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NEW YORK — Some 250 years after Common Sense helped inspire the 13 colonies to declare independence, Thomas Paine might receive a long-anticipated tribute from his adopted country.

A Paine memorial in Washington, D.C., authorized by a 2022 law, awaits approval from the U.S. Department of Interior. It would be the first landmark in the nation’s capital to be dedicated to one of the American Revolution’s most stirring, popular, and quotable advocates — who also was one of the most intensely debated men of his time.

“He was a critical and singular voice,” said U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), a sponsor of the bill that backed the memorial. He said Paine has long been “underrecognized and overlooked.”

Saturday marked the 250th anniversary of the publication of Paine’s Common Sense, among the first major milestones of a yearlong commemoration of the country’s founding and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Paine supporters have waited decades for a memorial in the District of Columbia, and success is still not ensured: Federal memorials are initiated by Congress but usually built through private donations. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed bipartisan legislation for such a memorial, but the project was delayed, failed to attract adequate funding, and was essentially forgotten by the mid-2000s.

The fate of the current legislation depends not just on financial support, but on President Donald Trump’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum.

In September 2024, the memorial was recommended by the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission for placement on the National Mall. Burgum needs to endorse the plan, which would be sent back to Congress for final enactment. If approved, the memorial would have a 2030 deadline for completion.

A spokesperson for the department declined to comment when asked about the timing for a decision.

“We are staying optimistic because we feel that Thomas Paine is such an important figure in the founding of the United States of America,” said Margaret Downey, president of the Thomas Paine Memorial Association, which has a mission to establish a memorial in Washington.

A contentious legacy

Scholars note that well into the 20th century, federal honors for Paine would have been nearly impossible. While Paine first made his name through Common Sense, the latter part of his life was defined by another pamphlet, The Age of Reason.

Published in installments starting in 1794, it was a fierce attack against organized religion. Paine believed in God and a divinely created universe but accepted no single faith. He scorned what he described as the Bible’s “paltry stories” and said Christianity was “too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice.”

By the time of his death, in New York in 1809, he was estranged from friends and many of the surviving founders; only a handful of mourners attended his funeral. He has since been championed by everyone from labor leaders and communists to Thomas Edison, but presidents before Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s rarely quoted him. Theodore Roosevelt referred to him as a “filthy little atheist.”

There are Paine landmarks around the country, including a monument and museum in New Rochelle, N.Y., and a statue in Morristown, N.J. But other communities have resisted. In 1955, Mayor Walter H. Reynolds of Providence, R.I., rejected a proposed Paine statue, saying “he was and remains so controversial a character.”

Harvey J. Kaye, author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, cites the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 as a surprising turning point. Reagan’s victory was widely seen as a triumph for the modern conservative movement, but Reagan alarmed some Republicans and pleased Paine admirers during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention when he quoted Paine’s famous call to action: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Reagan helped make Paine palatable to both parties, Kaye said. When Congress approved a memorial in 1992, supporters ranged from a liberal giant, Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, to a right-wing hero, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

“Reagan opened the door,” Kaye said.

An immigrant who stoked the fire of revolution

Paine’s story is very much American. He was a self-educated immigrant from Britain who departed for the colonies with little money but with hopes for a better life.

He was born Thomas Pain in Thetford in 1737, some 90 miles outside of London. (He added the “e” to his last name after arriving in America.) Paine was on the move for much of his early life. He spent just a few years in school before leaving at age 13 to work as an apprentice for his father, a corset maker. He would change jobs often, from teaching at a private academy to working as a government excise officer to running a tobacco shop.

By the time he sailed to the New World in 1774, he was struggling with debt, had been married twice and had failed or made himself unwelcome in virtually every profession he entered. But Paine also had absorbed enough of London’s intellectual life to form radical ideas about government and religion and to meet Benjamin Franklin, who provided him a letter of introduction that helped him find work in Philadelphia as a contributor to the Pennsylvania Magazine.

