You Are Being Lied To
The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion,
Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths

edited by Russ Kick
published by Disinformation Books (a division of RSUB)
400 pp * ISBN 0966410076

Go Out and Kill People Because This Article Tells You To:
The Political History Of The First Amendment

Black Panthers walked the streets of Oakland, California with a copy of it written across huge pieces of poster board. The Ku Klux Klan uses it to defend its right to burn crosses. No matter how radical their politics, few Americans understand the true origin of the First Amendment to the Constitution, the little diddy that forbids Congress from making any law interfering with freedom of speech and the free press (among other things). [1] Calls for a return to the original intent of the Founders echo across the political spectrum. It seems that nearly everyone, from pornographers and bomb-throwers, to holy rollers and goose-steppers, are just sure that the secret cabal of wealthy landowners who founded this country would be so eager to read their tracts and pamphlets.

But the Founders were hardly the political idealists that junior-high history books claim they were. Instead, the First Amendment, like much of the rest of the Constitution, was written in flurry of self-interest shot through with compromise. The First Amendment was not designed to make sure you could look at naughty pictures, or read this book, or tell a gaggle of lawyers on the subway, "After the revolution, we'll be strangling our bosses with your entrails! Hear that, motherfuckers? Your entrails!!!" It was designed to make sure that the Federalist and Anti-Federalist wings of America's ruling class had freedom to operate in the public sphere. The notion that anyone else would be able to afford a printing press, or that a newspaper would be something other than the organ of a political faction (or that the people of color and the people of plain ol' no money would be involved in politics, for that matter), was alien to the Founders. The creation of the Bill of Rights and the political economy of the publishing industry at the time tell a more complete story. You were being lied to. In print, even.

The Bill of Rights

The inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution is typically interpreted as a victory of the libertarian Anti-Federalists against the elitist Federalists. The Anti-Federalists were worried that Congress would assume absolute power, while Federalists like Alexander Hamilton claimed that the Constitution gave sufficient protection against dictatorship without the extraneous amendments. The Bill was one of the many compromises between these two factions.

When Colonel George Mason first proposed a Bill of Rights at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the motion was voted down almost unanimously, with zero votes for the Bill. Even the Anti-Federalist stronghold states voted against the measure, and Massachusetts abstained. No state voted for inclusion of a Bill, including those states which had their own Bills of Rights. Federalist Robert Sherman explained that he, too, was for preserving the rights of the people, but the states could do that just fine. Not surprisingly, these delegates were often the ruling powers of their states; they were land-rich through government grant, they were the leading politicians of their home states, and they had every reason to want the buck to stop at the state legislature, rather than at a distant Congress.

Mason, who is occasionally brushed off and set upright by modern libertarians as an early defender of individual rights, was hardly an idealist himself. [2] He sought protection for Southern shipping interests in the form of a two-thirds majority for commercial legislation, in an attempt to guarantee his own fortune and the continued import of slaves. [3] Back in Virginia, Mason supported limiting the voting franchise to landholders like himself and affirming the freedom to bear arms only within the context of a "well regulated militia," rather than allowing individuals to own their own guns. [4] And this was the one person to initiate discussion of a Bill and one of only three who declined to sign the Bill-less Constitution in 1787.

In spite of this evidence to the contrary, historians continue to insist that the Founders were idealists who were interested in defending individual rights. This apologia includes creating alternative scenarios to explain the near-unanimous antipathy for a Bill of Rights, even up to insisting that it was a very hot summer in Pennsylvania and the delegates just wanted to go home, where they presumably had central air conditioning. [5] It took over two years for the Bill of Rights to be introduced into the Constitution, and even then, it was partially a matter of power politics.

The Anti-Federalists were against a strong central government, not because they felt that such a government would harm the civil rights of the landless and powerless, but because they did not want Congress to have direct authority in raising taxes. This would trump states' rights with federal power through the judiciary, or regulate interstate commerce. "But they found that the more politically popular argument to use against ratification was the Constitution's lack of a Bill of Rights. So they advanced that argument, although it was a smokescreen for their real concerns, to fuel criticism of the Constitution. By dramatically objecting to the absence of a Bill of Rights, the Anti-Federalists hoped to compel revision of the proposed Constitution so as to greatly reduce the powers of the national government or, alternatively, to sponsor a second constitutional convention." [6]

