The ABC Settlement Is Just the Start of Trump’s Press Crackdown. History Shows Us What Comes Next.

 

History Dept.

The ABC Settlement Is Just the Start of Trump’s Press Crackdown. History Shows Us What Comes Next.

 

American presidents have often gone to war against the First Amendment — and won.

Donald Trump, who has called the press the “enemy of the people,” is threatening to use legal and criminal levers to “straighten out” journalists. |

 

By Joshua Zeitz

12/22/2024 12:00 PM EST

Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing writer, is the author of Lincoln's God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation (May 2023). Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/22/presidents-attacking-the-press-00195726

 

In July 1864, Edward Fuller, the editor of the Newark (N.J.) Evening Journal, published a blistering opinion piece criticizing the Lincoln administration’s call for as many as 500,000 new conscripts, a proposal intended to bolster the Union Army’s numbers as the Civil War ground into its fourth year. “Those who wished to be butchered, step forward,” the editorial read.

 

Within weeks, Maj. Gen. John A. Dix arrested Fuller, a Confederate sympathizer and staunch opponent of the Lincoln administration. The editor was promptly indicted on federal charges related to his paper’s discouragement of Union Army recruitment. Ultimately convicted, Fuller paid a small fine and returned to his post. His fate was similar to that of hundreds of Northern journalists whom the Lincoln administration arrested, prosecuted, jailed or punished over the course of the war, often on thin accusations that their writing undermined the Union war effort. In some cases, journalists served significant time in prison. In most others, the threat of indictment, censorship or closure was sufficient to stymie dissent.

 

 

In the wake of ABC News’ settlement with Donald Trump, who sued the network for defamation after it aired an interview in which anchor George Stephanopoulos said Trump was “found liable for rape” (he was not found liable for rape, but rather for sexual abuse in a 2023 civil case brought by columnist E Jean Carroll), watchdogs have sounded the alarm over the danger the president-elect poses to the free press. Indeed, Trump, who has called the press the “enemy of the people,” is threatening to use legal and criminal levers to “straighten out” journalists.

 

But as Lincoln’s crackdown on Fuller demonstrates, Trump’s anti-press stance is hardly unprecedented. In fact, presidents from John Adams through Richard Nixon used blunt legal and military force to mute their critics. In the period since Watergate, courts and civil society institutions have discouraged presidents from interfering with independent journalism. But historically speaking, that period was an anomaly in U.S. history — and now, as Trump prepares to retake office, it could be coming to an end.

 

Though America boasts a rich heritage of hard-hitting political reporting, there is a darker side to the story — that of presidents using the power of the state to bend reporters and editors to their will. It’s a story of progress and relapse, one step back for every two steps forward. History suggests that when presidents crack down on the press, the only check against executive overreach is popular reaction. The courts are sometimes, but rarely, a savior. Only public opinion can protect a free press.

 

The first wholesale assault on the free press in American history occurred during the administration of John Adams, when tensions with France led many leaders of the president’s Federalist Party to support a Sedition Act, passed in 1798, that aimed to suppress dissent and criticism of the federal government during a time of perceived national insecurity. Adams’ rival, Thomas Jefferson, who served uncomfortably as vice president, called it what it was: a measure aimed at the “suppression of the whig [opposition] presses,” particularly Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Aurora, the leading anti-administration newspaper.

 

The law made it a criminal act to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writings or writings against the Government of the United State, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the president, or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute, or excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.”

 

In effect, you couldn’t say anything mean about Adams.

 

Republican leaders, and voters who supported them, were appalled. The Bill of Rights was scarcely 7 years old, and already, a president — only the second in the nation’s history — was trampling over the very First Amendment, which guaranteed freedom of press, a freedom that had been denied when the states were colonies under King George.

 

At the same time, precisely because the amendment was new, its limits were sharply contested. Fearing that Jeffersonian Republicans might form a fifth column in support of France, Federalists like Robert Goodloe Harper warned darkly of “a domestic — what shall I call it? — conspiracy, a faction leagued with a foreign Power to effect a revolution of a subjugation of this country, by the arms of that foreign Power.”

