The Purpose Of A Free Press

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Currie, January 28, 1786

In researching this book, I ran across an astonishing piece of writing from our nation’s early years. It’s a fitting prologue for this chapter. In May 1831, a young French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the young nation of the United States of America. He was here at a pivotal time in American history. In the “Revolution of 1800,” Thomas Jefferson had ousted John Adams’s minority Federalist Party (largely made up of what Jefferson called “the rich and the well born”) and shifted control of the government to the Jeffersonian Democrats. To de Tocqueville (and most Europeans), American democracy was still very much an unproven experiment. De Tocqueville himself was skeptical that the American Experiment would last, as he thought that the “natural” state of man was to live in an aristocracy, but he was fascinated by the idea of an aristocracy made up of the workers. He was both skeptical and hopeful.

In 1835, just fifty-two years after the end of the American Revolution and forty-six years after the French Revolution, de Tocqueville closed his book Democracy in America* with a chapter titled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” Fascinated by that chapter title, which I had first seen on the Internet, I bought an 1862 edition of the book, translated into English. One of the three best-selling books of the entire nineteenth century, it was probably read twenty years earlier by Abraham Lincoln, as it was by almost all American politicians and most citizens. Turning the timeworn pages and reading the young de Tocqueville’s thoughts, I was astounded. It was as if he had seen America in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

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