The historical marker for Robert Bell's print shop
I wonder what the Tea Partiers and their political enablers in the GOP, with all of their much ballyhooed “going back to the original meaning of the Constitution”, would have made of Thomas Paine? If they even know who Tom Paine was. Because of all the men who made the American Revolution and the Republic that came forth from it, Thomas Paine is the forgotten Founding Father. In fact, I’m not sure if he is even afforded that honorific. Paine didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence, nor was he elected to office nor did he hold any of the great government posts. He left the United States — a name he coined — after the Revolution. Paine is excluded from the exalted ranks of Washington, Jefferson, Adams et al. or as the historian Eric Foner styles them, those “canonized in popular culture”.
And Paine is unlikely to be canonized anytime soon — he was a passionate egalitarian, a polemicist and a journalist, an internationalist before the term was coined, a believer in the subordination of government to the will of all the people and the rule of law, an enemy of hereditary rights, an opponent of capital punishment, convinced that America’s advantage lay in the absence of deep disparities of personal wealth, a passionate advocate of science and reason, and, most damningly to large swathes of American public opinion, deeply dismissive of the Bible and theology as the revealed word of God. Given that record, Paine is not likely to be embraced by the lunatic fringe who claim a return to the original intent of the founders and a government of Christian Dominionism is the answer to all our problems. And Paine himself would have recoiled at a party laying claim to the revolutionary inheritance. To Paine, the dead weight of the past was a hindrance to reason and progress. (For a passionate, entertaining and scabrous look at how Paine has been overlooked, played down and written out of the official histories, especially in Philadelphia which was his American base of operations, check out this article.)
Thomas Paine in a painting by Auguste Milliere
Paine arrived in Philadelphia from his native England on the eve of the Revolution. The son of a Quaker father, growing up in what was the Puritan hotbed of East Anglia, the birthplace of an earlier English republicanism, it’s entirely possible that Paine absorbed the influences of those two diverse folkways, but information on his early life is scanty so we may never know what shaped his thinking.
What we do know is that Paine landed up in Philadelphia in 1774, armed with a letter of introduction from Ben Franklin, then acting as the representative of several American colonies in Britain. Philadelphia was a seething hotbed of political agitation and it wasn’t long before Paine had secured a job as editor of the Pennsylvania Weekly and was forging contacts among the leaders of those agitating against the imperial power. One of these, Benjamin Rush, urged Paine to write a pamphlet outlining the American case.
The story of how “Common Sense” came about and the response to its publication is usually glossed over in narratives of the period. But it is a seminal moment nonetheless, just as important, maybe more so, than the story of how the Declaration of Independence was drafted, and certainly more important than the better known stories of the Virginia blowhard Patrick Henry and his overblown speeches, the jolly undergrads out on a jape that is the Boston Tea Party or the epochal, little understood midnight ride of Paul Revere.
According to the Thomas Paine Society “Common Sense went to print with an agreement between Paine and its publisher, Robert Bell, that if the pamphlet lost money, Paine would cover the cost. Bell had set the price at two shillings, which Paine thought too high. The public did not agree and by Paine’s own estimates Common Sense sold over one hundred fifty thousand copies in its first printing (not counting England and Ireland). Eventually over five hundred thousand copies were sold. By today’s standards Common Sense would be considered a bestseller. The pamphlet was a huge financial success. While Paine could certainly have used the money, he never took a penny of the profits instead turning his share over to the American cause.”
The title page of Paine's "Common Sense" published by Robt. Bell in 1776
Prior to this the Americans were threading a cautious course, insisting they were agitating for nothing but their rights as Englishmen and were careful not to advocate for independence. Rush specifically warned against Paine making the wider, more radical appeal.
Paine was having none of it. In a sharply argued, direct and forceful work, originally called Plain Truth, re-titled at Rush’s suggestion Common Sense, he changed at a stroke the whole dynamic of America’s unsure drift to independence. Paine wrote in language far from the classical high style of his political contemporaries. He was careful to echo the tone and tenor of the arguments he was hearing in the homes, the coffee shops and barrooms of Philadelphia. In doing so, he won himself a mass audience. His vision of a republic of virtue and equality, independent of Britain, resonated deeply with thousands of ordinary Americans, creating a new revolutionary reality that the more deeply conservative leaders of the Continental Congress were forced to acknowledge. Paine argued forcefully that republican government was superior to monarchy and hereditary rule, then the universal norm the world over. He argued for equality of rights before the law and for an America that would stand independent as a bastion of human freedom.
