ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the direct influence of Paine on popular politics among the mass influx of Mediterranean immigrants in early twentieth-century America. Some of the settings of Mazzari's tutelage were scenes that Paine could not have imagined. In the first years of the twentieth century, when Mazzari began to learn English and first picked up Paine, Luigi and Elena lived within the teeming multitudes of Little Italy. Paine in Common Sense had exhorted the British colonies' separation with a concern for democracy across a broad landscape of nationalities cast deep into the future. Further, Paine's disdain of the idea of reconciliation within the British Empire in 1776 was directly analogous to Mazzari's sense of the potential for an independent and democratic Italy to flourish under the yoke – the cultural hegemony, as his contemporary, Antonio Gramsci, would call it – of the Roman Catholic Church.
