Remember Carrie & Tom!

I was intending to blip the world's ugliest public sculpture tonight, but I chose this memorial bench instead. It's not easy to capture the entire inscription so that it's all readable, whereas the sculpture remains perfectly repulsive in any light. I'll blip it next time.

Carrie Burnham Kilgore (1838-1909) was the first female lawyer out of the University of Pennsylvania, and for that reason she is revered in the profession. What almost nobody seems to know about her is that she led the long campaign to restore Thomas Paine to his rightful place of honor among the founding fathers of the United States. A marble bust by sculptor Sidney H. Morse was comissioned by the National Liberal League by subscription in 1876. The bust was offered to the City of Philadelphia and intended for display in Independence Hall, but the city's Select Council rejected it. It finally was placed on display there in 1905, and remained until 1931, when it was placed in a basement storage room because of hard lobbying against it by the Catholic Church. In 1957 it was transfered to the premises of the Friendship Liberal League in the Olney section, and finally in 1967 it came to the American Philosophical Society (across the street from Independence Hall) and it remains there, in the head librarian's office, today. Very few living persons have ever laid eyes on the bust (as I have twice).

This is a glaring miscarriage of historical memory, peculair especially to Philadelphia. Without Paine's incredibly powerful pamphlets, we would have lost the war --it's that simple. But while many of the founding fathers were Deist, Paine went so far as to write about it, drawing the eternal hatred of the smallest and lousiest minds on the planet.

There are two impressive monuments to Paine in New Jersey, but none in Philadelphia, where the man made most of his collossal contributions to History. There is only a plaque where he wrote "Common Sense," a plaza named after him (again, only a plaque stating his name), and there's a small piece of parkland along the river where something is to be installed in his name, whenever that goes forward.

Here's the beginning of Paine's pamphlet "The Crisis," another part of which President Obama quoted in his inaugural address --without mentioning Tom Paine!

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.