[On September 19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept of parental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate that complex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leading up to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]
On two
distinct but interconnected lessons from a groundbreaking censorship trial.
In 1733,
the German American immigrant, printer, and journalist John Peter Zenger
(1697-1746) began publishing
strident critiques of New York’s colonial governor William Cosby in Zenger’s
newspaper The New
York Weekly Journal. Cosby had been abusing his power since his appointment
to the post, and Zenger used his paper to call out these abuses, sharing his
own arguments as well as those of others in the state’s Popular Party. The enraged
Cosby issued
a proclamation condemning the paper as “scandalous, virulent, false, and
seditious,” and when that did not stop its publication he had Zenger arrested
and charged with libel in 1734. After nearly a year in prison, Zenger’s case
was brought to
trial in August 1735; although the Judge James DeLancey was a hand-picked
favorite of Cosby’s, Zenger’s lawyer Andrew Hamilton argued his case directly to the
jury, and after only ten minutes of deliberation they returned
a verdict of not guilty (in opposition to the judge’s instructions to focus
only on the question of whether Zenger had in fact published the articles in
question, not their veracity, making this an early example of jury nullification).
In
returning that groundbreaking verdict, the Zenger jury were also helping
advance an important idea about the freedom of the press: namely, that truth is
an absolute defense against libel. Ironically, that same idea had been the
subject of a February
1733 opinion piece in The New York Weekly Journal, authored by “Cato”
(a pen name shared by the journalists John Trenchard
and Thomas Gordon). In that op ed, which closely parallels Gordon’s earlier
piece “Reflections
Upon Libelling,” Cato makes the case that even though “a libel is not less
the libel for being true,” it remains vital to highlight “when the crimes of
men come to affect the public…states have suffered or perished for not having,
or for neglecting, the power to accuse great men who were criminals, or thought
to be so…surely it cannot be more pernicious to calumniate even good men, than not
to be able to accuse ill ones.” When Judge DeLancey instructed the jury only to
consider whether Zenger had published his critiques of Cosby, he was trying to institute
precisely the opposite idea in law; and when the jury rejected those instructions
and ruled that Zenger was not guilty because his articles were true, they were
striking a vital blow for the future of a free press in the colonies.
That
principle is, or at least should be, universal to every era and every
community. But I would nonetheless note that Zenger’s own identity and
community, his status as a German immigrant (from the region known as the German Palatinate)
to New York and the colonies, adds important layers to these histories. Partly
that’s because after Zenger’s family immigrated to New York when he was a
teeanger, he was apprenticed
to a local printer (William
Bradford), as a result of a policy through which all immigrant children
from that German region would be apprenticed out. But I would also argue that
this community as a whole not only reflects the significant diversity
found in 18th century New York, but also and especially reminds
us that it is precisely this foundational diversity which has so often
contributed to our shared national ideals (including the freedoms of the press,
speech, religion,
and more). That is, while Zenger’s heritage had nothing to do with the truth of
his accusations against Governor Cosby, it nonetheless represents another vital
truth about 18th century America—and its legacies to this day.
Next
censored history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?
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