Legacy
Paine outlived his reputation, then went underground. The ideas didn't — they passed into twentieth-century American thought through the people he taught, and the people they taught.
The eclipse
By the time Paine died in 1899 he was the most popular American lecturer of the century. By 1925, when Clarence Darrow argued the Scopes trial, he was already a half-remembered name. Two world wars, a Cold War alliance with religious anti-communism, and the rise of academic philosophy left no place for an unsystematic platform orator. The Conway Edition stayed in print, but quietly.
The lawyers
Clarence Darrow heard Paine lecture as a young man in Ohio and credited him for the change of mind that produced his career. Through Darrow, Paine's defenses of free speech, free thought, and the irreligious citizen entered the American legal record at Dayton, Tennessee, and at the bar of every later civil-liberties case Darrow argued.
The freethought societies
The American Secular Union, Center for Inquiry, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the secular-humanist tradition that runs through them all keep the Painite agenda alive. The argument that an unbeliever can be a moral citizen, that the state has no religious test, that the church should not levy a tax, runs unbroken from God in the Constitution to today's First-Amendment litigation.
The journalists
H. L. Mencken read Paine as a boy and inherited his caustic register, though he amplified the contempt and lost the warmth. The American newspaper column as a vehicle for popular freethought, religious skepticism plus political commentary plus literary review, is essentially Mencken refining a form Paine built.
The women
Paine's Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child was a generation ahead of suffrage; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony spoke at his lectures and quoted them in their own. His daughter Maud and her descendants continued his political work into the twentieth century. The women's freethought tradition that runs through Margaret Sanger and into modern reproductive-rights advocacy is, on the religious-liberty side of the argument, in his line.
The poets
Edgar Lee Masters wrote a partisan biography of Paine (1962, but drafted decades earlier) and named him as a model for the spoken-word poetry of the Spoon River period. Carl Sandburg's populist American voice owes something to Paine's. The democratic music in Allen Ginsberg's long lines descends, distantly, from the same lectern.
The academic recovery
Beginning with Orvin Larson's American Infidel (1962), and arriving at Susan Jacoby's Filthy Little Atheist: Thomas Paine and American Freethought (2013), professional historians began to recover the figure. Jacoby's book made the case that the secular foundation of nineteenth-century reform politics has been systematically under-told, and Paine restored to that record is the missing keystone.
The contemporary scene
The "new atheists" of the 2000s, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, rediscovered Paine piecemeal. Hitchens edited a 2007 anthology of The Portable Atheist that prints Paine alongside Hume and Russell. The mainstream of secular humanism in the United States today walks a road Paine cleared, even when his name is not spoken.
What endures
The lectures themselves: still funny, still moving, still useful. The Conway Edition has not been out of print in the United States since 1900. The Thomas Paine Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York, opened in 1993 and welcomes visitors. This site, and others, are part of a digital recovery that began in the late 1990s and has not stopped.
His own preferred measure was simpler: "He who lives a useful life will not be remembered for the sake of his memory, but his memory will be a benefit to others."