A hero for our time

I have just finished reading Harry Harmer's Tom Paine: The Life of a Revolutionary and it surprised me that I knew so little about his life. I read Common Sense and The Rights of Man at university and The Age of Reason sometime later. However my recollection is that he was barely mentioned in high school. Possibly he was a bit too radical for 1960s America.

Did you know he was the first to use the term "United States of America"? I didn't nor did I realise that he had been imprisoned (and nearly executed) during the French Revolution while America stood by and did nothing to secure his freedom. He was effectively shunned in the states late in life because of his vociferous opposition to religious extremism.

It is also hard to imagine the old hometown, staid Philadelphia, as a hot bed of revolution and radicalism the MOVE incident not withstanding).

From the introduction to Harmer's book:

"If Paine returned, it is easy to imagine his disappointment that the battles he fought remain to be won. He would find Britain a monarchy, albeit with the monarch's direct political power exchanged for a stifling feudal symbolism; an unelected second chamber in which appointed cronies sit instead of hereditary lords; and the people still with no written constitution as a guarantee of their liberties. In the America he loved, Paine would find a democracy so in thrall to the corporations that the parties seem no more than factions in a one-part state; and the poverty that he hated enmeshed with the racial prejudice that he loathed. Wherever Paine found himself, he instinctively strove to shatter the carapace of deceit that every establishment lays on society, to prod it with his pen until the cracks could no longer be ignored. Paine's words were his life and continue to ring out with anger and hope."