The Revolutionary War began in April 1775 and pamphlets helped frame the arguments, much as social media posts do today. The Philadelphia-based statesman and physician Benjamin Rush was impressed enough with Paine to suggest that he put forth his own thoughts. Paine had wanted to call his pamphlet Plain Truth, but agreed to Rush’s idea: Common Sense.

Paine’s brief tract was credited to “an Englishman” and released on Jan. 10, 1776. Later expanded to 47 pages, it was a popular sensation. Historians differ over how many copies were sold, but Common Sense was widely shared, talked about, and read aloud.

Paine’s urgent, accessible prose was credited for helping to shift public opinion from simply opposing British aggression to calling for a full break. His vision was radical, even compared to some of his fellow revolutionaries. In taking on the British and King George III, he did not just attack the actions of an individual king, but the very idea of hereditary rule and monarchy. He denounced both as “evil” and “exceedingly ridiculous.”

“Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived,” he stated.

A message that continues to resonate

Historian Eric Foner would write that Paine’s appeal lasted through “his impatience with the past, his critical stance toward existing institutions, his belief that men can shape their own destiny.” But Common Sense was despised by British loyalists and challenged by some American leaders.

John Adams would refer to Paine as a “star of disaster,” while Franklin worried about his “rude way of writing.” Meanwhile, George Washington valued Common Sense for its “sound doctrine” and ”unanswerable reasoning,” and Thomas Jefferson, soon to be the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, befriended Paine and later invited him to the White House when he was president.

Paine’s message continues to be invoked by those on both sides of the political divide.

In his 2025 year-end report on the federal judiciary, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts began by citing the anniversary of Common Sense and praising Paine for “shunning legalese” as he articulated that “government’s purpose is to serve the people.” Last year, passages from Common Sense appeared often during the nationwide “No Kings” rallies against Trump’s policies.

One demonstrator’s sign in Boston said, “No King! No Tyranny! It’s Common Sense.”

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — He has been in exile for nearly 50 years. His father, Iran’s shah, was so widely hated that millions took to the streets in 1979, forcing him from power. Nevertheless, Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is trying to position himself as a player in his country’s future.

Pahlavi successfully spurred protesters onto the streets Thursday night in a massive escalation of the protests sweeping Iran. Initially sparked by the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, the demonstrations have become a serious challenge to its theocracy, battered by years of nationwide protests and a 12-day war in June launched by Israel that saw the U.S. bomb nuclear enrichment sites.

What is unknown is how much real support the 65-year-old Pahlavi, who is in exile in the U.S., has in his homeland. Do protesters want a return of the Peacock Throne, as his father’s reign was known? Or are the protesters just looking for anything that is not Iran’s Shiite theocracy?

Pahlavi issued calls, rebroadcast by Farsi-language satellite news channels and websites abroad, for Iranians to return to the streets Friday night, which they did. He has called for further demonstrations this weekend.

“Over the past decade, Iran’s protest movement and dissident community have been increasingly nationalist in tone and tenor,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert with the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which faces sanctions from Tehran.

“The more the Islamic Republic has failed, the more it has emboldened its antithesis,” Taleblu said. ”The success of the crown prince and his team has been in drawing a sharp contrast between the normalcy of what was and the promise of what could be, versus the nightmare and present predicament that is the reality for so many Iranians.”

Pahlavi’s profile rose again during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term. Still, Trump and other world leaders have been hesitant to embrace him, given the many cautionary tales in the Middle East and elsewhere of Western governments putting their faith in exiles long estranged from their homelands.

Iranian state media, which for years mocked Pahlavi as being out of touch and corrupt, blamed “monarchist terrorist elements” for the demonstrations Thursday night during which vehicles were burned and police kiosks attacked.

Born into luxury

Born Oct. 31, 1960, Pahlavi lived in a gilded world of luxury as the crown prince to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Mohammed Reza had inherited the throne from his own father, an army officer who seized power with support from the British. Mohammed Reza’s rule was cemented by a 1953 CIA-backed coup, and he cooperated closely with the Americans, who sold the autocratic ruler billions of dollars worth of weapons and spied on the Soviet Union from Iran.

