The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

                This book was a recommendation from Whisky Prajer.  Back in December, I had posted a video of Christopher Hitchens talking about the legacy of the American Left, and Whisky Prajer wrote in the comments section: Similar note: did you ever read Doctorow’s “The Book of Daniel”? I think you’d dig it.  His best novel, IMO, by quite a margin.

                I had never even heard of The Book of Daniel before, but I dutifully went to the Wikipedia page to read up on it.

                Wikipedia gives this description:

The Book of Daniel (1971) is semi-historical novel by E. L. Doctorow, loosely based on the lives, trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Doctorow tells the story of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson (corollaries to the Rosenbergs) through the persons of their older son, Daniel, and his sister, Susan, who are college students deeply involved in 1960s politics 

                Now, I don’t read most of the books that people recommend to me*.  However, this description caught my interest, because the book was (according to Wikipedia) about the Rosenberg children’s involvement in the student movement, and I had actually read a book on this exact same subject.

                When the Rosenberg’s were executed for treason (W), they left behind two surviving children: Michael Meeropol (W) and Robert Meeropol (W).  (Meeropol being the name of their adopted parents).  As these two boys grew up during the 1960s, they became leaders in the student movement—they never reached the level of national prominence like Mario Savio or Mark Rudd, etc, but they were local leaders at their universities.  And they wrote about all this in their joint autobiography: We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (A)—a book which I actually read back in my college days.

                …Well, I sort of read it anyways.  Truth be told, in my younger days, before I started this book review project, I was a lot less anal-retentive about finishing books cover to cover.  I used to pick up books, graze through the parts I was interested in, ignore the other parts, and then just move on to something else.  (In fact part of the reason I started doing this book review project in the first place was to introduce more discipline to my reading.) 

In particular, I used to have the bad habit of going into the college library to research a paper, and then start procrastinating by browsing through all sorts of material not connected to my studies.  And so one school night I found myself reading through the autobiography of the Rosenberg children when I was supposed to be researching something else.

                I was in those days primarily -  interested - in the student movements of the 1960s, so I zeroed in on those parts of the book and largely ignored the 1950s treason trial and execution.  And although I probably missed out on the most interesting part of the book, I still remember well the parts I did read some 15 years later.**

                The awkwardness of being living martyrs to the communist cause comes through very clearly in the book.  Even after their parents had been executed, they continued to stick to the communist ideals of their parents.  The Rosenberg children recounted the arguments they used to have with their elementary school teachers—their teachers would tell them that Soviet Russia had no freedom of the press, and they would respond by pointing out that in America the press was completely controlled by corporations. 

                It’s no wonder the Rosenburg children became such enthusiastic participants in the 1960s student movement.  (I don’t remember this being explicitly mentioned in the book, but it must have been strange for them to witness the change in American public attitudes—from the rabid anti-Communism that killed their parents in the 1950s to socialism once again becoming fashionable at American universities in the 1960s.) 

But with the new generation of radicals comes an ignorance of the past.  At some point in the late 1960s, one of the Rosenberg children works up the courage to tell his girlfriend that he is actually the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  He expects that she already secretly knows.  (In the past, many of his acquaintances and friends had worked out his secret long before he actually told them.)  But he discovers instead that not only does she not know his secret, she has no idea who the Rosenburg’s even were, and he has to fill her in on the whole story.

                In short, I thought it was a fascinating story about the martyrs of the old left being caught up in the struggles of the new left.  So when I realized the entire premise of The Book of Daniel was about the Rosenburg children in student movement of the 1960s, I was pretty much sold on it.***  But if I had needed extra persuasion, Whisky Prajer’s glowing review of the book pushed me firmly into the interested camp.  “…what Doctorow best conveys is the dark energy of aspirations betrayed, specifically the American Left.  Funny, my heart-rate jumps just thinking about some of those scenes.  Highly recommended.”

Footnotes

* Oh and by the way, a blanket apology to everyone who’s recommended books to me over the years.  I appreciate the recommendations, I just never get around to most of the books I intend to get around to. 

** That is to say, I think I remember these parts well.  But I am going off of memories of a book I encountered when I was about 20, and a book I didn’t even read completely at that, so apologies if I’m mis-remembering any of it.

