Theodore Roosevelt was thirty years old, between his ranching collapse in the Dakotas and his rise on the New York Police Board, when he sat down to write a brief campaign biography of Gouverneur Morris for the American Statesmen series. He needed to dispatch Morris’s old colleague, the man Morris had refused to lift a finger to save from the Luxembourg Prison. He reached for a phrase that has stuck to Thomas Paine ever since:
Morris’s irritation, however, was natural enough. There were many other Americans in Paris at the time, but he was responsible for none of them but Paine, and Paine was a filthy little atheist.
That is the entire indictment. Paine had been dead seventy-nine years. The book was published in 1888, when the future president was a junior author trying to make his name. The line is six words long. It carries no argument, no source, no qualification. Paine was Roosevelt’s age when he wrote Common Sense; Roosevelt was Paine’s age when he wrote that line.
The slur worked because each adjective was meant to do separate damage. Filthy: Cheetham’s 1809 hit-piece biography had alleged personal squalor; Roosevelt knew that biography and trusted it. Little: a body diminutive, the same instinct that produced the British cartoonists’ images of the dwarfish Paine being thrashed by John Bull. Atheist: the word that, in 1888, still settled the argument by itself in a country whose presidents swore on Bibles.
It was wrong on every count. Paine was not personally filthy. He was, by the description of every house he stayed in over thirty-five years on three continents, a man who washed and dressed neatly. He was not little. He was five feet ten in a century when American men averaged five feet seven. And he was not an atheist. He was an avowed deist who opens The Age of Reason with the words: I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
But the argument is not whether Roosevelt was right. The argument is what the line did.
It did the work of putting Paine outside the fold, where his ideas could be quoted but his person could be discarded. The same Roosevelt who called Paine filthy spent his political life echoing Paine’s economics, his nationalism, and his appetite for popular insurrection against the powerful. Roosevelt could quote Common Sense in 1898 to justify expansion in the Philippines, and quote Crisis #1 in 1917 to justify entry into the World War, while keeping the man at arm’s length. The line is an instrument of distance.
It worked. American schoolchildren learned about Common Sense without knowing who wrote it. American politicians borrowed from Paine without ever quite naming him. By the centenary of his death in 1909, the New Rochelle farm where he was buried was overgrown; the bones, by then, had been across the Atlantic in a trunk for ninety years. The Roosevelt line was the official seal on the policy of forgetting.
We adopted the slur because it has done that work long enough.
The point of taking up the title is not contrarian. It is curatorial. The Great Agnostic, the sister project this site grew from, took for its banner the title Robert Ingersoll’s contemporaries used in unironic admiration. The Paine equivalent of that title does not exist in the historical record because Paine never had contemporaries who would say what Ingersoll’s would. He was too useful and too dangerous; the people who agreed with him in private were the people who burned his books in public. The slur is the one phrase about Paine that everyone remembers. We use it because it is true to how he was treated.
It is also true that the slur is wrong, and we mean readers to find that out. The site is the argument that Roosevelt was lying. Not in the sense that he meant well and got the facts wrong; in the sense that he wrote a line he knew would do damage and let it do damage. A serious archive of Paine, with the texts and the chronology and the contemporary witnesses laid out the way they actually were, is the only refutation that matters.
So when you see the title at the top of every page, read it as a citation. Roosevelt wrote those words in 1888. Paine wrote two million words across thirty-five years of public life. The site is here because, all things considered, the wrong man got remembered.