The Bill of Rights was actually added to the Constitution as a result of struggle from below, and the Founders did all they could to limit the power of the first ten amendments, both in drafting them and in subsequent interpretation. Land seizures by the poor, food riots, and other protests erupted across the United States during and after the 1787 Convention. This convinced even the most libertarian of the Founding Fathers that a strong central government was necessary to preserve their land rights and to challenge the Indian tribes that still occupied most of the continent, while putting limits on the power the ruling elite would grant itself. Radical historian Michael Parenti points out that the Bill of Rights, to the extent that people actually benefit from these rights, is best seen as a product of class struggle against the Founders, rather than as an example of the Founders' interest in the "grand experiment" of democracy. [7] The Founders themselves had no interest in anything more than a class democracy; their meetings were held in secret, and no reporters or information was allowed in or out of the hall during the proceedings. If one wasn't invited, one didn't count.

The Sedition Act of 1798

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were tools designed to silence Republican opposition and supporters of friendly relations with France. The Alien Act allowed non-citizens to be arrested without evidence during wartime, and the Sedition Act made criticizing the President illegal. These Acts were drafted by contemporaries and political allies of Founders and were passed by a Congress made up of Founders and their allies as well.

The Sedition Act was designed by the Federalists primarily to shut down Republican presses and to maintain power for its own international business practices, which were oriented towards the British. Proof that this bill was politically motivated became obvious when the House voted to extend the act from the originally proposed length of one year to the expiration of John Adams' term, March 3, 1801. Kentucky and Virginia each responded with acts basically nullifying the Congressional act (a tactic which would not work today, given the attenuation of states’ rights), but other states accepted Congress’ seizure of what had been a state function.

The election of 1803 ended the Alien and Sedition Acts, but not the social relationships that created them. The Sedition Act was powerful in that there were powerful connections between business interests and publishers. Only the wealthy could afford printing presses, and the wealthy had the greatest interest in public policy. There were no "non-partisan" presses, either; they were overwhelmingly owned by members of one faction or the other, and explicitly used as a bully pulpit. Unlike today, where even a relatively small concern can hire a printer to put out a magazine or flyer (and where a nominal independence from political parties is a common conceit among journalists), publishers and printers were formerly one and the same. To attack the press was to attack political opponents, directly. The Sedition Act was not a mistake or the result of a misunderstanding of the First Amendment, but was the result of a very mercenary understanding of the Bill Of Rights. It wasn't supposed to mean anything.

Not A Free Press, But An Expensive One

By 1800, there were over 200 newspapers, 24 of which were dailies, and the vast majority of which were political papers, rather than "objective" sources of news. The Gazette of the United States, for example, was a Federalist paper, while the cleverly titled National Gazette was a Jeffersonian, Anti-Federalist sheet. Political reporting was privileged, while the stuff that fills today’s pages (crime reports, news of accidents, unreconstructed press releases, and lifestyle reporting) was nearly nonexistent. The politics were hardly genteel; stinging denunciations and satire were the norm. Advertising, and the need for a mass audience to sell to advertisers, did not exist as we know it. Publishers and printing press owners were one and the same, and they were marketing towards their comrades in the upper classes. Newspapers often cost as much as six cents, a sum that made it impossible for the average working man to keep up on the news, since doing so would actually require buying more than one paper.

The press was vitally important for the founding of the country, as it made up an "internal bulletin" for the ruling elite of post-colonial America. Hamilton and Madison's "Federalist Papers" were printed (anonymously, of course) in The Independent Journal and several New York area papers. Anti-Federalist Samuel Bryan published his "Centinel" essays in Philadelphia's Independent Gazetteer. In spite of the fact that most papers were totally irrelevant to the average American, the mythology of a press for all from the time of the Founders is still repeated. George Krimsky, the former head of news for the Associated Press’ World Services, earned his paycheck with this bit of historical revisionism: "In the wake of America's successful revolution, it was decided there should indeed be government, but only if it were accountable to the people. The people, in turn, could only hold the government accountable if they knew what it was doing and could intercede as necessary, using their ballot, for example. This role of public 'watchdog' was thus assumed by a citizen press, and as a consequence, the government in the United States has been kept out of the news business." [9]

As noted already, very few citizens could even afford to read the "citizen press," much less be a part of it. The 55 attendees to the Constitutional Convention were a strong part of the embryonic publishing and newspaper industry of the United States, and many of them wrote, published, or financed work on politics, economics, and the sciences. [10] The media belonged to the elite, and the First Amendment was nothing more than an attempt to protect that elite from its own legislative excesses. Modern notions of the free press are quite different.

The Trickle-Down Theory of the Free Press