[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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