Unfreedom of the Press Page 5
During the lead-up to and commencement of the revolution, and the eventual victory over Britain, Thomas was most impressed with Benjamin Edes, a printer who founded and published the Boston Gazette with John Gill. “When the dispute between Great Britain and her colonies assumed a serious aspect, this paper arrested the public attention, from the part its able writers took in the cause of liberty and their country; and it gained a very extensive circulation.”6 When the British troops arrived in force in Boston, Edes was able to escape “with a press and a few types,” and began printing from Watertown. “In 1776, Edes returned to Boston, on the evacuation of the town by the British army.” Thomas wrote that “[n]o publisher of a newspaper felt a greater interest in the establishment of the independence of the United States than Benjamin Edes; and no newspaper was more instrumental in bringing forward this important event than The Boston Gazette.”7
David A. Copeland, professor at Elon University, writes that by 1768, Edes and others “synthesized all that had happened in terms of the importance of the press. . . . The press, they said, protects the liberties of the people. It keeps government in check. As the voice of the people, the press assures that officials will follow the consent of the governed.”8 Copeland describes how the Gazette declared, under the pseudonym Populus:
THERE is nothing so fretting and vexatious; nothing so justly TERRIBLE to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a FREE PRESS. The reason is obvious; namely, Because it is, as it has been very justly observ’d . . . “the bulwark of the People’s Liberties.” For this reason, it is ever watched by those who are forming plans for the destruction of the people’s liberties, with an envious and malignant eye. . . . Your Press has spoken to us the words of truth: It has pointed to this people, their danger and their remedy: It has set before them Liberty and Slavery; and with the most perswasive and pungent Language, conjur’d them, in the name of GOD, and the King, and for the sake of all posterity, to chuse Liberty and refuse Chains.” [Capitalization, spelling, and italics as in the original.]9
Professor Carol Sue Humphrey of Oklahoma Baptist University explains that “[h]istorians have long studied and discussed the factors that led to the American Revolution, and they have always given ample credit for the success of the revolt to the press, and particularly the newspapers, for their efforts during the conflict. Even those historians who wrote in the years immediately after the war praised the press for its many contributions to ultimate victory.”10
“During the first half of the nineteenth century,” explains Humphrey, “historians emphasized the patriotism of the printers in their efforts to help America establish its republican system of government as a model for the rest of the world to follow. These scholars are often classified as nationalist or romantic in their outlook and conclusions. For these historians, the American colonies had an important role to play in making the world a better place to live through the spread of democracy and freedom, and the newspapers served well in helping to bring about the break with Great Britain that led to these developments.”11 Humphrey argues that “[t]hese historians continually emphasized the importance of the newspapers in bringing on the revolt against British tyranny and praised the printers for their loyalty and patriotism in the fight for liberty and independence.”12
Indeed, support for independence spread from New England to the rest of the colonies. David Ramsay, one of the first historians of the American Revolution, famously wrote in 1789 that “in establishing American independence, the pen and press had merit equal to that of the sword.” In other words, most of the early printers, pamphleteers, and newspapers in the decades leading up to independence encouraged revolution, and they likewise were supportive of the revolution once war broke out.
As Ramsay noted, the role of the early pamphleteers and the relatively few newspapers—forty or fewer by 1775—that existed in the years before the revolution and the commencement of the war was profound. They were not only sources of information, but far and away provided the philosophical, substantive, and even polemical arguments for the causes and principles that animated the revolution and America’s founding. Indeed, in many ways they fashioned the case for liberty, independence, and representative government.