It was heady stuff. The success and influence of Common Sense was immediate and huge. Much of what Paine said had been said before, but his synthesis of ideas, set out with plain-spokenness and simplicity created a mass audience and gave coherence to ideas informing the plain people of the colonies. It would be on their shoulders that the success or failure of the revolution would rest. Now, to quote an earlier English republican, not only would the ”plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows” be again in the vanguard against an English King and aristocratic tyranny– albeit this time in blue, not russet uniforms — but he would have, thanks to Paine, a handy primer with which to make his case, spelled out clearly and forcefully.
Clarity, forcefulness, coherence. They don’t make republicans like they used to, do they???
…..the more things change the more they stay the same.
I’m one of those people that stops and reads historical markers. Which isn’t always ideal when your driving down 9th street in Philadelphia in the evening rush hour traffic and you glance up and catch a name on one of the many blue and yellow plaques that are liberally scattered around the older parts of the city. The name that caught my attention was Joseph Bonaparte.
The historical marker outside the Bonaparte house on 9th street.
Now somewhere in the whiskey-soaked brain cells, I think I recalled that Joseph had fled to America after the collapse of the Bonaparte family business — you know, conquering and carving up Europe and parceling out kingdoms, countries and duchies to sundry family members and close personal friends of Napoleon Bonaparte. To whit, there were Bonapartes placed on the thrones of Spain, Naples, Westphalia, and Holland, not to mention the Emperor himself, who sat not only on the newly created imperial throne of France but also styled himself King of Italy (this last title was passed on to his heir).
In all of this historic carve up, Joseph, Napoleon’s older brother, found himself installed first as him king of Naples (1806–1808), then later King of Spain(1808–1813). Joseph seems from all the evidence to have been the one of the least feral of the Bonapartes — certainly less so than his grasping and power-obsessed sisters Caroline and Pauline. (It was Caroline and her empty-headed cavalry general husband Joachim Murat who replaced Joseph on the Neapolitan throne).
Joseph Bonaparte
It seems kingship did not sit easily with Joseph. He retained some of the republican ideals of the French revolution and as King of Naples he tackled the local ancien regime, the vestiges of feudalism among the aristocracy and the church, and introduced judicial, financial and educational reforms — which was par for the course with French revolutionary armies — the revolution was exported at the point of French bayonets. It seemed Joseph might have made a place for himself in Italy, becoming an enlightened monarch in the mode of another Joseph, Joseph II of Austria, but it wasn’t to be.
His brother Napoleon had other plans for him. He installed him as king of Spain. Unwelcome, unwanted and unsuccessful, Joseph struggled to assert himself and found himself totally reliant on French forces. Even that proved an illusion as Napoleon’s hard-riding, hard-bitten veteran commanders — Junot, Suchet, Ney and the rest — deferred not to Joseph but only to his brother. He had little control of the army and remained as little more than a figurehead of the French regime — a regime rejected by the vast majority of Spaniards.
As war on the Peninsular spread from Portugal and Spain and by 1813, threatened France itself, Joseph found himself a king without a country and he abdicated and returned to France. With the eventual defeat of Napoleon, Joseph fled first to Switzerland, then to America.
Joseph wasn’t exactly your poor immigrant arriving at Philadelphia with just the clothes on his back. Apparently he also carried a case of jewels and had hidden a cache of gold in Switzerland for recovery when he was settled.
(Interestingly he travelled under the name Lazare Carnot, Napoleon’s last minister of the Interior and the famous “Organizer of Victories” for French armies both revolutionary and imperial alike. Carnot was himself a fugitive from a vengeful restoration regime in Paris, so it seems odd that Joseph chose to use that name.)
Joseph initially settled in Philadelphia and it’s to that house to which the unsuspecting traveler on 9th street is directed by the historic marker. It certainly stands out from the typical Federal era houses of Philadelphia, giving off something of New Orleans or even Parisian vibe. Maybe that’s why Joseph rented it. (It’s also instructive to remember that the decorative iron work of New Orleans from the same period was forged in Pennsylvania foundries).