*** Actually as it turns out, Wikipedia slightly misstated the premise of this book.  Wikipedia states (as of this writing) that the main characters, the corollaries to the Rosenberg children, were “deeply involved in 1960s politics”.  Indeed the real Rosenberg children actually were deeply involved in 1960s politics, but their fictional counterparts in this novel are much more ambivalent about the peace movement, and the older sibling especially is portrayed as being at times deeply cynical about the movement, at least at the beginning.  Which brings me to my next point…

Separating Truth from Fiction

                Since I began my review of this book by mentioning my interest in the real Rosenberg children, I now need to make clear that this book is not about the real life Rosenbergs.  It’s a fictional book that takes the Rosenberg case as its loose inspiration.  But it deviates quite a bit from actual history, and indeed the children in this book are nothing like the actual Rosenberg children.

                To be fair, Whisky Prajer tried to warn me of this:  The prof who introduced me to this book told me the Rosenberg kids were decidedly NOT fans of the novel, for reasons that will likely be clear in the early pages

                And after having read this book, I have to say I don’t blame him one bit.  I would hate this book too if I were him.  Both of the children in this book are mentally unstable.  The main character and narrator of the book, Daniel Isaacson (the fictional stand-in for the oldest Rosenberg child) has become a sexual sadist, and also in his narration has a fixation with bodily functions.

                The actual real-life Michael and Robert Meeropol, by contrast, appear to be quite well adjusted and to have none of these short-comings. 

                It’s notable that The Book of Daniel was published in 1971, and that the Meeropol brothers’ autobiography didn’t come out until 1975.  Perhaps in the days before the Meeropol brothers had gone public with their own version of their story, the outcome of the Rosenberg children and their psychological state was left up more to the imagination.  And although E.L. Doctorow’s version of events is not the real one, on one level it is the more believable version—if you didn’t know any better, how easy it would be to imagine that the trauma of the Rosenberg trial must have screwed up those children.  You wouldn’t expect healthy well-adjusted adults to come out of that kind of childhood experience, and E.L. Doctorow does not portray healthy well-adjusted adults. 

                (I also half-wonder if the publication and subsequent fame of The Book of Daniel was one of the reasons prompting the Meeropol brothers to write their autobiography and set the record straight?)

                All that being said, however, I am going to (with apologies) contradict Whisky slightly here.  A Google search of the Meeropol brothers and The Book of Daniel reveals that the Meeropols are not actually against this book.  (If they ever were against it, they must have made their peace with it.)  This link here [LINK HERE], for example, tells of the Meeropol brothers at a screening of the film version (W) of The Book of Daniel, and not seeming opposed to the attention the film has brought to their parents’ case.

                Another link here [LINK HERE] is the text of a lecture that Michael Meeropol himself gave on The Book of Daniel.  Although he takes care to emphasize repeatedly that the book is fiction, he does not seem opposed to the book or its message.  As he says of the book: “Remember Dr. Beagle’s quote: History tells you how it was—Historical fiction tells you how it felt.”

                And for his part, E.L. Doctorow goes through a lot of lengths to change enough of the details of the story to make it clear that his book is supposed to be fiction, and not fact.  Most obviously, he’s changed the sex of the younger sibling to a little girl instead of a little boy.

The Review

                Right, now that I got all that set-up out of the way, let’s talk about the actual novel itself.

               

                The first thing to note is that this book is properly Literature with a capital “L”.  It experiments with changes in perspective in the narrative, an unreliable narrator, symbolism, word play—the whole bit.

                If you’re the kind of literary person that’s into this kind of book, you’ll probably love it. 

                A bit of flavor of the type of book this is can probably be gleamed from the contemporary New York Times review, which said of this book: 

 One contemplates most novels based on controversial public happenings with a sinking heart: fictionalization tends to trivialize such events: the public record weighs like sandbags on the imagination. But Mr. Doctorow has turned such liabilities into assets. He freely acknowledges the looming presence of the Rosenberg Case by building a high- tension bridge between reality and fiction. His Daniel's jottings are only intermittently novelistic in the conventional sense. They stutter back and forth between third-person and first-person narrative, as if Daniel were only tentatively trying out the role of a character in a story. They draw past and present, public and private, real and unreal events into a labyrinth of obsessive memories. They stumble into rock piles of speculation on history (how did the Cold War get started?), into newspaper reportage (a New York Times reappraisal of the Isaacson Case 10 years after the execution), and heavy sociological tracts (the meaning of Disneyland).

