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Reviews of Books
Jeffrey L. Pasley, University of Missouri-Columbia
| The Free and Open Press: The Founding of American Democratic Press Liberty, 1640–1800. By Robert W. T. Martin. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 239 pages. $50.00 (cloth).
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The sporadic debate over free press theory in the early Republic has rarely seemed to progress during the past half century. Dominated by the sledgehammer scholarship of Leonard W. Levy, the discussion can be boiled down to an extended squabble over the relative fullness of the libertarian glass. At least as far as freedom of expression was concerned, Levy's Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History (1960) poured cold water on the mythology of America as a new birth of liberty, arguing that restrictive English ideas of press freedom were more widely accepted here, even after the Revolution, than liberal jurists had previously imagined. Those ideas included William Blackstone's common law doctrine of seditious libel, holding that words alone could constitute a criminal attack on government and the public peace, and that a free press meant only one that was not subject to prior restraints on publication. Other legal historians and journalism historians counterattacked, embarrassing Levy on many specific points by going more deeply into the record of popular politics than he had. (Levy had to reissue his controversial book with a new title, Emergence of a Free Press [1985], and a new twist ending that had obscure Jeffersonian Tunis Wortman rewrite free press theory seemingly overnight in response to the Sedition Act.) Yet Levy's critics rarely went much beyond the inherently subjective question of "how full?" in trying to show that early Americans were more libertarian in their outlook and behavior than Levy contended without successfully refuting his basic claim that the Sedition Act was more culmination than aberration. |
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Political scientist Robert W. T. Martin enters the press freedom debate with little interest in judging the legacy of early America à la Levy. Martin takes the more fruitful approach of problematizing the developments that Levy and his critics wrangled over, asking what press freedom was for and, implicitly, why the press was given the unique, privileged place in American constitutional law—and notions of liberty—that it eventually achieved. Whereas Levy and his critics tended to employ a vague, absolutist, and probably anachronistic standard of libertarianism that conflated political freedom of the press with the modern idea of free expression, Martin sets out to find something much more specific: the origins of American democratic press liberty. This phrase signals Martin's orientation toward the political uses of press freedom and the larger theme of the book, which is that the degree and type of press liberty a particular group or figure favored was a function of the degree and style of participatory democracy they favored. As Martin sees it, American democratic press liberty was founded on the victorious Democratic-Republicans' conclusion that an unrestrained press was indispensable to the functioning of representative democracy as they envisioned it. |
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Though The Free and Open Press breaks no new archival ground, Martin's research is quite thorough for a nonhistorian, avoiding an over-reliance on canonical, Founder-based sources and making significant use of the newspapers themselves. The strength of the book lies in its clear conceptual organization. Four of five chapters sketch out a handy narrative taxonomy of Americans' contradictory yet overlapping approaches to press freedom. |
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