Joseph lived here while he was acquiring land and constructing a huge estate in Bordenstown, New Jersey. What’s interesting to me is the idea of a European king, albeit an arriviste one, remaking his life in the New World, the land of Second Chances. He certainly had many more advantages than the millions of emigrants who set out for the Americas seeking new lives — who can gainsay the power of looted Spanish jewels? Yet seeing Joseph remake himself in the style of a New World aristocrat, the holder of thousands of acres in New Jersey and in upstate New York, the builder of a New World palace in Bordenstown NJ, reminds me of the elegant Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina in Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. (The Prince is essayed wonderfully in the Lucino Visconti movie by the great Burt Lancaster).
Don Fabrizio, realizes that the old world of aristocratic power and privilege is gone and the new world of bourgeois democracy is replacing it. It is as his nephew Tancredi says, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. I think Joseph Bonaparte would have appreciated that sentiment and understood exactly what he meant.
I missed this yesterday. Maureen O’Hara is ninety years of age and celebrated her birthday in fine style at home in Ireland. God bless her. If ever there was a movie star that demanded to be seen in colour, it’s Maureen.
Nobody looked better in costume, in those sword-and-sandal movies Hollywood once did so well and can’t do any more.
Though she starred in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, How Green Was My Valley, Miracle on 34th Street, Comanche Territory and scores of others, she’s probably best remembered as a perfect foil for Duke Wayne in several movies, notably The Quiet Man, Rio Grande and McLintock. They certainly were a formidable romantic pairing. One always got the sense that here were two people who genuinely liked and cared for each other and it showed on-screen.
Happy birthday Red. One of our own.
Film critic Glenn Kenny, on his splendid site Some Came Running, has posted an endearing reminiscence of the first time he saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, wrapped around family legend and memory. You should read it. It made me laugh because I have what many people, particularly parents of kids in a more cosseting-and-cotton-swaddling era, might consider a story of delinquent parenting, also involving Psycho. Not me. I consider it a funny reminder from an age when parents weren’t so uptight about what their kids could see and read, especially if they considered their kid able to handle what they knew to be adult subject matter.
So picture the scene, ten o’clock or so in the evening, probably the school holidays, one of the four TV channels we had is about to show Psycho. My Mother, a woman of waspish wit and some deviousness, usually well hidden to all but those closest to her, says to me, “Have you ever seen this?”
I say “no”.
She says “Ah we’ll watch it so.”
I was ten years old.
I know what age I was because we were still living in the house in which I spent my earliest years, and we didn’t move out until I was ten going on eleven. I was delighted to be staying up to watch an “old movie” (Psycho would have been thirteen years old at the time, a little bit older than me). It was probably that feeling of well-being that caused me to miss my mother’s odd smile and the giveaway lift of the eyebrows, which should have alerted me that something was amiss. If that didn’t give the game away, my father’s arrival about ten minutes into the movie asking “What’s on?” only to be told “Psycho — say nothing” and be given a hard stare by my mother, should have absolutely tipped me off. But I was obviously engrossed in what was a neat little thriller about this blonde (Janet Leigh) who embezzles her bosses money and does a runner. So far so good — I’d seen enough of these things even at ten to recognize a basic crime-chase drama, even if I couldn’t have recognised the trappings and called it a noir, a word I hadn’t learned yet.
So imagine my surprise when things get a little creepy — there’s the motel and the awkward guy running the place (Anthony Perkins), then there is the overheard argument with his mother in the big sinister house, not to mention the eye watching through the hole in the wall. All the while I’m trying to get my ten-year old head back to the money and the cops-and-robbers aspect of it all; shouldn’t Janet Leigh be hightailing it out of California before the cops catch up to her? I’m failing to note that my mother is watching me, who is watching Norman Bates, who is watching Marion Crane who is getting undressed and going to the shower, and while she’s in the shower, the shower curtain is flung back and there is a knife………………
I jump about a foot and a half out of my seat — which is pretty impressive when you are ten and in a sitting position — and my mother laughs and says “You weren’t expecting that were you?” No I bloody well was not. (Typically, my father is having a fit he’s laughing so hard).