                As for me, my interests are more historical than literary, and I’m not smart enough to fully analyze a book like this, or catch all the clever things the author is doing.  (I did enjoy my literature classes in college, but I always needed the professor to explain to me all the symbolism in the books before I could fully appreciate them.  I could never catch these things on my own.)

                So, as always, take my opinion with a grain of salt.  I’m not smart enough to give this book a full analysis, but I’ll comment on the few things that I did notice.

                There are a lot of tangents and digressions going on in this book, but it’s primarily about the history of the American left.  The frame story takes place during the student movement of the 1960s.  The flashbacks to the trial and execution of the Isaacsons (the fictional stand-ins for the Rosenbergs) happen during the Red Scare of the 1950s.  Further flashbacks to the earlier life of the Rosenbergs cover the Communist movement of the 1930s and 40s: for example the Scottsboro Boys trial, the Paul Robeson Concert and Peeskill ritots (W).  Beyond that, references are made to earlier heroes: Thomas Paine, John Brown, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, et cetera.

                This is mixed in with a lot of religious imagery—as should be evident right from the very title of the book.  Within E.L Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, many references are made to the biblical book of Daniel.

                For me, the most powerful scene from the book is when the narrator Daniel recounts the moment his younger sister told him about God.  It is the night that their parents are executed.  The children are at home watching baseball, deliberately trying not to think about what is happening to their parents.  But then the television chimes to mark the changing of the hour, and they know their parents are dead.  The passage is powerful enough that it probably deserves to be quoted in full:

                In Susan resides the fateful family gift for having definite feelings.  Always taking stands, even as a kid.  A moralist, a judge.  This is right, that is wrong, this is good, that is bad.  Her personal life carelessly displayed, her wants unashamed, not managed discreetly like most people’s.  With her aggressive moral openness, with her loud and intelligent and repugnantly honest girlness.  And all wrong.  Always wrong.  From politics back to drugs, and from drugs back to sex, and before sex, tantrums, and before tantrums, a faith in God.  Here is a cheap effect: A long time ago, on an evening in June, 1954, June 22 to be exact, at exactly ten P.M., Susan gave me the word about God.  It was during a night game between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.  Allie Reynolds was pitching for the Yanks and it was nothing-nothing in the top of the seventh.  Boston had one out and a man on first.  Jim Piersall was up and the count was three and one.  Reynolds picked up the rosin bag.  Mel Allen was saying how a base on balls is always trouble and as he spoke there was a short beep over his voice the way it happens on television to indicate that a new hour has begun.  At that moment Susan, age eight, and I, thirteen, could not look at each other.  Allie Reynolds dropped the rosin bag, pulled at the peak of his cap, and leaned forward for the sign.  And that’s when Susan told me there was a God.

                “He’ll get them all,” she whispered.  “He’ll get every one of them.”  (p.9-10)

                From this, the narrator goes into an exploration of God’s role in the Bible, which is probably also worth quoting.  Also from page 9:

                THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GOD AS REPRESENTED IN THE BIBLE

                Actually that’s what God does in the Bible—like the little girl says, he gets people.  He takes care of them.  He lays on this monumental justice.  Oh the curses, the admonitions; the plagues, the scatterings, the ruminations, the strikings dead, the renderings unto and tearings asunder.  The floods.  The fires.  It is interesting to note that God as a character in the Bible seems almost always concerned with the idea of his recognition by mankind.  He is constantly declaring His authority, with rewards for those who recognize it and punishment for those who don’t.  He performs fancy tricks.  He enlists the help of naturally righteous humans who become messengers or carriers of his miracles, or who deliver their people.  Each age has by trial to achieve its recognition of Him—or to put it another way, every generation has to learn anew the lessons of His Existence.  The drama in the Bible is always in the conflict of those who have learned with those who have not learned.  Or in the testing of those who might be able to learn.  In this context it is instructive to pause for a moment over the career of Daniel, a definitely minor, if not totally apocryphal figure (or figures) who worked with no particular delight for a few of the Kings in the post-Alexandrine Empires…. (p. 9-10)  […Here, the narrator transitions into an analysis of the biblical book of Daniel, which I’ll come back to later in this review…]

