OPINION:
INDELIBLE INK: THE TRIALS OF JOHN PETER ZENGER AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICA’S FREE PRESS
By Richard Kluger
W.W. Norton, $27.95, 334 pages
History needs heroes. But sometimes they must be created out of pretty thin cloth.
So it seems is the case with the patron saint of America’s freedom of expression, John Peter Zenger, whose 1735 criminal trial for seditious publications mark the establishment of our most vital freedom, the right to speak and write without fear of official restraint or reprisal.
Historian Richard Kluger won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his expose of the drug cartel known as the tobacco industry. This story apparently was more difficult to tell, but is all the more important because it is less about Zenger the man than it is about how efforts by governments to keep the people quiet when they protest official misconduct must be resisted at all costs.
As Mr. Kluger explains in his preamble, freedom of speech and expression is thought to be pretty well established in the American ethos these days. That right was formally established early on in the First Amendment to the Constitution and ratified repeatedly in such declarations as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s historic pledge during World War II that freedom of expression was one of the Four Freedoms America was committed to spread throughout the world.
Mr. Kluger is right that the Zenger story is especially timely at the moment because of the surge of the current government restraints on the established press, its prosecutions of whistleblowers of official misconduct, and its wholesale reclassification of public documents on uncomfortable foreign and security policy decisions. Shockingly, he cites the most recent survey of global press freedom conducted by the United Nations’ consultant group Reporters Without Borders. In its index of press freedom, the United States ranked 46th in the world, behind Finland, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Uruguay and even South Africa.
What is so timely about this well-written and thoroughly researched book is its reminder that no civil right extended to the American people is set in stone or inviolable. Efforts by presidents to prevent the public from learning about their gaffes, misjudgments, corruption or sheer iniquities are as old as the republic itself. John Adams, one of the more insufferable of our Founding Fathers, tried to impose the Alien and Sedition Acts on a hostile press. Even that hallowed press libertarian Thomas Jefferson tried reprisals against some of the calumnies published about his personal life. Abraham Lincoln routinely jailed pro-secession editors and both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR imposed wartime censorship.
While Mr. Kluger’s Zenger is hardly the heroic figure that historian-hagiographers have made him out to be, his acquittal of charges of criminal libel against the governor of the joint New York-New Jersey colonies was both a watershed event in American jurisprudence and an essential precedent in establishing truth as a bulwark against official reprisals against criticism.
Zenger was a German immigrant who was apprenticed to one of colonial America’s earliest printers, William Bradford. To be a pioneer in this new technological communications breakthrough — the printing press — was a dangerous venture. James Franklin, Benjamin’s half-brother, was jailed so often in Boston that he had to flee to Rhode Island. Bradford had started out in what he thought was the more tolerant colony of Pennsylvania. But he quickly ran afoul of the Quaker political elite and moved on to the vibrant port city of New York, where he prudently coupled his newspaper venture with being the colonial government’s official printer.
New York in the 1720s and 1730s was, like many other North American colonies, a place in ferment. The citizenry, while still professing loyalty to the British Crown, was beginning to chafe at the notion that since the king was the de facto owner of North America, his appointed officials need answer only to him. Colonial governors with their royal appointments were expected to carry out two main tasks, first to insure a steady flow of goods and tax revenues to Britain, and, equally important, to enrich themselves however they could.
No doubt seeing financial gain to be had, Zenger began publishing a weekly newspaper The New York Journal, and quickly allied himself with wealthy merchants and landowners who were resisting the financial impositions of the latest royal governor, an obtuse second-rater named William Cosby.
The diatribes Zenger’s patrons provided anonymously for The Journal may have shielded them, but they so vexed Gov. Cosby that in 1734 he retaliated by ordering the printer jailed and charged with libel in retaliation. After nearly a year in custody and much legal maneuvering, Zenger’s patrons secured the services of the legendary lawyer Andrew Hamilton. It was Hamilton’s masterful argument that convinced the jury to defy the governor’s judge and acquit Zenger. It was Hamilton’s landmark assertion that citizens had not only the right but the duty to oppose official wrongdoing and that if the allegations were true, they could not be libelous.
President Obama as well as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump should read this book, but probably will not. But you ought to, if only to stiffen your sinews.
• James Srodes’ latest book, “Spies in Palestine,” will be published in October.
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