation of church and state. And the way he puts it is, the only role for government in religion is to enable everyone to practice it as he chooses, or he or she chooses. That in itself was a revolutionary
23:08
concept. And if you had, by the way, if they had never declared independence, but only declared separation of church and stay, which would have been an impossibility, that would think about the history making character that so. And then he goes on and lays out how they can do it. And along the way, he talks about, he talks about the impact that look, we're diverse people, but God basically intended probably intended it that way. Okay. He talks about the imperative of America serving as
23:38
an asylum for mankind, okay, which becomes in many ways the fundamental idea behind immigration and the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus's poem, you know, welcoming people to this country. I mean, and as I said, it was not just a best seller, it literally spurred an incredible response. People who had hesitated in Virginia, there were Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists who hesitated
24:07
to join the rebellion because they didn't want to have the Anglicans who were the dominant religious group and they were the big landowners in Virginia. They didn't want to set up a new state or a state of Virginia that was going to have an Anglican church, meaning an Episcopal church. But when they read this pamphlet, they saw the reasons to join the rebellion and turn it into a revolution is the fact that you could set up separation of church and state. Talk about the irony in that sense is these were the evangelicals.
24:36
of the 18th century who wanted the separation of church and state were horrified at the notion of anyone telling them how to worship or anything like that. And here we are all these many decades and generations later and what have we got? We've evangelicals who got involved. I need no, I go no further on that one, okay? Okay, so I mean, it literally spurred the revolution. Pamphlet, not just pamphlets, in the future between now, January of 76 and
25:06
July or March in particular when they decide that Congress were gonna act on this, they were getting petitions from North and South of the colonies. It's time to declare, it's time to separate. So Payne's pamphlet spurs the talk of independence and the making of a democratic republic. And that's of course, eventually the committee is formed, Jefferson plays the leading role in creating it. And then I'll just note.
25:34
without going into too much detail, that Payne himself enlists in one of the Philadelphia militias. I mean, this man's now like 40 years old and here he is enlisting, right? I mean, it's astonishing. And ends up meeting Washington in the course of that. mean, everyone knew of Payne, but not everyone would get to meet him, obviously. So he gets up, goes up to New Jersey, to Fort Lee with this militia and then militia withdraws back to Philadelphia. He stays on.
26:04
with Nathaniel Green, one of Washington's, if not his most favorite general in the field. And then Washington is retreated from New York City and we get this historic moment when the two of them actually meet. And make the long story short about their relationship. Among people that were close to Washington, they knew how essential, and Washington knew how essential Paine's first and all of his writings during the revolution were to sustaining the spirit and the morale, not necessarily of all Americans,
26:34
but specifically of the troops, of his own troops. And they often attribute this line to this sort of poetic line to John Adams, but it wasn't. Adams did not really care for Paine. Paine was much too small-D democratic for John Adams. But it was Joel Barlow who was a, for a while I think he was actual minister to the troops. He became an ambassador later for the United States, that kind of thing. He says,
27:04
Without the pen of pain, Washington's sword would have been wielded in vain. Now, I could go on and on about pain and the revolution, but I want to point out to everyone that he was solidly small-D democratic. And in the course of his life, he became recognized as an author of common sense. He later writes the famous pamphlet, The Crisis at the end of 76, when Washington's troops were in retreat and it looked like the revolution was over and done with.