                In addition to the biblical imagery and the history of the American Left, there are some brief sections where the book flirts with an analysis of the failure of the American Left.  (Much of this analysis is borrowed from other writers.)  For example from pages 278-279, where the narrator says: “Shannon, in THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, shows us the immense contribution made by the American Communist Party to its own destruction within a few years after the war.  They had all the haughty, shrewd instincts of a successful suicide.  It is no wonder in this club of ideologues of the working class, self-designed martyrs, Stalinist tuning forks, sentimentalists, visionaries, misfits, hysterics, fantasists, and dreamers of justice—no wonder that a myth would spring out of their awe for someone truly potent.  It is ironic that such a myth would arise without planning or intent from their laboriously induced collective mythic self.  But they were helpless before it.”

                And not surprisingly given the topic of the book, the idea of martyrdom is also a theme.  At one point, the status of the Isaacsons (the fictionalized Rosenbergs) as martyrs is being discussed.  Artie Sternlicht (a fictionalized Abbie Hoffman) is discussing it with his girlfriend Baby and with Daniel Isaacson.

                “Your folks didn’t know shit.  The way they handled themselves at their trial was pathetic.  I mean they played it by their rules.  The government’s rules.  You know what I mean?  Instead of standing up and saying fuck you, do what you want, I can’t get an honest trial anyway with you fuckers—they made motions, they pleaded innocent, they spoke only when spoken to, they played the game.  All right?  The whole frame of reference brought them down because they acted like defendants at a trial.  You dig?”

                …

                “And Susan disagreed?”

                “Yeah.”

                “She said nevertheless they were martyrs,” Baby said from the kitchen.

                “Sure they were martyrs.  But the revolution has more martyrs than it needs.  Like all the spades you never heard of murdered in their beds, and in every jail in the world, and like the millions of kids murdered in their schools, and like the people starved to death or shot or burned in Vietnam.  We’ve got martyrs up the ass.”  (p.151-152).

                However, for the most part the main thrust of this book is emotional instead of analytical.  The Isaacson children in this book, like their real-life counterparts the Rosenberg children, go through something no child should ever have to go through.  And it’s all narrated in heart-wrenching detail: the arrest of their parents, visiting their parents in jail, hearing rumors on the playground of their parents imminent execution, being taunted by the other kids, and finally having their parents executed. 

               

                The scenes, for example, of the kids visiting their parents in jail is sad enough.  But then of course it all culminates with the execution.  The narrator (the oldest child looking back) directly addresses the reader at this point.  “I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution.  I know there is a you.  There has always been a you.  YOU: I will show you that I can do the electrocution” (p. 295-296).  The narrator then proceeds to graphically describe the electrocution of first his father, and then his mother.

                These poignant scenes leave the reader feeling in a highly emotional state, which the author then exploits to transition to the violent repression of the 1960s peace movement.  After having already been left emotional vulnerable by the trauma of the Rosenberg case, the reader is thus hit all the harder by passages which describe the repression of the anti-war demonstrators.

                When describing the police breaking up a peaceful anti-war march, the narrator writes: “And suddenly he is there, locked arm in arm with the real people of now, sitting in close passive rank with linked arms as the boots approach, highly polished, and the clubs, highly polished, and the brass highly polished, wading through our linkage, this many-helmeted beast of our nation, coming through our flesh with boot and club and gun butt, through our sick stubbornness, through our blood it comes.  My country.  And it swats and kicks, and kicks and clubs—you raise the club high and bring it down, you follow through, you keep your head down, you remember to snap the wrist, complete the swing, raise high bring down, think of a groove in the air, groove into the groove, keep your eye on the ball, eye on balls, eye on cunts, eye on the point of skull, up and down, put your whole body into it, bring everything you’ve got into your swing, up from your toes, up down, turn around, up high down hard, hard as you can, hard as you can, harder harder: FOLLOW THROUGH!” (p. 256)

******************************

                There’s a lot more going on in this book than I’ve written about.  But someone smarter and more literary than me is going to have to tackle all the other themes and symbols and everything else in the book.  All I can really do is engage with this book at a surface level, and I’ve written all of the main things that struck me about its surface.

                I’ll wrap things up by just making a few more notes on odds and ends.

