Like the Truth

After all the rioters at Trump rallies and the Trumpsters fighting them, they talk about who is trying to limit whose free speech.  And then there was the reporter, Fields, who was assaulted by the Trump campaign manager while trying to jockey for a question.  She worked for Breitbart, a Trump endorsing organization, who was just as embarrassed as Trump was and tried to bury the happenstance, until she filed charges.  Then she and the editor quit in protest.  Then, 3 days after Ben endorsed Trump, Trump threw him under the bus by refusing to step down from charges that he’d made about Ben being a child molester and psycho.  What’s the truth?

            “Don’t want nothing complicated, baby. Just want something simple— like the truth.” Isn’t that how that old song goes?  I sit back and remember New York vs. Zenger.  You can’t forget the names of the characters. 

1730, a new royal governor was appointed to New York, but took a year to get there. So the New Yorkers appointed an acting interim governor in Gov. Cosby’s absence.  Rip Van Dam (How’s that for a Dutchman!) was an old guy that held the interim job.  When Cosby got there, 1731, he demanded Van Dam hand over half the salary he had made. Van Dam didn’t give one and refused to turn over a penny.  Case went before Judge Lewis Morris who said Cosby has no right to Van Dam’s salary.  Cosby sacked Morris and when Morris tried to run for assemblyman, refused to count the votes.  Eventually a large group of people began to oppose the highhanded tactics of Cosby and they started a newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, published by a German immigrant Johan Peter Zenger (How’s that for a German!) Each week, Zenger anonymously wrote a scathing editorial against Cosby.  Cosby sued for libel, got a second compliant judge to issue a warrant to arrest Zenger.  But the clever German slipped more editorials through a hole in the prison door to his wife, and the newspaper continued to publish.  Cosby disbarred all the lawyers who wanted represent Zenger.  Finally the opposition folks got James Hamilton, the original sharp “Philadelphia lawyer”, to represent Zenger pro bono. Cosby attempted to stack the jury, but the courts overruled.

All the speculation around the colonies was whether the New York government could prove that Zenger had even authored the articles in the paper. They were anonymous. But the day of court, Hamilton stunned the court by getting Zenger to freely admit he had written everything.  But, Hamilton noted, Zenger was still innocent.  He was merely telling the truth!  And when governors overstep their authority, it is the duty of ‘we the people’ to tell the truth on them.  But didn’t the strict libel laws of that day still make him guilty?  Hamilton argued ‘jury nullification’, that an unjust or misused law could be overruled by a jury voting to nullify it by their verdict.  Jurors cannot be held liable for their decisions. 

And so the jury unanimously said “not guilty”.  The court exploded in cheers.  The city set off cannonades for joy. Zenger was set free.  This case set the notion in the colonies that papers should be free to criticize government.  Thomas Paine wrote that Zenger case was like yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater. If you do it for mischief, you’re in the wrong.  But if there really is a fire,(the truth) you do a service.  Zenger led to guarantees of freedom of the press throughout the colonies and to its inclusion in the First Amendment. Paine argued Zenger’s truth test in Common Sense for replacing a tyrannical king with a republic.  Lewis Morris’s son went on the pen the preamble to the US Constitution, “We the People of the United States…”

Don’t want something complicated, baby.  Just want something simple like the truth!