Thomas Paine is discussed across three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, twice in conversation with the historian Harlow Unger and once in passing during a call about capitalism. The excerpts present him chiefly as a writer of the American founding era whose pamphlets were read aloud to troops, whose books helped inspire a second revolution in France, and who consistently declined the money his writing could have earned him. Bob Zadek frames him as a founder who has received less historical attention than his contemporaries, telling Unger that Paine “is little more than a name” to most people and that his influence on the Revolutionary era was “quite profound.” Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021)
Meeting Benjamin Rush and the making of Common Sense
Unger recounts that Paine met Benjamin Rush in a bookstore. Paine had come over from England, was an enemy of royalty, and was eager to help Americans gain independence. He had taken a job as editor of a magazine and was working on a pamphlet on American liberty and the horrors of the concept of divine right of kings, asking why some baby born of some woman should have the right to rule the world. He showed the pamphlet to Rush, who edited it and came up with the title Common Sense. Founding Healer (2019)
According to Unger, Paine then delivered the pamphlet to Washington on the banks of the Delaware opposite Trenton, and Washington ordered it read aloud to all the troops the night before they crossed the Delaware and fought the Battle of Trenton. Unger credits the reading with having revived the spirits of Washington’s dispirited troops after their defeat in Brooklyn. When Zadek asks whether the book read to the troops was Crisis, Unger corrects him: it was not a book but the first of a series of pamphlets called American Crisis, specifically American Crisis I, with each pamphlet appearing at different times during the Revolutionary War. The last, after the victory at Yorktown, said that the times that try men’s souls were over. Unger notes that the pamphlets were later published in the 20th century in book form. Founding Healer (2019)
Financial sacrifice and The Rights of Man
In the later episode, Unger describes Paine turning every penny he could have made from these essays over to Washington to send to Congress to buy food and supplies for the war effort, leaving Paine as broke at the end of the war as when he first landed in America. Washington invited him to stay at the army camp so that he would at least have food and shelter, and wrote to the governors of each state and to the President of Congress saying something had to be done for Paine because he had refused all the money he could have made and given it to the war effort. James Madison arranged for Congress to give Paine a sum of money, which Unger puts at $200 or $300. Some states did nothing; New York State gave Paine a 250-acre farm just north of New York City in New Rochelle, a farm that had belonged to a Tory farmer who had fled. It became the only home Paine ever owned, and the cottage he lived in is still there, maintained by the Thomas Paine National Association. Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021)
Unger says Paine earned nothing from his writings and that shortly after the war he began writing his first true book, The Rights of Man, which upset kings, queens and royalty around the world. In Unger’s account it took the words of the Declaration of Independence and the spirit of the American Revolution and turned them into a book that inspired the French, set off rioting in England, and made Paine a good sum of money that allowed him to live comfortably afterward. It inspired the French Revolution to the point that the revolutionary government of France named him an honorary citizen and a member of the French National Assembly, though he could not speak a word of French and everything had to be translated. Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021)
The Age of Reason and Paine’s later years
Zadek notes that Paine came within an eyebrow of being guillotined, saved only by the death of Robespierre, and had to leave France in a hurry before ultimately returning to the United States. He describes The Age of Reason as a polemic against organized religion that did not endear Paine to the American public at large or to much of the American elite, and says Paine was most proud of that book. Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021)
Unger places the writing of The Age of Reason in prison, after Paine was sentenced to die for fighting the idea of executing the king — arguing that the king was very popular in America and that executing the man who had sent the army to help free the American people would endanger the friendship with America. In The Age of Reason, Unger says, Paine saw Christianity as a continuation of the age of mythology, comparing Zeus for the Greeks, Jupiter and the Roman gods, Moses for the Jews, and Christ for the Christians three centuries after he allegedly lived. Devout Christians and especially royalists hated the book, but Jefferson, Madison and most of the founders thought it was terrific; Washington, Unger notes, had died in 1799, before it. Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021)
Across episodes
Paine is treated in two Unger episodes three years apart, and the excerpts show no development in the show’s treatment so much as a division of labor: the 2019 episode reaches Paine through Benjamin Rush and the editing of Common Sense and the American Crisis pamphlets, while the 2021 episode takes Paine as its own subject and adds The Rights of Man, the French honorary citizenship, the New Rochelle farm, and The Age of Reason. The 2012 episode mentions Paine only in a caller’s list of founding fathers alongside Jefferson and Franklin, with no claim about him beyond his inclusion. The Morality of Capitalism (2012)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Paine’s death, his burial or the fate of his remains, and they do not give his birth or death dates. They do not state where in England he was born or when he arrived in America, and they do not name the magazine he edited or the title of the pamphlet before Rush renamed it. The 2021 episode’s discussion of The Age of Reason breaks off mid-sentence in the first excerpt and resumes only at the later segment, so the intervening argument is not available here.