Honoring Tom Paine, union organizer

Yup, some of the most remembered words in American history were written by an immigrant worker who got fired for trying to organize his workplace.

That would be Tom Paine, who penned the words,

These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Man, he could write.

Today, in honor of the Fourth of July, Al Hart at the ue news update brings us a fascinating biography of Paine. From it we learn:

Nearly all the leaders of the American Revolution - known ever since as "the Founding Fathers" - were members of the upper classes: rich merchants, investors, landowners, planters, judges and lawyers. But Thomas Paine - the man whose writings won over the country to the idea of independence and helped rally the army and the people to defeat the powerful British Empire - was the exception.

Paine was the son of a Quaker corsetmaker and his wife, a member of the Church of England. He followed his father into the corsetmaking business but couldn't make a living at it. So he became a public worker, an excise officer, collecting taxes on imports, exports and manufactured products. Here's what happened next:

...excise officers were poorly paid and frequently had to move to other parts of the country, at their own expense. In 1772 excise officers began organizing to petition Parliament for better pay and working conditions, and on behalf of his co-workers Paine wrote and published a pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise. For helping to organize, in effect, a public employee union, Paine was fired, and soon found himself in a desperate financial condition. But in 1774, he was introduced in London to Benjamin Franklin, the prominent American leader from Philadelphia, who urged him to emigrate.

Who knew?

Paine got a job as editor of Pennsylvania Magazine, where he anonymously published a pamphlet arguing for independence from Britain. Called Common Sense, it sold more than 100,000 copies in three months. He wrote The American Crisis (the one about men's souls being tried) to raise the Continental Army's morale. It worked. George Washington read it to his troops on Christmas Day, and they crossed the Delaware and won the Battle of Trenton.

He returned to England, where he wrote The Rights of Man, a best-selling pamphlet defending the French Revolution. Paine was forced to flee to France, where he was elected to the National Convention though he didn't speak French. He was imprisoned for opposing the execution of Louis XVI and barely escaped the guillotine.

Hart concludes,

He died in 1809 at age 72 in Greenwich Village, New York, in relative obscurity. Only six mourners attended his funeral, two of whom were African American.
But with the beginnings of a labor movement in the U.S. in the 1820s and '30s, there also came a Paine revival. Labor activists held annual dinners on Paine's birthday (January 29), toasting the memory and ideas of the great revolutionary. Thomas Paine's writings have much to offer us today - most of all his faith in the ability of people, acting together, to overcome injustice. As he told us in Common Sense, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

Read the whole thing here.