Notes

* After having read this book, I’m now beginning to regret that I only read the second half of the Rosenberg children’s autobiography, and more or less skipped over all their reminiscings on their parents and on their parents’ trial.  At some point I may again try to track down We Are Your Sons and read it properly this time.

* This is actually the second E.L. Doctorow book I’ve read.  The first book, Ragtime, I read and reviewed on this blog 9 years ago.  I’m embarrassed to say that I remember absolutely nothing of it now. 

                It’s funny how some stuff stays in your memory over the years, and other stuff doesn’t.  Most of the books I’ve read in my life I at least remember something off, but for whatever reason Ragtime is a complete black hole.  Were it not for the fact that I blogged about the book at the time, and that I now have that blog post to look back on, I might not even remember that I had ever read it. 

* Michael Meeropol’s lecture on this book is worth reading (link, once again, HERE).  He picks up on a lot of things in this book that I would not have picked up on my own: particularly the scenes in this book in which the differences between the Old Left and the New Left are brought into stark contrast, and the narrative techniques E.L. Doctorow uses to do this.

                Also, among other things, he mentions that the Boston Anti-War group that the fictional Susan Isaacson became involved with in the book was the same one that the real life Noam Chomsky was involved with.

* Connections with other books I’ve read: The Iron Heel by Jack London is mentioned as one of the many leftist books on the bookshelves of the Isaacson family. 

* I suspect someone smarter than me will be able to analyze why bodily functions play such a large role in this book—I’m sure there is some symbolic or literary purpose—but I can’t figure it out myself.  All I can say is that the focus did leave me somewhat disgusted with the narrative, and would make me hesitate before recommending this book to someone else. 

Thoughts on the Biblical Book of Daniel—A Slight Digression

                Okay, so I’m going to make a digression here to something only tangentially related—the Biblical book of Daniel.  And because this is only tangentially related, I’ve purposely put it down here at the very bottom of the review, so you can stop reading here if you want to.

                Although I now consider myself an agnostic, I still retain a fascination with the Bible, and in particular find the intersection of mythology and history in the Old Testament to be fascinating.  In that regard, the Biblical book of Daniel is one of the most fascinating books. 

                The book of Daniel is unique in that it’s one of the few books in the Bible to take a larger historical perspective.  Most of the historical narrative in the Old Testament focuses myopically on the small nation of Israel, largely ignoring all the other, more significant, empires and cultures of the ancient world—except of course when they impact directly on Israel. 

                (It’s not surprising that the Israelites would focus on their own history, but what is ironic is that since Christianity has become the religion of the Western World, the history of the small little provincial nation of Judah is seen as being the most significant in ancient history, and the accomplishments of all the other, much larger, empires have been regulated to historical footnotes.  At least that was my experience growing up in the Christian schools.)

                The Book of Daniel, however, breaks this pattern, and suddenly the scope of the Biblical Narrative is widened to include world history—the great Babylonian Kings, the fall of the Babylonian Empire, the rise of the Persians.  And then, through thinly veiled metaphorical prophecies, the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the dissolution of Alexander’s empire into warring miniature kingdoms is also covered.

               

                But despite being about an apocalyptic Jewish prophet in the Persian Empire, there is evidence that the Book of Daniel was actually written much later.  The book of Daniel is the only Old Testament book to be written partly in Aramaic (the colloquial language of Jesus’s time) rather than in ancient Hebrew. 

                Furthermore, as Dale Martin points out in his lectures on the New Testament, the writer of the book of Daniel gets all of his historical predictions right up until the year 164 BC, and all his historical predictions wrong after 164 BC.  Which, as Dale Martin says makes it pretty easy for scholars to date the writing of the Book of Daniel to 164 BC—which would make it the latest document to be included in the Old Testament, despite the fact that the chronology of its story takes place before the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.  (In fact, as Dale Martin also points out, the worldview contained in the Book of Daniel is more in line with the apocalyptic view of the New Testament writers than it is with the much older books of the rest of the Old Testament, and which is the reason Dale Martin includes an analysis the book of Daniel in his lectures on the New Testament.)