Copeland explains that “[b]y the last half of the 1760s, the press had become a partisan tool. Writers regularly proclaimed their rights to a free press. Increasingly, however, the Patriots, those in favor of American independence from Great Britain, attempted to silence opposing voices. What seemed to be a contradiction of demands to speak freely for decades, even centuries among Britons, vanished for a time in the colonies, but there was a purpose. It could be found in the ideas of government as proposed by thinkers such as Locke. When Americans won the Revolution and freed themselves from tyranny and oppression, the press resumed its role as a partisan mouthpiece, and most citizens of the new United States adopted the motto . . . ‘Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together.’ ”13 The groundwork had been set for what would later become the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Harvard professor and historian Bernard Bailyn, who has likely studied more of the early pamphlets than any other scholar, asserts that “influential in shaping the thought of the Revolutionary generation were the ideas and attitudes associated with the writings of Enlightenment rationalism—writings that expressed not simply the rationalism of liberal reform but that of enlightened conservatism as well.” “In pamphlet after pamphlet the American writers cited Locke on natural rights and on the social and governmental contract, Montesquieu and later Delolme on the character of British liberty and on the institutional requirements for its attainment.”14
The pamphlets, of which there were several hundred between 1750 and 1776, were, Bailyn writes, “[e]xplicit as well as declarative, and expressive of the beliefs, attitudes, and motivations as well as of the professed goals of those who led and supported the Revolution.” They confirm that the Revolution was “above all else an ideological-constitutional struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of society. It confirmed . . . that intellectual developments in the decades before Independence led to a radical idealization and rationalization of the previous century and a half of American experience, and that it was this intimate relationship between Revolutionary thought and the circumstances of life in eighteenth-century America that endowed the Revolution with its peculiar force and made of it a transforming event.”15
Therefore, while the revolution was undeniably a transforming event, it was not about the “fundamental transformation” of American civil society itself, as President Barack Obama would proclaim about his own election. Moreover, its purpose and principles were the antithesis of and incompatible with the philosophies that undergird the modern Progressive Movement, such as those espoused by German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, and later American progressive intellectuals including Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and Walter Weyl, among others.
Bailyn makes the critical point that “[w]hat was essentially involved in the American Revolution was not the disruption of society, with all the fear, despair, and hatred that entails, but the realization, the comprehension and fulfillment, of what was taken to be America’s destiny in the context of world history. The great social shocks that in the French and Russian Revolutions sent the foundation of thousands of individual lives crashing into ruins had taken place in America in the course of the previous century, slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly, not as a sudden avalanche but as myriads of individual changes and adjustments which had gradually transformed the order of society. By 1763 the great landmarks of European life . . . had faded in their exposure to the open, wilderness environment of America. But until the disturbances of the 1760s these changes had not been seized upon as grounds for a reconsideration of society and politics.” By the end of 1776, “Americans came to think of themselves as in a special category, uniquely
placed by history to capitalize on, to complete and fulfill, the promise of man’s existence. The changes that had overtaken their provincial societies, they saw, had been good: elements not of deviance and retrogression but of betterment and progress; not a lapse into primitivism, but an elevation to a higher plane of political and social life than had ever been reached before.” Bailyn writes, “It was the most creative period in the history of American political thought. Everything that followed assumed and built upon its results.”16
Bailyn states that the pamphlets published before and during the revolution and American independence were so important that “everything essential to the discussion of those years appeared, if not original then in reprints, in pamphlet form. The treatises, the sermons, the speeches, the exchanges of letters published as pamphlets—even some of the most personal polemics—all contain elements of this great, transforming debate.”17
Indeed, Bailyn writes, “[e]xpressing vigorous, polemical, and more often than not considered views of the great events of the time; proliferating in chains of personal vituperation; and embodying to the world the highly charged sentiments uttered on commemorative occasions, pamphlets appeared year after year and month after month in the crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. More than 400 of them bearing on the Anglo-American controversy were published between 1750 and 1776; over 1,500 appeared by 1783.18
One of the great pamphleteers was, of course, Thomas Paine. Although a recent immigrant from Britain, coming to Philadelphia in October 1774, Paine became a decisive voice for American independence. On January 10, 1776, Paine’s essay, Common Sense, was published as a pamphlet. Only forty-eight pages long and written in plain English, the pamphlet spread throughout the colonies. The Constitution Center points out that it sold an amazing 120,000 copies in its first three months, and an estimated 500,000 copies by the end of the revolution. An estimated 20 percent of colonists owned a copy of the pamphlet.19 Numerous newspapers also reprinted it, in whole or part.
It is indispensable, therefore, when writing about the press then and now, to examine key elements of this enormously influential pamphlet and the ideas and principles it promoted, contrasted with the ideas and principles of the modern media and the progressive ideology.
