A Short History of the Thomas Paine Birthday Celebrations:

The celebration of Thomas Paine's birthday, though largely forgotten today, is a tradition of central importance for reform and freethought movements in the U.S. and the world. Paine's birthday was a core celebration that was utilized as a platform for women's rights and suffrage, abolition, education, labor, land reform, and a host of progressive causes thoughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

The first Thomas Paine Birthday Celebration was held secretly in London, England in 1818. The meeting was clandestine because Paine's works were outlawed by the British government and the publication of Paine's Rights of Man at the very center of the British press wars. William Carlyle, his wife, daughter, and shopmen were just the most famous in a larger roster of those imprisoned and persecuted for printing Paine's works and for their exercise of a free press.

The first known US celebration was organized by British émigré Benjamin Offen and held in 1825. Since Offen was aware of the earlier London meeting, the two events were more or less directly related. Many of the attendees at this and subsequent occasions were, like Offen, radicals who had fled Britain's more restrictive laws and imported their radicalized temperament with them. Historians Brown and Stein assert that the celebration in 1825 represented the rebirth of organized freethought in the United States and many of its participants played key roles in the great 19th century American equal rights movements. Working Men, land reformers, equal rights advocates, and deists met to commemorate the reformer they most admired, Thomas Paine. [See Brown, Marshall G. and Gordon Stein, Freethought in the United States: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1978), 34-35].

At the Paine Celebration two years later on January 29, 1827, the same individuals established the Free Press Association for the "support of a press, which, without dread, and uninfluenced by party, interest, or public opinion, will maintain the cause of truth and justice." Organizations and movements whose origins can be traced to the Free Press Association and those early Thomas Paine Birthday Celebrations include the Equal Rights branch of the Democratic Party, Lincoln's Party of the Republic, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Secular Union, the Abolitionist movement, the Women's suffrage movement, the Workingman's Party, the Homestead movement, and People United for the Separation of Church and State. [see Post, Albert. Popular Freethought in America, 1825-1850. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943 and Lause, Mark A. "The 'Unwashed Infidelity' - Thomas Paine and Early New York City Labor History." Labor History. Summer1986, Vol. 27 Issue 3, p. 385, 25pp].

Celebration participants over the years include:

George Henry Evans: publisher, land and labor reform advocate. The Homestead Act resulted from the movement founded by Evans.

Elihu Palmer: Deist lecturer/author and founder of the "Prospect," one of the United States earliest freethought newspapers.

Frances "Fanny" Wright: early equal rights advocate and the first woman in U. S. history to lecture publicly on political and social issues.

Walt Whitman: American poet. Delivered the principal address at the 1877 celebration in Philadelphia, PA.

Robert Owen: Early social reformer and co-founder of New Harmony communitarian experiment.

Robert Dale Owen: co-founder of the New Harmony community and co-editor with Fanny Wright of the Free Enquirer. Influential reform New York Working Men personality and reform figure, though in his later age he acted as if embarassed by what he characterized as youthful excess.

Ernestine Rose: freethinker and equal rights advocate - Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony saw her her as their inspiration and mentor. Rose gave the principle address at the dedication of Gilbert Vale's Thomas Paine Monument in New Rochelle, New York.

Benjamin Offen - most famous of America's early freethought and reform lecturers. Toured throughout the United States. Organized the 1825 Thomas Paine Birthday Celebration.

George Jacob Holyoake: founder of the Co-operative Movement, called the father of Secularism in Britain, and a highly respected laborer in the struggle for a free Press, education of the workers, the rights of woman, arbitration and peace, and other reforms.

Thomas Herttell - judge, legislator, early candidate and supporter of the Working Men, freethought, equal rights, and reform movements.Walt Whitman: Celebrated American poet and visionary.

William Lloyd Garrison: most famous of the white abolitionist leaders.

Robert G. Ingersoll: orator, abolitionist, and one of the greatest freethought/reform figures in US history.

Thomas Edison: Inventor and freethinker; widely declared Man of the Century for the 20th century.

Lucretia Mott: Abolitionist.

Lewis Masquerier: co-founder with Evans of the National Reform Association (from whence the Homestead Act), socialist, and land reformer.

D. M. Bennett: publisher of the Truth Seeker journal and respondent in United States v D. M. Bennett freepress case in the era of postal censor Anthony Comstock.

While Paine's birthday is still observed in a few homes and meeting places in the US and Britain, the celebrations have fallen into the background, out of the awareness of the populace as a whole, and have deteriorated to their historically lowest ebb. Will they die out with the inexorable distancing effect of time or flare up wildfire-like in the midst of some present or future world upheaval? Likely the celebrations will stand or fall on the egalitarian principles Paine advocated. As long as the latter exist, the former will persist.

Text above is copyright © Kenneth W. Burchell - 2004 - All Rights Reserved. Used here by permission of the author.

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Portrait of Thomas Paine by close friend and famed American artist John Wesley Jarvis. Painted in 1806 when Paine was 69 years of age. National Gallery of Art.

Orator and freethought pioneer
Robert G. Ingersoll
at a Paine celebration is 1894