AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
Now here’s a highlight. A real one. A butt-kicking, nearly earth-shattering highlight in this, my cherry-picked listage (a word I just made up * ) of the highs and lows of American history.
( * Upon further snoopage 1, I find listage already has been coined. It’s French and it means precisely what I want it to mean and it’s occasionally allowed in English usage. By golly, I’m a polyglot!)
( 1 Dang. Snoopage exists as a word already, too, but it doesn’t mean what I want it to. So much for my coinage career. It actually connotes a sneaky, underhanded prying into someone’s personal affairs, papers, or other such stuff. Sounds like fun but it doesn’t work in this context.)
Anyway, today’s highlight is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Google it and you might find, as I did, plenty of people saying it remains the best-selling publication in the history of the United States. I don’t want to be cynical but, for pity’s sake, that doesn’t sound quite right. What about The Bible? What about Valley of the Dolls? What about any of the two dozen books Stephen King writes in a year?
For that matter, what about JK Rowling and that Harry Potter series of hers?
The Los Angeles Times, perhaps, sets things straight. “Common Sense,” according to an article written by AT Williams in the January 20, 2025 edition, “remains one of the best-selling works of all time relative to the U.S. population (2.5 million in 1776, not counting slaves and Native Americans).”
I buy that much more readily than I buy that Paine’s pamphlet remains the top-selling book/tract/thingy of all time in America.
The Original Common Sense Was 47 Pages, Stitched Together, No Cover.
William’s caveat, in fact, inadvertently brings up a lowlight that existed even as the Founders were printing the words “All men are created equal” on their parchment or Paul Revere iPads or whatever they were writing on.
A lowlight? Call it the lowlight. It is America’s mortal sin. Our own pair of proto-holocausts — our genocide of the Indigenous Peoples who lived here and slavery.
“Not counting slaves and Native Americans,” indeed. Nothing defines us any better than that brobdingnagian contradiction. It proves my basic point: because we’re such a vast melange of humanity, the most diverse on the planet, we also represent the best and worst of human behavior.
We’ll look into our worst behaviors as this series goes on. Today, though, just to be celebratory, let’s stay positive and take a look at the most famous piece of writing by inventor, philosopher, statesman, British immigrant, hellraiser, American expat, deist, and drunkard, Thomas Paine.
Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet, was America’s first bestseller. It was written in clear, concise language (shockingly, for its time) that laid out arguments for the establishment of a new nation, a principled, moral, progressive, egalitarian, almost utopian nation, one that hadn’t been seen in world in all of human history.
Paine lambasted monarchy and its hereditary lineage. Individual rulers, he wrote, led inevitably to corruption and tyranny. He argued that an independent United States would be the ideal for all the Earth’s peoples. He called for representative republican government. “The law,” he wrote, “is King.”
Government, Paine continued, was “a necessary evil” whose purpose was to curb the worst instincts in humans.
Grab your muskets, he advised, and let’s kick the hell out of the British. More than half a million copies of his pamphlet were printed and sold as the Colonies plunged headlong toward revolution.
In fact, the very notions Paine elucidated in Common Sense were revolutions in and of themselves. The pamphlet, you can say, kicked the common man — the common white man; remember the other kinds weren’t counted — into action. Common Sense, perhaps more than any other single thing, made the America Revolution go.
Here’s it is, in its entirety, online.
Thomas Paine’s Death Mask.
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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins
