The father of our country may have had the disease of alcoholism. No, it isn’t Washington.
Review: "Tom Paine: America's Godfather"by W. E. Woodward
"If Thomas Paine had drunk even half the liquor that [the experts in the art of slander] said he drank he never could have written anything, but would have died of delirium tremens before he had reached middle age."(p. 16)
"In describing his alcoholic habits [the maligners of Paine] made his liquor consumption and drunkenness so preposterous that, if it were true, he could never have written anything at all, and certainly not such powerful literary creations as Common Sense, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. Nor could he have lived to the ripe age of seventy-two."(p. 337)
So wrote W.E. Woodward near the beginning and end of his 1945 biography of ...