The young Pahlavi was schooled at the eponymous Reza Pahlavi School, set up within the walls of Niavaran Palace in northern Tehran. A biographer of his father noted the crown prince once played rock music in the palace during a New Year’s Eve visit to Tehran by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

But the fall of the Peacock Throne loomed.

While successfully riding rising oil prices in the 1970s, deep economic inequality set in during the shah’s rule and his feared SAVAK intelligence agency became notorious for the torture of dissidents.

Millions across the country participated in protests against the shah, uniting secular leftists, labor unions, professionals, students, and Muslim clergy. As the crisis reached a fever pitch, the shah was doomed by his inability to act and poor decisions while secretly fighting terminal cancer.

In 1978, Crown Prince Reza left his homeland for flight school at a U.S. air base in Texas. A year later, his father fled Iran during the onset of what became known as the Islamic Revolution. Shiite clerics squeezed out other anti-shah factions, establishing a new theocratic government that executed thousands after the revolution and to this day remains one of the world’s top executioners.

After his father’s death, a royal court in exile announced that Reza Pahlavi assumed the role of the shah on Oct. 31, 1980, his 20th birthday.

“I can understand and sympathize with your sufferings and your inner torment,” Pahlavi said, addressing Iranians in a speech at the time. “I shed the tears which you must hide. Yet there is, I am sure, light beyond the darkness. Deep in your hearts, you may be confident that this nightmare, like others in our history, will pass.”

Years in exile

But what followed has been nearly five decades in exile.

Pahlavi attempted to gain influence abroad. In 1986, the Washington Post reported that the CIA supplied the prince’s allies “a miniaturized television transmitter for an 11-minute clandestine broadcast” to Iran by Pahlavi that pirated the signal of two stations in the Islamic Republic.

“I will return and together we will pave the way for the nation’s happiness and prosperity through freedom,” Pahlavi reportedly said in the broadcast.

That did not happen. Pahlavi largely lived abroad in the United States in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while his mother, the Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, lived in Paris.

Circles of diehard Iranian monarchists in exile have long touted dreams of the Pahlavi dynasty returning to power. But Pahlavi has been hampered in gaining wider appeal by a number of factors: bitter memories of his father’s rule; the perception that he and his family are out of touch with their homeland; and repression inside Iran that aims to silence any opposition sentiment.

At the same time, younger generations in Iran born decades after the shah’s rule ended have grown up under a different experience: social restrictions and brutal suppression by the Islamic Republic and economic turmoil under international sanctions, corruption, and mismanagement.

Pahlavi has sought to have a voice through social media videos, and Farsi-language news channels such as Iran International have highlighted his calls for protests. The channel also aired QR codes that led to information for security force members within Iran who want to cooperate with him.

Mahmood Enayat, the general manager of Iran International’s owner Volant Media, said the channel ran Pahlavi’s ad and others “on a pro bono basis” as “part of our mission to support Iran’s civil society.”

In interviews in recent years, Pahlavi has raised the idea of a constitutional monarchy, perhaps with an elected rather than a hereditary ruler. But he has also said it is up to Iranians to choose.

“This regime is simply irreformable because the nature of it, its DNA, is such that it cannot,” Pahlavi told the Associated Press in 2017. “People have given up with the idea of reform and they think there has to be fundamental change. Now, how this change can occur is the big question.”

He has also faced criticism for his support of and from Israel, particularly after the June war. Pahlavi traveled to Israel in 2023 and met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime hawk on Iran whose criticism of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal fueled Trump’s decision to withdraw America from the accord. Netanyahu also oversaw the 12-day war with Iran.

“My focus right now is on liberating Iran, and I will find any means that I can, without compromising the national interests and independence, with anyone who is willing to give us a hand, whether it is the U.S. or the Saudis or the Israelis or whomever it is,” Pahlavi said in 2017.