 

The administration promptly put the act to work, arresting 25 Republican journalists and ultimately charging 17 of them with seditious libel. Among those imprisoned was Bache, who contracted yellow fever while in jail and died, even as his supporters attempted to raise $2,000 for his bail — an onerous sum in 1798. The administration even prosecuted and secured the conviction of a onetime journalist and sitting member of Congress, Matthew Lyon, who during his four-month imprisonment defied the president by continuing to pen articles critical of the Sedition Act and running successfully for reelection from his cell.

 

The Sedition Act proved enormously controversial and, eventually, unpopular. No less a high Federalist as Alexander Hamilton viewed it as both a political liability and genuine danger to America’s fledgling democratic republic. “Let us not establish a tyranny,” he warned. “Energy is a very different thing from violence.”

 

“Let us not establish a tyranny.”

Alexander Hamilton

 

Ultimately, public opinion proved the undoing of the Sedition Act — and the Sedition Act proved the undoing of the Adams administration. Even as pliant Federalist judges enforced the act with gusto — none more so than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase — ordinary citizens turned against the president. Far from cowing Republican journalists, the act emboldened them. Between 1798 and 1800 the number of Republican newspapers grew dramatically, and in 1800, John Adams lost to Jefferson, becoming the first president to be unseated.

 

In 1801, Jefferson allowed the Sedition Act to expire.

 

Subsequent presidents who imposed crackdowns on the free press similarly justified their actions as matters of national security. Such was the case with President Abraham Lincoln, whose administration suppressed over 300 Northern newspapers over the course of the Civil War. Suppression was strongest in border states like Missouri, home to a significant minority that sympathized, and in some cases fought, with the Confederacy. There, the administration tamped down on 55 of the state’s 148 papers.

 

Suppression operated on a sliding scale. In some cases, the government censored outgoing and incoming telegraphic materials to ensure journalists could not widely disseminate their stories. In other cases, U.S. marshals arrested individual journalists. Military commanders also issued gag orders and arrested offending editors or reporters, a task made easier when Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout large swaths of the border states and lower Midwest, where Southern sympathizers abounded.

 

Private citizens, including soldiers and members of the Union League, further bolstered these efforts through mob violence against pro-Confederate or anti-war newspapers, in odd imitation of the mob violence visited on antislavery publishers during the antebellum period.

 

Prominent journalists whom the administration jailed included Frank Key Howard of the Baltimore Exchange, John Mullaly of the New York Metropolitan Record, John Murphy of the Baltimore Republican and Dennis Mahoney of the Dubuque Herald, who was arrested and held in the Old Capitol Prison on orders by Defense Secretary Edwin Stanton. He later published a book, Prisoner of State, chronicling his ordeal.

 

Lincoln rarely involved himself directly in individual actions against newspapermen. Most often, his generals and civilian officials did the dirty work. But he certainly knew what was happening on his authority.

 

Most persons jailed by the administration served short sentences. The idea wasn’t to execute mass arrests and long prison sentences. It was to impose self-censorship on offending newspapers. In this regard, it didn’t work. The Democratic press, even the pro-Confederate Copperhead press, remained vocal and ubiquitous throughout the war. Indeed, during Lincoln’s 1864 reelection bid, Democratic newspapers ran what was arguably the most vicious, and certainly the most racist, campaign of incitement against an incumbent in American history. Democratic newspaper editors coined a new term, “miscegenation,” and accused the president of fighting a war to impose race amalgamation on the country. They claimed Lincoln was in fact “the outcrop of a remote African in his ancestry” and issued a stinging satire, Lincoln Catechism, that dubbed the president “Abraham Africanus the First,” including a mock rewrite of the Ten Commandments. This sample quote should give you an idea of how ugly it got: “Though shalt have no other God but the Negro.”

 

So biting was the opposition press that the president remarked to his young aide, John Hay, “It is a little singular that I who am not a vindictive man should have always been before the people for election in canvasses marked for their bitterness; always but once: When I came to Congress it was a quiet time. But always besides that the contests in which I have been prominent have been marked with great rancor.”

 

In reality, the Lincoln administration strove to walk a very fine line. Officials wanted to crack down on newspapers that were hindering draft enforcement, recruitment and other elements of the war effort — not quotidian political opposition to the president. But the military officials enforcing the crackdowns didn’t always make this distinction.