27:33
that the whole, in fact, Washington said one more blow like that from Howe's troops and we're finished. Howe didn't make that extra blow, but Payne published the crisis, the first of what would be 13 of them. And it includes the line that may well be the most quoted line in American history. Maybe, at least it's gotta be in the top 10. These are the times that try men's souls. And the reason I say it's often quoted is at halftime, it was not unusual, it said,
28:02
coaches to tell their team if they were losing. These are the times that we'll try ourselves. To go way ahead, can tell you that Lincoln had read Paine, loved Paine's works and very much influenced his thinking. But Lincoln was warned by his friends, you can't go around saying this because Paine was such a radical who challenged religious ideas and things like that. uh There was a guy, I'm forgetting his name, Cartwright, I think was his name. When Lincoln is running for Congress,
28:31
the first time, this Methodist minister was also running. And he had heard about the fact that Lincoln was influenced not only politically, but religiously by pain. he started challenging Lincoln as whether or not he was actually a Christian. And by the way, in many ways, Lincoln was Christian-like, but he himself really never joined a church. His family did, but he did not. But the guy who did, the guy who,
29:01
who charged him with that would then use the line of pain about, because he was a traveling preacher, sometimes on horse and sometimes on foot. And he would say, these are the times that try men's souls, S-O-L-E-S. So it was truly incredibly often that it, I mean, I couldn't tell you how often, you Google it. The AI will tell you it was very heavy. I was, I know we're almost, we're actually almost out of time. uh
29:31
One of the things I wanted to ask you though was it seems like because of the age of reason, you point out in the book. That's the part where he challenges organized religion. It seems like that became the excuse to almost erase him. That was the goal of the, look, the powerful, the propertied and the pious and the privileged if we include an extra P in there. They did everything in their power for the 200 years after
30:00
the 1790s to crush Payne's memory, to abolish it, to suppress it. But he was never actually forgotten. I was first gonna write the book on Payne, my plan was I was gonna write first about the life and labors of Payne, two about the suppression of his memory, and then I was gonna bring him back to life and have a conversation with him. And that's the book I signed a contract to write. But when I did the research on the suppression of his memory, which
30:29
every historian and biographer always spoke of, what I discovered is that, the suppression occurred, but the memory was never lost in every generation. Look, the free thinkers, the abolitionists, the working men's parties, the suffragists, the populists, the progressives, the socials, every single generation of in quotes, progressive politics. And those,
30:58
movements always reached back to the revolution. And in order to identify themselves in those terms, they would discover, they would bring pain into their movement as their sort of uh champion, their hero, as much as Jefferson or Washington or anybody else. so I discovered, every historian dreams about discovering something that no one else had encountered. That was my, that was my only great discovery in my life as a historian, but it was a great one.
31:28
truly great one, I believe. So, so, so, because the pamphlet, Age of Reason that he wrote when he was in France during the course of the French Revolution, and he actually was about to be guillotined while he was there because, because he did not deny God. Okay, did not they wanted to create, they wanted to abolish religion altogether during the latter part of that revolution.
31:55
And Payne was outraged. You can abolish religion, but you cannot abolish the concept of God. You can't erase God from you, from life. He was a deist. He believed that God was the creator. By the way, and let me make it clear. Jefferson was a deist? Yes. The one that they have the hardest time in understanding is Washington was a deist. Now there's a difference between Payne who was a militant deist, Jefferson who was a sort of progressive deist, and Washington who just
32:24
didn't talk about it. Okay. And by the way, Franklin was a leading deist. That should also be made clear. the founders, the making of the United States is not by, it was never intended to be a Christian nation. Further to that is the fact the constitution never mentions God once and there are no religious oaths to be taken or anything like that. So, but they tried to, you know, folks,
32:51
even if they didn't care about religion, they wanted to crush Payne's memory because he was so radical in his calls for democracy. not surprisingly, as I said, every movement of a progressive sort trying to lay claim to. Now, if you have time for one more, and then we'll wrap up. I got time. You weren't out of time. What would you say to Payne today, if you were to have that conversation with him, given what's happening, what would you say to him?
33:20
I would tell him that we could use you again. We could use you again because there was an incredible, look, the majority of Americans, the majority of Americans carry with them a kind of deep cultural memory of what it means to be an American going all the way back to the revolution. The majority of Americans know for decades now things have not been the way they should be. Okay. I mean, he didn't win.
33:49
with a majority, okay? Okay, in the first go round. And the fact is that the Democrats blew it in the second round. But the point is that when we poll Americans today, and by the way, I'm working on this book about the case for an economic bill of rights. And a couple of years ago, Data for Progress, major polling group, did a poll. And what we discovered is that the majority of Americans
34:19
just as they did in 1944, want the makings of an economic bill of rights. They want national healthcare. They want education as far as their capacities can take them in public settings, not to go into debt, okay? They want assurance that they'll have a home. They'll be able to feed their families. And they want the certain fundamentals of a decent life enshrined, or not enshrined, know, inscribed in an economic bill of rights.
