Independence Day? Two, with pleasure: "The only Founding Father worth honoring this 4th of July is Thomas Paine."

It's a long read, and this is a short excerpt. It's worth your time.

Why? Because July 4 makes me feel radical and revolutionary, and it's never too late to make good on promises deferred, especially in 2020 (see Pierce, Charles P. for more).

There's still a chance to bust this sucker wide open, folks. For more on the topic, see "Happy Birthday, America!" by Ricky L. Jones in a past issue of LEO Weekly.

Reading Paine From the Left, by Sean Monahan (Jacobin)

Though embraced by the likes of Glenn Beck, Thomas Paine was the American Revolution's most radical figure.

 ... Paine was a consistent advocate of a strong federal government and also a sharp critic of economic inequality and poverty who designed the world’s first fully fleshed-out scheme of social welfare provision. Beyond that, he introduced millions to a radical critique of private property and class society, and pointed to democratic politics as the solution.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, while ruling classes were cursing Paine’s name from pulpits and palaces, the growing radical workers’ movements were toasting to his memory and reprinting his works. The Irish Republicans, the Chartists of England, and the early American labor movement all lauded Paine and his ideas echoed across Europe in the Revolutions of 1848. For generations, the revolutionary’s birthday was celebrated every January 29 by fledgling trade union and socialist movements on both sides of the Atlantic, who regarded Paine as one of their intellectual fathers and a role model for democratic revolutionaries.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the only Americans who dared to openly claim Thomas Paine for their own were radical trade unionists, freethinkers, abolitionists, and socialists. As John Nichols points out, in 1856 the New York Times warned that the “many socialist Painites . . . and their affiliation to every species of radicalism in the land boded evil to the future of our republic.”

The Prussian Forty-Eighter, disciple of Karl Marx, and Civil War Union Army Gen. August Willich praised Paine’s radical criticisms of authority at dozens of the birthday celebrations held by radical German-American organizations. Eugene Debs too was an open Painite, and at his trial for sedition for publicly opposing World War I, he cited Paine’s declaration, “My country is the world. To do good is my religion” as a model of the “wider patriotism” that he espoused.

As Harvey Kaye observes, the Communist Party published a collection of Paine’s writings in 1937, and hailed him as the “foremost fighter for world democracy,” the “chief propagandist and agitator of the revolution,” and a visionary radical who saw “beyond the limits of the bourgeois revolution,” attacked the “accumulation of property,” and proposed a “system of social insurance.”

Paine was at the center of two of the great democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century — the American and the French. (Beyond that, though he found the violence of the Haitian Revolution “distressing,” he considered it “the natural consequence of slavery,” which should “be expected everywhere.”)

Not only was he a central personality in the “age of revolutions,” he was one of the first radicals to connect the cause of political democracy to economic demands. Because of that, he was touted as a champion not only of the rights of the commoners against aristocracy, but, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, “the radical-democratic aspirations of small artisans and pauperized craftsmen” against the owners of property ...

Paine & Pleasure, Part 1: "The only Founding Father worth honoring this 4th of July is Thomas Paine."

It's a long read, and this is a short excerpt. It's worth your time, and will be followed by the second part, an old column of mine that includes a passage about Paine.

Why? Because July 4 makes me feel radical and revolutionary, and it's not too late to make good on promises deferred. For more on this topic, see "Happy Birthday, America!" by Ricky L. Jones in the current issue of LEO Weekly.

Reading Paine From the Left, by Sean Monahan (Jacobin)

Though embraced by the likes of Glenn Beck, Thomas Paine was the American Revolution's most radical figure.

 ... Paine was a consistent advocate of a strong federal government and also a sharp critic of economic inequality and poverty who designed the world’s first fully fleshed-out scheme of social welfare provision. Beyond that, he introduced millions to a radical critique of private property and class society, and pointed to democratic politics as the solution.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, while ruling classes were cursing Paine’s name from pulpits and palaces, the growing radical workers’ movements were toasting to his memory and reprinting his works. The Irish Republicans, the Chartists of England, and the early American labor movement all lauded Paine and his ideas echoed across Europe in the Revolutions of 1848. For generations, the revolutionary’s birthday was celebrated every January 29 by fledgling trade union and socialist movements on both sides of the Atlantic, who regarded Paine as one of their intellectual fathers and a role model for democratic revolutionaries.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the only Americans who dared to openly claim Thomas Paine for their own were radical trade unionists, freethinkers, abolitionists, and socialists. As John Nichols points out, in 1856 the New York Times warned that the “many socialist Painites . . . and their affiliation to every species of radicalism in the land boded evil to the future of our republic.”

