Glenn Greenwald’s post this morning and some of my reading for a revision of my paper with Chris Coyne on the Memphis Riot of 1866 got me thinking about the importance of a free press and a competitive marketplace for ideas. In my reading I came across the following eloquent quote from the April 1867 issue of The Methodist Quarterly Review, which appears to have been celebrating the establishment of The Charleston Advocate:
There is nothing so assures the triumph of truth and righteousness as the multiplication of unshackled organs of thought. Slavery could never have lived but by the suppression of free utterance. The human auction block and the free press could not stand side by side.
* For tyranny to advance, free speech and a free press are the first things that have to go. Indeed, one of the more troubling things about studying American history is the frequency with which people who expressed unpopular ideas were violently suppressed. To take just the example of Memphis in the 1860s, some people (black and white) were arrested or prohibited from freely assembling because they held abolitionist sympathies. The tables turned while Memphis was under Federal occupation, and Confederate sympathizers were actively suppressed. The constant is interesting. When you give someone the power to oppress others, you give them the power to oppress you. *
Later in the article, the writers get a little slippery: “Terrible is the government force by which this result has been secured; but where the insurgent powers of evil are fierce and rampant, beneficent is even the temporary despotism that brings them to order.”