                Then there are also all the historical inaccuracies in the book of Daniel.  Christine Hayes says in her lectures on the Old Testament:   

These chapters tell of Daniel's adventures under two Babylonian kings, Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar; the text says two Babylonian kings, Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar; a Median king Darius who happens to be unknown to history, a Persian king Cyrus — that's a whole lot of years!
The historical inaccuracy of the work, right? You have the chronology of more than a century being telescoped here! There're other inaccuracies. Belshazzar was actually never a king; he was sort of a prince regent. He was defeated by Cyrus, not by Darius, so there are tremendous historical inaccuracies and this is a sign that this was written at a much later time, looking back when the history of a period 300 years ago was very confused. There's no clear historical knowledge of the Babylonian and Persian period. So the book, we know, was written quite late, perhaps the end of the third century, those first six chapters.

                 In actual history, it was the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great which conquered the Babylonian Empire.  But in the book of Daniel, there is this odd historical inaccuracy, where it was the Median King Darius who conquered Babylon. 

                In actual history the Median Empire had been absorbed by the Persians before the Persians conquered Babylon, and the figure of “Darius the Mede” is completely unknown to history, making it somewhat of a mystery where the author of the book of Daniel got this idea of “Darius the Mede”.

               

                Anyway, I bring this up for two reasons: (1) this general historical nitpicking is of interest to me, and this is my blog, so I allow myself a certain amount of leeway on my digressions, and (2), it leads into some nitpicking about all the details E.L. Doctorow got wrong on the book of Daniel.  To return to the passage I mentioned earlier:

                “In this context it is instructive to pause for a moment over the career of Daniel, a definitely minor, if not totally apocryphal figure (or figures) who worked with no particular delight for a few of the kings in the post-Alexandrine Empires.” (p.11)

                Post-Alexandrine Empires???  The Babylonian Empire and the Persian Empire described in the book of Daniel were before the conquests of Alexander the Great.

                Jumping down a bit further on the same page, we find this description of the biblical book of Daniel: “Typically, the King (Nebuchadnezzar, or Belshazzar, or Cyrus) suffers a dream which he cannot understand. (p. 11)

                Okay, now as we mentioned above, Cyrus probably should have been the Persian King Daniel interacted with, if the writer of the book of Daniel had actually known their history.  But instead it’s Darius the Mede who pops up, not Cyrus.  (Cyrus only really enters Daniel’s story as kind of a footnote at the end, when the author mentions in passing that Daniel also prospered during the reign Cyrus as well.  But there are no specific stories about Daniel interacting with Cyrus.)

                Jumping down a bit further on yet the same page, we find more inaccuracies: “For this wisdom Daniel is accorded ministerial rank in the tradition of Joseph and Moses before him” (p. 11). 

                Putting aside Hollywood versions of the story, there’s no indication in the Biblical story that Moses had any sort of ministerial rank.  He was adopted by an Egyptian princess, but that’s as much as the Bible tells us.

                And a bit further down: “At one point, Daniel’s three brothers are accused of sacrilege by the cunning Chaldeans and the King sentences them to death in a fiery furnace” (p. 11)

                The three men sentenced to death in the fiery furnace, Shradrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were Daniel’s friends and fellow-exiles, but they were not his brothers.

                So, what to make about all these mistakes?  The charitable explanation is that E.L. Doctorow knew that his narrator was getting the details wrong, but that this was part of his literary device of using an untrustworthy narrator.

                The uncharitable explanation is that E.L. Doctorow got sloppy and did shockingly little research on the Biblical book of Daniel, despite having made this such a major point of reference for his novel. 

                I am genuinely unsure of which explanation is correct, so anyone feel free to chime in in the comments section if you have an opinion.

And On More Historical Nitpick…

                On page 35, the narrator Daniel recounts his father’s historical passions.  “He told me about using imported Chinese labor like cattle to build the West, and of breeding Negroes and working them to death in the South.  Of their torture.  Of John Brown and Nat Turner.  Of Thomas Paine, whose atheism made him an embarrassment to the leaders of the American Revolution.”

                This is a common misconception (perhaps ever since Teddy Roosevelt referred to Thomas Paine as a “dirty little atheist”.)  But Thomas Paine was actually a Deist, not an atheist, as he makes very clear in his book The Age of Reason. 

                By going so publically with his arguments against the Bible, he did actually make himself somewhat of an embarrassment to the American government at the time, but in his deism he was in very good company with many of the other founding fathers including Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

                As with the preceding Biblical inaccuracies I mentioned, I’m not sure whether to chalk this one up to E.L. Doctorow’s sloppy research, or to a literary device of an unreliable narrator.

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