The Prussian Forty-Eighter, disciple of Karl Marx, and Civil War Union Army Gen. August Willich praised Paine’s radical criticisms of authority at dozens of the birthday celebrations held by radical German-American organizations. Eugene Debs too was an open Painite, and at his trial for sedition for publicly opposing World War I, he cited Paine’s declaration, “My country is the world. To do good is my religion” as a model of the “wider patriotism” that he espoused.

As Harvey Kaye observes, the Communist Party published a collection of Paine’s writings in 1937, and hailed him as the “foremost fighter for world democracy,” the “chief propagandist and agitator of the revolution,” and a visionary radical who saw “beyond the limits of the bourgeois revolution,” attacked the “accumulation of property,” and proposed a “system of social insurance.”

Paine was at the center of two of the great democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century — the American and the French. (Beyond that, though he found the violence of the Haitian Revolution “distressing,” he considered it “the natural consequence of slavery,” which should “be expected everywhere.”)

Not only was he a central personality in the “age of revolutions,” he was one of the first radicals to connect the cause of political democracy to economic demands. Because of that, he was touted as a champion not only of the rights of the commoners against aristocracy, but, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, “the radical-democratic aspirations of small artisans and pauperized craftsmen” against the owners of property ...

Alexander Hamilton: "Why liberals have embraced our most dangerously reactionary founder."

I intended to post this link last year (the essay was published in March of 2017), but it wasn't exactly a period of precision or lucidity for me.

Let it suffice that every time someone mentions Hamilton: An American Musical, I think of Stoller's words. Only the conclusion is excerpted here; set aside 20 minutes and a stiff drink to think about it.

The Hamilton Hustle, by Matt Stoller (The Baffler)

Why liberals have embraced our most dangerously reactionary founder

The Obama era looks like an echo of the Federalist power grabs of the 1780s and 1790s, both in its enrichment and glorification of financial elites and its open disdain for anything resembling true economic democracy. The Obama political elite, in other words, celebrates Hamilton not in spite of Hamilton’s anti-democratic tendencies, but because of them.

Set in contrast to the actual life and career of its subject, the play Hamilton is a feat of political alchemy—as is the stunningly successful marketing campaign surrounding it. But our generation’s version of Hamilton adulation isn’t all that different from the version that took hold in the 1920s: it’s designed to subvert democracy by helping the professional class to associate the rise of finance with the greatness of America, instead of seeing in that financial infrastructure the seeds of a dangerous authoritarian tradition.

In 1925, Franklin Roosevelt asked whether there might yet be a Jefferson to lead the forces of democracy against Hamilton’s money power. Perhaps someone—maybe Elizabeth Warren, who pointed out on PBS that Hamilton was a plutocrat—is asking that question again. That said, Hamilton is a great musical. The songs are catchy. The lyrics are beautiful. But the agenda is hidden, because in America, no political leader, not even Donald Trump, can credibly come right out and pronounce democracy a bad thing and agitate for rule by big finance. And the reason for that is that Alexander Hamilton, despite his success in structuring Wall Street, lost the battle against American democracy. Thank God for that.

ON THE AVENUES: Deity building, American-style.

ON THE AVENUES: Deity building, American-style.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

To begin, I recommend “Washington: A Life,” Ron Chernow’s recent biography of George Washington, but with appropriate cautionary notes, prime among them being that these many years later, there exists no sure, non-speculative way to know what was in the mind of a man who was Colonial America’s most impenetrable sphinx.

Whenever Chernow is able to augment scant primary testimony with contributing evidence from record provided by outsiders, the results are good. He is especially skilled at evoking the time of Washington’s childhood and early adulthood in colonial Virginia; in these instances, Chernow corrals an impressive array of surviving accounts, and weaves it masterfully.

Unfortunately, as the narrative progresses, the author frequently opts for pure guesswork, which amounts to the usual litany of phrases like, “He must have felt,” “Perhaps it was the case” or “Maybe there came a twinge of regret.”

Chernow cannot resist them, and in honor of our eternally prurient bedazzlement with sex, most of this amateur psychology comes in periodic analyses of Washington’s purported dalliances with Sally Fairfax, wife of a fellow planter further up the social chain of the Virginia planter’s aristocracy than Washington himself.

Was the Father of Our Country in love with Fairfax, both before, during and after his marriage to the immensely wealthy widow Martha Custis? Can we read between the lines of frequent classicist references in his letters? Was the relationship consummated?

