Ben Franklin speaks

On September 17, 1787, just before the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were asked to sign the document, Ben Franklin asked his fellow delegate from Pennsylvania, James Wilson, to read his considered closing remarks.

The Democracy Movement

The Democracy Movement is a war over democracy in America, whether we shall have it.

The Democracy Spring event in Washington, DC in the spring of 2016 was not the opening salvo of the Democracy Movement, it was merely a sign of where we are today.

The Democracy Movement began in earnest as a response to the infamous Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, a decision that declared, not for the first time but in no uncertain terms, that corporations were natural persons under the Constitution and therefore entitled to Constitutional rights and protections, and that money in unlimited amounts was protected speech.  As this decision undermined what we all were brought up to believe – that we are a democracy, that We the People rule, and that we are all created equal under the law – a movement broke forth to correct this insult to our collective identity.  And for lack of a better name, this is The Democracy Movement.

John Ferling on Paine's Common Sense

Nothing that I have read, by or about Thomas Paine, does so good a job explaining my connection to the great American revolutionary as this passage from John Ferling’s book, Independence:The Struggle to Set America Free, Bloomsbury Press:2011, pp. 217 – 223.  

Thomas Paine didn't invent the American Revolution, he brought people around – aristocrats and the common people alike – to the necessity and the urgency of it.

This passage is totally worthy of your time and attention.  If you like what you read here, read the book.

Just days before word of the Canadian calamity reached Congress, an express arrived with the first tidings of George III's October address to Parliament.  “It is decisive," a New Englander instantly responded.  No greater proof was needed that Britain's monarch "meant to make himself an absolute despotic Tyrant."  Samuel Ward added that "Every Man must now be convinced that . . . our Safety depends wholly upon a brave, wise and determined Resistance."  Samuel Adams told others that this proved the king was the driving force behind British policy.  War guilt "must lie at his Door," he added.  A Virginian, Francis Lightfoot Lee, concurred.  The king's speech laid bare his and North's “bloody intentions" and demonstrated beyond doubt that it was folly to any longer continue "gaping after a reconciliation."

Thirty-six hours after the express brought the king's speech to town, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the most important pamphlet published in the American Revolution – indeed, the most influential pamphlet published in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America – hit Philadelphia's streets.  Its central argument was cogent and timely: Reconciliation was not in the best interests of the colonists.

The thirty-seven-year-old Paine was an Englishman who, like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams,

Introduction to My Blog

I am "A Son of Common Sense," a son therefore of Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), who was sometimes called plain “Common Sense,” after his pamphlet’s title.  Paine's Common Sense (1776) was the most important and most persuasive argument for the colonies’ independence from Great Britain.  It called on us to form a democratic republic, it called us for the first time the “United States of America,” and it can honestly be called the father of the Declaration of Independence, whose sentiments echo its own.  It was by far the biggest selling book in U.S. history – after the Bible of course – as it sold 500,000 copies to a population of 2,000,000 (which would be like selling 80,000,000 copies in today’s America).  Paine published Common Sense anonymously and he earned not a penny from its sale.  He cared about his message.  (As an aside, a half-dozen new biographies have been written about Thomas Paine since the turn of the century.  Here is an article from Wired magazine written in 1995 that may have sparked the renewed interest in my Dad).  And here is Bill Moyers interviewing a conservative and a liberal, both huge fans of Paine.

I care about my message too.