Telling Stories of Freedom of the Press

The rhetoric of liberty and freedom pervades American political talk. Sometimes it lurks beneath the surface of other issues, and other times it has pride of place. In either case, that rhetoric gives rise to a perennial American habit—telling and retelling stories about liberty and freedom in American history. Like the recounting each year of the Passover story at Seders around the world, these stories of liberty remind and reassure us that America is a land of liberty, that we must never take our liberties for granted, and that retellings of how our liberties were won or nearly lost should inspire us to remain vigilant in defense of them.

The books under review retell old stories in different ways and for different purposes. In Indelible Ink, Richard Kluger has written a familiar account of the Palatine printer John Peter Zenger, whose travails in New York in the 1730s as criminal defendant and persecuted printer built an imperishable monument to our reverence for freedom of the press. Kluger's purpose is to spur us, by invoking Zenger's example, to stand forth again in defense of press freedoms in an era when they are newly besieged. By contrast, in Press and Speech under Assault, Wendell Bird has given us a formidably researched and challenging account of the Sedition Act of 1798, its precedents, its uses, and its complicated relationship with the common law so often cited as justification for it. Kluger's well-crafted narrative tells us what we already know. By contrast, Bird's dense and powerful monograph warns us that we have been misled and that we ought to know far more, and it deduces conclusions radically different from those that we have often been told to draw. Bird's purpose is to challenge the power of conventional understandings and to bring needed complexity and nuance to that task.

Kluger is a prolific independent scholar whose works include Simple Justice (1975), The Paper (1986), and Ashes to Ashes (1996). His latest book, Indelible Ink, retells the story of John Peter Zenger, his newspaper the New-York Weekly Journal, and the efforts of colonial authorities to suppress it and to silence him and his political backers. Framing their story within concentric historical and modern contexts, Kluger insists that it is essential for modern readers to understand the value of press freedoms; the ways in which today they are threatened by such forces as market pressures, fear of terrorism, and governmental demands to protect national security; and, most important, how these modern threats were all implicit in the Zenger story nearly three centuries ago. Kluger's Preamble, "The Essential Liberty," begins constructing that modern frame for his historical story, eloquently extolling the value and necessity of press freedom; his Epilogue, "From Zenger to Snowden," completes that frame, drawing explicit links between past and present. Within that frame, Kluger recounts, with detail not found in previous versions of the story, Zenger's origins and career before he came to New York; his alliance with the political faction led by the prominent New York politician Lewis Morris; his collaboration with the Morrisites in creating a newspaper that became a powerful force challenging the colony's political establishment led by Royal Governor William Cosby; and his becoming the focus of the dispute between the Morrisites and the Cosbyites. The climax of Kluger's story is the prosecution by New York authorities of Zenger for the crime of seditious libel (punishing criticism of government or public officials), and the dramatic appearance at a critical moment in Zenger's trial of the great Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who took over Zenger's...