 

As was the case in the 1790s, judges largely fell in line with the administration. It was up to the citizenry to protect its First Amendment rights. In many border and lower Midwest states, the administration’s crackdowns against journalists and other Lincoln opponents produced a strong backlash, contributing in large part to massive Republican losses in the 1862 off-year elections. The president and his Cabinet understood that it could not press so hard without risking the allegiance of border state and lower Midwest constituents. The administration tolerated abuse more than it punished it.

 

The same pattern — press crackdowns predicated on national security interests — repeated themselves in the 20th century. During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson signed, and his administration vigorously enforced, a new Sedition Act. Socialist newspapermen like Eugene Debbs and Victor Berger were imprisoned for writing antiwar broadsides. In New Hampshire, an editorialist was sentenced to three years in jail for writing that “this was a Morgan war and not a war of the people” — in other words, for arguing that Wilson had either colluded with or been manipulated by financiers like J.P Morgan, who promoted American entry into the European conflict for personal gain.

 

During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson (left) signed, and his administration vigorously enforced, a new Sedition Act. Socialist journalists such as Eugene Debbs and Victor Berger were imprisoned for writing antiwar broadsides. | AP

 

Fear of arrest was only one arrow in the government’s quiver. The Post Office more or less shut down dissenting outlets like The Masses and the American Socialist, and scores of German-language publications, when it revoked their mail privileges.

 

Again, the courts mostly accommodated the administration. It fell to popular dissent, particularly in the form of socialist-leaning labor unions — which were strong in this period — and progressive critics of the crackdowns to serve as a check. After the administration badly overreached in its use of the Sedition Act during the Red Scare of 1920, popular opposition resulted in the act’s repeal and the election of Republican Warren Harding, a famously corrupt yet ingratiating figure who promised a “return to normalcy,” and even gave Debbs a presidential pardon. “Well, I’ve heard so damned much about you,” the new president told Debbs when they clasped hands in person at the White House, “that I am now very glad to meet you personally.”

 

Such was the pattern, as well, in the 1940s, when Harry Truman’s administration invoked the Smith Act of 1940 to target individuals accused of promoting subversive ideologies, including journalists associated with Communist or leftist publications. The act criminalized advocating the violent overthrow of the government, and its enforcement was particularly aggressive during the early Cold War. Notable cases included the prosecution of editors and writers for the Communist Party’s newspaper, the Daily Worker. Figures like Eugene Dennis, a prominent Communist leader and contributor to the publication, were convicted under the Smith Act alongside other party members in the landmark 1949 trial of Communist leaders. These prosecutions stifled dissent and fostered self-censorship in left-leaning media, as journalists feared being labeled subversive or facing legal repercussions.

 

In this case, it wasn’t so much public opposition, but rather, public ennui, that led to a relaxation of the government’s relationship with opposition journalists. By the late 1950s, as Cold War tensions began to thaw — Josef Stalin was dead, the Korean War had ended and Americans were enjoying an age of unprecedented prosperity — the public’s lust for crackdowns dissipated, and journalists felt emboldened to write freely.

 

As they came to view civil liberties as a greater imperative in the postwar era, the courts became more of a reliable ally of the free press. When the Nixon administration sought to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, citing national security concerns, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers, holding that the government could not prevent their publication unless it could prove a direct and immediate threat to national security. This case was a landmark decision for press freedom, affirming the right of the press to publish material of public interest, even if it is critical of the government.

 

We now find ourselves at an unfamiliar crossroads — unfamiliar to most Americans because they cannot remember a time when presidents threatened to use the courts, the Department of Justice and other instruments of federal power to stifle the free press. But it’s not unprecedented, if we take the longer view.

 

It is by no means impossible to imagine a world in which the Trump administration transitions from using civil cases to bully journalists into silence, to using the Department of Justice. The border and fentanyl crises certainly provide the veneer of “national security” interests, and as was the case from Adams to Lincoln to Wilson to Truman, an administration need only make a few examples of opposition journalists to send a chill over the entire profession.

 

What was true then is likely true now. The courts won’t save independent journalism. It will be up to American citizens to decide how much they value their First Amendment rights, and how vocal they will be in defending them.