Common Sense begins with a statement about the distinction between society and government, and the latter’s limitations in a free society:
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.20
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a Government, which we might expect in a country without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. . . .” [Italics are in the original.]21
As the colonies increase in population and distance grows between members of society, and as public concerns multiply, a government of representatives small in size and confined in power becomes necessary, writes Paine, to “establish a common interest with every part of the community, [and] they will mutually and naturally support each other. . . .” “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no act can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered. . . .”22
Paine believed in the primacy of individual liberty; he was hostile to large institutions and averse to taxation and government regulation. For the modern Progressive Movement, and its media voices and scribes, Paine’s conception of government is too messy and too dispersed to allow for the required “expert” decision making and “scientific” planning required of a centralized administrative state.
Paine then attacks the British monarchy and hereditary succession:
[T]here is . . . a greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.23
Paine continues:
England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath as much larger number of bad ones, yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honorable one. A French bastard, landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. However, it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right, if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the ass and lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion.24
Of course, the progressive and modern media would agree with Paine’s condemnation of monarchy and hereditary succession, but what of the enormous power exercised today by lifetime-appointed judges, who micromanage more and more of society; unelected bureaucrats employed by scores of government departments and agencies, who legislate not through elected members of Congress but by the issuance of untold regulations and rules; and, the surrendering of sovereign legal and policy authority to international organizations, thereby conferring governing decisions to organizations that exist outside the Constitution’s framework? Is this a republican design of representative government of which Paine and his fellow countrymen would approve? Yet this is the design and increasing reality of progressive governance.
Paine follows with a call to arms for a revolution that had, in fact, already begun in Massachusetts, but had yet to rally all colonists to the cause.
Volumes have been written on the subject of the struggle between England and America. Men of all ranks have embarked in the controversy, from different motives, and with various designs; but all have been ineffectual, and the period of debate is closed. Arms as a last resource decide the contest; the appeal was the choice of the King, and the Continent has accepted the challenge. . . .25
’Tis repugnant to reason, to the universal order of things, to all examples from the former ages, to suppose, that this continent can longer remain subject to any external power. The most sanguine in Britain does not think so. The utmost stretch of human wisdom cannot, at this time, compass a plan short of separation, which can promise the continent even a year’s security. Reconciliation is now a falacious dream. Nature hath deserted the connexion, and Art cannot supply her place. For, as Milton wisely expresses, “never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.”26
Every quiet method for peace hath been ineffectual. Our prayers have been rejected with disdain; and only tended to convince us, that nothing flatters vanity, or confirms obstinacy in Kings more than repeated petitioning—and nothing hath contributed more than that very measure to make the Kings of Europe absolute: Witness Denmark and Sweden. Wherefore, since nothing but blows will do, for God’s sake, let us come to a final separation, and not leave the next generation to be cutting throats, under the violated unmeaning names of parent and child.27
The progressive historians were not about to let the early historians write the definitive history of the pamphleteers, printers, and newspaper publishers, despite the fact that the early historians were obviously closest to the actual events. The problem for the progressives was that the early historians tell the story of the revolution and America’s founding in which the principles and ideas of Western enlightenment—
individual, economic, and political liberty—lead to a mass movement, indeed a revolution. For America’s beginning must be either reinterpreted to accommodate the progressive ideological project, or denounced as a fraud and a sham perpetrated by self-serving commercial interests.
Indeed, as Humphrey explains, over time, later historians provided different explanations of American history that parted from the early historians and their patriotic view of the role of the press. For example, she writes that “[a]fter 1900 [progressive] historians presented a new interpretation of American history. In an era concerned with inequities and the lack of unity in American society in the twentieth century, the progressive historians emphasized the presence of conflict from the initial settlement of the colonies down to the present. Most of the disagreements and arguments occurred between different classes of people or geographic sections of the American colonies, but the Revolutionary era represented a period of both internal and external troubles. Divisions existed both between groups within the colonies and between the colonies and Great Britain. In this environment, the press played an important role in encouraging and carrying out a crusade for change. In pushing for alterations in the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain, the mass media often helped to accentuate the differences and thus helped to make the divisions grow and become worse.”28