As you celebrate our many freedoms during the upcoming Fourth of July holiday, thank newspapers.
They were the weapons of choice used by the radicals of the American Revolution. The pen, it turns out, really is mightier than the sword.
I came to learn this during the nation’s Bicentennial, a year-long celebration in 1976 of the 200th year since the Declaration of Independence was issued by folks like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.
You’ve probably heard of them.
During the Bicentennial, the nation held many celebrations – fireworks and parades were the order of the day on July 4, of course. But there were also many projects that didn’t make as much noise.
Independence Square in Philadelphia was cleaned up. Even Queen Elizabeth II made a celebratory visit, presenting the U.S. with a replica of the Liberty Bell, thus proving that, a couple of centuries later, Great Britain was a good loser.
But one of the most bizarre Bicentennial projects involved me. As a recent graduate of the University of Alaska, I was made editor of The 1776 Gazette, a weekly newspaper published by the journalism department that printed the news of the week from 200 years ago. The idea was that students would write the historical stories and I would put them in newspaper form. Copies of the newspaper were mailed to hundreds of libraries around the country.
I had to write every story in the entire newspaper every week.
This was not easy. Also, history did not unfold in 52 tidy installments through the year. Nor did it strictly follow the narrative that we had been taught in high school.
History, it turned out, is a bit messier.
I had microfilm copies of a few newspapers that were published in 1776, which made my job a lot easier. I made photographic copies of the more interesting pages and rewrote some of the stories to make them appropriate. Most of the original stories weren’t written in a journalistic style at all. They were usually letters, observations and reports written by various hotheads and cranks who wanted to break away from England.
A few newspapers also opposed breaking away. I had no idea.
One neutral newspaper was The Pennsylvania Evening Post, which was first to publish the Declaration of Independence on July 6, 1776.
That’s right. It took two days to publish the most important document in the history of our country.
As interesting as the “news” were the advertisements that appeared in some of the newspapers. One front-page ad I found involved selling slaves.
So while many newspapers were on the “right” side of history, supporting the rights of men, some were also offering men for sale.
The declaration states that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Unless you happened to be a slave. Or a woman. History is indeed a messy business, even in the context of the American Revolution.
But that history was not played out on the internet or TV. The good, the bad and the ugly appeared in the pages of America’s newspapers.
In every sense, the United States exists today not only because of the heroism of the founders, soldiers and other colonists, but the newspapers that knitted a new nation together.
Carl Sampson is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in Stayton.