34:48
Pain, we forgot, we jumped over that, pain in the other two key pamphlets, um Rights of Man, which he wrote during the revolution, the French Revolution to defend it, and Agrarian Justice, which he wrote in the 1790s, because couldn't believe that even Christian preachers were saying the poor will always be with us. And he said, poverty is not something created by God, it's created by civilization. And he said,
35:16
What we need to do is people who have most of the property should pay taxes into a fund. And those funds should be used to create what we would today call social security. It would be monies to be able to, for older folks not to have to work and to give grants to young people to set themselves forward in life. know, education or some bit of land or setting up in a small business or trade.
35:44
That by the way is even recognized online at the social security website unless the Trumpsters have taken it down. That is Thomas Paine, okay, who is the father or godfather of social security as we know it. I mean, you think about this figure in history, no wonder they wanted to suppress him. As far as I was concerned, was a radical Democrat. He was a socialist for even thinking about taxing the rich and providing people with the money to cover their needs. oh
36:12
He talked about separation of church and state and was insistent upon it. So anyhow, I would say that we need someone like you today because you were able to articulate Americans needs and yearnings that they themselves, knew, I mean, was, I think he said to himself, everyone knows what needs to be done. They just had, no one's articulated, no one's formulated in a truly democratic and progressive fashion. So today we have,
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We know what people are thinking, what they're going through. We have politicians who do a good job of campaigning. But it's only, that's why, by the way, you asked me at beginning, Graham Plattner, I don't know if it'll be in this. One of the beauties about Graham Plattner is his, he's able to articulate these things and lay out in conversations with people who can help him formulate exactly what needs doing. He's not Thomas Paine, but he has a voice who can articulate.
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kinds of things pain was able to do in writing. And what would you say to people listening to this? So we we've just finished this is good to air after we've we've aired Common Sense. It's entirely we did. The last two episodes was part one and part two. What would you say to people who are first hearing Common Sense and about pain for the first time? This is going to sound and I'm going to offer a bit of an apology after I say it and not an apology and explanation.
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I think that if people take the time, they should put it next to their bedside. By the way, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other feminists of the first part of the 19th century, they often said, should keep Thomas Paine's rights of man, many of his, you should keep his works at your bedside. That was the case. So what I would say is pick up a copy. mean, it's available free online. You can buy nice little paperback copies um anywhere. Read it now.
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Some of the language will seem a little archaic, because it comes from the fact that his father was a Quaker, and he picked up certain Quaker habits about these and, you know, the and the and things like that. The point is, if you take the time, you're not going to understand parts of it. But you sure as hell will understand what he's saying to open up by talking about Americans, and not Americans, humans as fundamentally democratic, with democratic instincts. You're going to understand, because a lot of it's done with great humor, his mockery of kings, okay.
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We need you back, Thomas Paine, if only because no King's Day needs you. How's that? Okay. But the problem with no King's Day is it doesn't go far enough. The no King's Day should also go after the economic royalists, as FDR called them. And Paine realized that very thing when he wrote Agrarian Justice calling for taxes on the wealthy. So read Common Sense. And I think if you give it a shot,
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I know we live in an impatient age. I think you'll find us like a letter from an old friend.
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I like that that's well said. Where can we find your work? Where can we find? Well, any good bookseller will just go in and say, hey, I'd like to see, like to get a copy of Thomas Paine and The Promise of America by Harvey Kay. Or just say Harvey Kay, Thomas Paine, and they can look it up on their in their guides online. All you got to do any one of those kind of booksellers, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, whatever. OK, I'm not recommending any particular one, but it is the case that it's readily available. um
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both the Thomas Paine book and the Fight for the Four Freedoms. mean, some of the books that I've written, because they were back say in the eighties into the early nineties, they're out of print already, but you can get them through all these services because they'll sell secondhand books. The book Thomas Paine, The Proposal of America, that was my love letter to America. Start there. And I can't praise that book enough. I mean, I read a lot of American history just for fun. for me,
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probably for the year so far that's been the best one. So I can't thank you enough for writing it. And now I'm gonna buy the Four Freedoms book and hopefully That was my love letter to my parents' generation just for the record. Nice. I hope that we can have you back to talk about that one and the second Bill be very happy to. I'd be very happy to. We'll talk for a minute after we. Yes, yes. So give me just a second. I'll press stop.