(As a side note, perhaps no other prominent male Colonial figure profited as early and as often from his richer and better placed relatives marrying properly, and then dying prematurely. Washington inherited early and often.)

As for love and carnal happiness, there remains not a scintilla of evidence to suggest wayward, greased naked play between Washington and Fairfax, occurring in the fetid grove out back of the slave quarters at any of his four or more plantation properties.

Nor do we know whether they met illicitly in a rough-hewn cabin located somewhere in the middle of the tens of thousands of acres Washington connived to be awarded as compensation for his service in the French and Indian War -- not that Washington would have left used condoms for “Smoking Gun” to find.

That’s because Chernow persuasively describes a man with an unusually defined sense of self, possessed with propriety from a very early age, constantly obsessed with how he appeared to the eyes of others, and performing the nuanced role of Geo. Washington at all times. While we cannot know about Fairfax, it is clear that Washington anticipating the personal “brand building” of later times.

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It certainly helped to be “Geo. Washington the Mythic Deity” when debt was high and pocket change fleeting, as was the case throughout his adult life, reflecting the land-rich, cash poor existence of the founding baronial planters. Periodically, Washington was obliged to pause from nation-building to hector his tenants and collect rents, but even this tenure as Slumlord Papa, borne of the aforementioned calculated grab of prime acreage in “new” western territories, did not help the household ledger to balance.

Washington and family customarily lived large, simultaneously complaining and indulging incessant impositions from guests. With most pre-war finished goods imported very expensively from England, therein is found a significant (and grubby) portion of the rationale for independence.

Later, while serving as the country’s first president, Washington launched what we would refer to now as a “buy local” campaign to reduce America’s dependence on imported goods. How would he view our addiction to China and Saudi Arabia today?

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In terms of military accomplishment, Washington had a lopsided losing record, with more defeats in battle than victories.

This lifelong devotee of the theater achieved martial success not as a tactical genius, but as a thespian, portraying himself as the calm rallying point amid the storm, one underfunded by an inept, willfully impotent political structure that he freely criticized for effect, his stature remaining constant as each year’s Continental army came and went after their bare-bones, one-year enlistments expired, and overall, always just barely staying alive – living to stall and sometimes fight another day, and waiting stolidly for the Brits, who never committed themselves entirely to the cause of keeping the Colonies, to grow weary of their losses.

It worked … when the French came aboard.

All the while, Washington carefully hoarded all letters and dispatches in huge trunks for the purpose of burnishing posterity’s judgment of his performance. However, what succeeded in uniform was less beneficial in civilian’s clothes, and at this juncture, with a new nation imploring its idol to serve, matters become more factual, and also muddied.

Chernow’s persistent characterization of the early Federalists versus Republicans struggle as a fundamentally unfair fight, pitting the lofty and irreproachable ideals of Washington and Alexander Hamilton against the shrill, self-serving machinations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, grows tiresome as the pages turn.

Granted, America’s political honeymoon of intellectual content over supercharged hyperbole barely lasted through Washington’s first administration (he was twice unanimously elected by the pre-suffrage Electoral College), but the author’s propensity to depict Washington’s saintliness wounded by the evil, conniving Jefferson veers ever close to sheer hagiography.

More balanced accounts surely exist, and readers are asked to recommend such choices.

In the end, tottering on the edge of an insolvency compounded by his many years of military and political absence, and unable to square the circle of slavery either theoretically or at Mt. Vernon, Washington endeavored to enjoy a truncated two-year retirement before dying at the age of 67.

Had his doctors (and Washington himself) not extracted multiple pints of blood in search of an elusive cure, he might have survived a bit longer. As it stands, his departure from humanity’s mortal coil merely set into motion the process of deification that continues more than 200 years later with founding father pop psychology, in which Chernow’s biography snugly finds a place.

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As an addendum, it appears likely that Washington, who fancied himself the thinking’s man’s planter and agriculturist, managed to grasp early on that slavery was a losing proposition economically, and perhaps to a lesser extent, also was unacceptable in the sense of human rights as informed by the inescapably and hypocritically Christian atmosphere of the age.

While humane by the standards of his contemporaries, Washington generally internalized his views and did nothing more about slavery until just before his death, when a revised will stipulated the freeing of his slaves – that is, only those owned by Washington himself, as opposed to “dower” slaves legally attached to his wife’s estate.

I am familiar with the exculpatory apologetics: Those folks simply could not be expected to think outside the constraints of their milieu, etc, etc.

And yet, when it comes to deities, I prefer mine to be a tad more prescient. By knowing and not acting, Washington falls short, although two centuries of worship constitute a hard habit to break.