• BOOKS
• MARCH 3, 2009

Bookshelf

Newspaper Wars

How the press – brash, irreverent, partisan – served early America.

 

By JAY WINIK

As the economy reels and the Obama administration makes its first calls to action, not a day goes by that we don't hear urgent pleas for thoughtful bipartisan debate as a way of finding our way out of the morass we're in. In the same vein, we are told that the fulminations on 24-hour cable networks and talk radio -- or even on the editorial pages of newspapers -- stifle rather than enhance a proper consideration of "the issues." A subtext of these claims is that there once existed a golden age -- notably the Founding Era -- when Olympian political figures and impartial, public-spirited newspapers guided the nation in its times of crisis.

To get some perspective on such views, one need go no further than "Scandal & Civility," Marcus Daniel's detailed study of the American press in the 1790s. The idea that this critical period was marked by a calm spirit of reasoned debate is a myth, as Mr. Daniel shows, and a deeply misleading one at that. The postrevolutionary age witnessed the unexpected rise of fiercely contending political parties; an increasingly bloody French Revolution that divided Americans into warring camps; a string of crises, such as the Genet affair, the Whiskey Rebellion, the XYZ affair; and the passage of the Alien and Sedition acts punishing dissent. It would not be too strong to assert that every step along the way the very survival of the nation was at risk.
And what role did newspapers play? A profound one. As Mr. Daniel amply shows, they stoked debate with abandon as well as with a mean- spiritedness and partisan passion that make today's scuffles seem tame by comparison.
One of the most famous editors of the age was Philip Freneau, an ardent Republican and once "penniless young poet," and the publisher of the National Gazette, a semiweekly newspaper. What makes Freneau so interesting is that George Washington's secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, hired Freneau to work as a minor clerk at the State Department; however, his real responsibility was to galvanize, through his newspaper, Republican opposition to the administration he served. Rival journalist Richard Fenno, who was himself aligned with Washington rather than Jefferson, accused Freneau of being a "demon of slander," and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who often felt the sting of Freneau's articles, condemned Jefferson for paying Freneau with public funds, though to no avail.

Scandal & Civility
By Marcus Daniel
(Oxford, 386 pages, $28)

Sick of the constant tirades against the government, an outraged President Washington called on Jefferson to put a stop to Freneau. Remarkably, Jefferson refused, insisting the National Gazette had "saved our Constitution." But if Washington felt the pain of Freneau's attacks, it was nothing compared with what he suffered at the hands of another Republican, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora, a newspaper whose inimitable motto was Surgo ut Prosim ("I rise that I might serve"). A grandson of Benjamin Franklin, the worldly Bache was no run-of-the-mill journalist, which only gave more force to his criticisms. He labeled "unconstitutional" Washington's actions on behalf of the Jay Treaty -- a 1794 agreement with Britain, reviled by pro-French Republicans, concerning trade, sovereignty and the looming specter of war -- and called for the president's impeachment. Remember, until then Washington was seen as virtually untouchable.
Nor did Bache stop there. At the same time that his paper praised revolutionary France's bloodthirsty dictator, Maximilian Robespierre, as the "embodiment of virtue," he derided Washington as a "Demi-God of a Turkish seraglio." Others joined the fray: One writer spoke of Washington's "childish ambition"; another said that Washington was "cowardly"; a third that he was "insipid." Bache himself blasted Washington as "guilty of the foulest designs against the liberty of the people." (Victims of Keith Olbermann or Sean Hannity take note: This was some of the tamer stuff.)
Yet if it got personal between editors and politicians, it was equally personal between journalists and journalists. Where Freneau ridiculed Fenno's "court sycophantism," Bache published a scathing account of William Cobbett's personal life -- the eccentric Englishman, who had come to the U.S. in the early 1790s, published the pro-British Porcupine's Gazette -- and one cartoon even pictured Cobbett as acting upon the urgings of the "devil." Dripping with contempt for his adversaries, Cobbett fired back at pro-Jacobins like Bache, labeling them "deluded," among other things.
With almost eerie echoes for today, Mr. Daniel shows how a number of the most prominent newspapers in the 1790s rose and fell, going out of business almost as quickly as they were launched. Richard Fenno watched in horror as the financial affairs of his influential Gazette of the United States deteriorated, and he was even forced to receive a small publishing commission from George Washington. Meanwhile, the publisher of the daily paper Minerva, Noah Webster -- of Webster's "speller" fame -- tired of the rough-and-tumble of journalism and withdrew from public life altogether.
The press had other problems, too. Cobbett became the first editor to be prosecuted for libel by the federal government, losing his case in a "ruinous verdict," and in 1800 returned to England, convinced that America's free press was in jeopardy. And radical journalist William Duane saw his paper slowly strangled by the Sedition Act of 1798. In words that would ring as true today, he moaned that "newspaper debts are the worst of all others."
In an age when our newspaper industry is increasingly embattled, "Scandal & Civility" serves as a timely reminder of just how vital a thriving news culture is to the well-being of our democracy. The book, it should be said, is the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation and is at times marred by the jargon one finds in graduate seminars. But it neatly presents an animated portrait of the postrevolutionary era, when opinionated, brash, irreverent newspapers were indispensable. They are no less indispensable to us today.
Mr. Winik is the author of "The Great Upheaval" and "April 1865."