Jun 21, 2018 - Sale 2483

Sale 2483 - Lot 210

Price Realized: $ 3,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,500 - $ 5,000
DEFENSE AGAINST CHARGE OF MALIGNING THOMAS PAINE ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. Typed Letter Signed, with a 12-line Autograph Postscript Signed, to Frank T. Winslow ("My dear Mr. Winslow"), asking him to convey to Mr. Mangasarian what follows in the postscript: a clarification of his statement about Thomas Paine. 1 page, 4to, "Metropolitan" stationery, folds, faint uneven toning. With the original envelope. New York, 26 March 1918
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". . . [W]ill you kindly show what I have written below to Dr. Mangasarian? You will readily see why I do not think it desirable to make it public."
The postscript: "My statement about Paine was based on Gouverneur Morris' statement about him, in his diary, while Morris was Minister in France during the Terror. Paine asked his help. Morris called on him, and found him in bed, where he had stayed for some days without getting out, to perform the offices of nature. If this is not 'filthy' I don't know what is. Morris comments . . . on his writing an article attacking the deist. 'Atheist' would have been the proper 13th century term as applied to Paine; but in the 18th century, the term was 'deist,' and this is the term I ought to have used."
M.M. Mangasarian was a resident of Chicago who, for several years beginning as early as 1909, campaigned against the characterization of Thomas Paine that Roosevelt published in his Gouverneur Morris: "[T]he filthy little atheist had to stay in prison, 'where he amused himself with publishing a pamphlet against Jesus Christ,'" (p. 289; Boston, 1888).