Now obviously someone could concoct some theory about boys and their mothers, me and Ma, Norman and his Ma, the perils of parenting, what kids should and should not see, the things we pass on to our kids, but I’m Irish and I don’t go for that psycho-babble (ouch!) stuff. I’ll just say nice one Ma, ya got me good.
As a coda — many, many years later, while working in a super busy bookstore in New York, I was approached by our book-buyer who indicated with a raise of his chin “Do you know that woman over there?” Doing a hundred things at once I gave the elegant elderly blond lady a cursory glance over my shoulder.
“No,” I said “should I?”
He said “Think Psycho“. I looked again and sure enough it was Janet Leigh and what do I go and blurt out? “Jaysus, she looked different in the shower…”
A poster on the When Skies Are Grey forum just linked to this video.
Cheers to cort and to Michael who did all the hard work……it’s got me rightly in the mood for the new season.
So the English Premier League’s long season kicks off next weekend and the marathon haul will take us all the way to next May. Yep, it’s a grueling competition.
There are previews up at all the football websites and on all the newspaper sites; individual teams are rated and slated and writers are falling over themselves to make predictions (which is a mugs game, as so much can happen, and does, over the course of a season).
Naturally for me, my focus is all Everton and like many Blues, I find reason for optimism. That would seem to be the prevailing view across the blue internet boards, at least, from the always hopeful Bluekipper to the mad cacophony emanating from the When Skies Are Grey forum. Why, even Toffeeweb, perennially the pessimistic cousins of the Everton family seem to be allowing themselves a reason to hope for good things. So I’m not gonna go and do a preview, nor am I gonna make any predictions; I’m just gonna list ten things, in no particular order, I’d love to see from Everton this season.
1. After his first summer break in two years, I want Diniyar Bilyaletdinov to prove the doubters all wrong and emerge as a major player at Everton.
2. Speaking of doubters, after I could not see Maroune Fellaini coming good for Everton, come good he did- spectacularly so. I want the mad-haired one to recover from that injury and become the driving force in Everton’s midfield and the obvious successor to Arteta.
3. A Tim Cahill headed goal in the Derby. That never gets old.
4. And speaking of our lovable neighbours, after last seasons appalling Derby losses, is two wins too much to ask? Actually, I think it’s been twenty years since we’ve put four past them — the famous four-four draw — and forty-five years since we slapped four by them in a win, so that’s what I’m hoping for. Ditto mullerings of the nouveau riche Denims of Manchester and Harry Meltyface’s Tottenham.
5. A cup run all the way to a cup final. The Cup Final in 2009 left me deflated. We need a cup run and a cup win to erase the memory. I’ll even take the League Cup, whatever they are calling it these days.
6. Tim Howard being beaten from forty yards out. Seriously. Stop.
7. Hibbert Scores. If it happens we will riot.
8. Jack Rodwell, doing those box-to-box Beckenbauer-style runs match after match and scoring frequently at the end of them — like that one against Man. United last year. And speaking of United, isn’t it about time Everton went to Old Trafford and gave United a game of it?
9. Jermaine Beckford, the latest in a line of David Moyes buys from the lower divisions, to raise his game and become the twenty-goal-a-year-every-year guy we have been looking for. Moyes seems to be one of the few managers who will take a shot on talent from the lower divisions and lets hope this pays dividends like the Jagielka, Cahill and Lescott deals did.
10. And last and by no means least, I would take great pleasure in seeing Mad-dog Johnny Heitinga exact some measure of revenge on that snide bastard Carragher for his classless comments about Heitinga getting to a World Cup final (which of course I can’t find a link to, but he said them anyway). “Measure of revenge” as in boot him up about four feet in the air.
And you’ll notice I’m not asking for a top four finish. Yet. Roll on the new season!
This week, the photo blog of the Denver Post posted a remarkable set of photos here by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, taken in the late Thirties and early Forties. Apparently, they are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations, and of an America slowly pulling herself out of the Depression with the arrival of war. They range all across the country and provide a vivid window into ordinary people living their lives and struggling on. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.
There are seventy pics and you should check ‘em all out. (Hat tip for the tip to JFP)
There are many great images here but one of my favorites is the one below, of a crossroads juke joint in Louisiana. Can’t you just see Robert Johnson or Son House walking down that dusty road, dirty boots, guitar slung across his back, Highway Chile….?
Here’s Son House playin’ and talkin’ about Robert Johnson…..
