The Freedom of the Press

THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS / Don Bogen Consider the printer of an abolitionist newsletter in a river town on the border of the South. His office one cluttered floor on Front Street: job cases, drawers of tiny ornate type, rags, ink, and the single ponderous machine, its clunk of iron and overbite into newsprint. He is an artisan of the age before unions, a proprietor of a smaU significant trade in the burgeoning service sector. Capitalism is a steam train, chugging, half-ludicrous, protuberant. Its lurches break the hearts of entrepreneurs and drive the midnight ramblers into Bucktown. Torched hovels, barricades in the mud streets, an absurd six-pound cannon sledged in to terrorize the ghetto—such the trickle-down of the panics of the 1840s. The smaU businessman must pick at the leavings of the great, printing handbUls for dubious ventures, tracts, crank newsletters—anything the papers won't take. He has one simple labor-saving device and his own hands and judgment to sell. On slow days he can stroll down near the river and watch the stevedores whose work never seems to stop. Huge, free on this side of the water, 266 · The Missouri Review they take what's stacked for them, hefting load after load in the slowly drying stream of cotton, pig fat and lye. In this fresh republic, the printer is a bastion of efficient democracy. He is not just off the boat Uke the Irish day laborers idUng near the wharves. The mayor's his pal. The mad-eyed philanthropist who pays him to run those atrocity stories has a bond on the printing press. Yet there is some difficulty in the liquidation of assets. When the news comes to the printer's door as it must, in torchlight with pitchforks and chair-leg clubs, he will watch, before he passes out, his shrewed investment in democracy dismantled with a care that seems almost systematic, each oiled piece of the press lifted free and carried over a chain of heads down til it drops into bubbles beneath the dark Ohio. Don Bogen THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 267 ...