The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America Book

It's hard to classify this book, if such a thing matters to you. It's not a history, and it's not a work of critical theory, yet it plays with elements of both. It lavishes upon the reading of republican texts the complex language of cultural theory. Historians are likely to cringe. Students of literature will follow the language easily given the fact that literature departments no longer study literature but are steeped in cultural theory. Hence Lawrence Buell's glowing review. However, since Warner's subject matter, ultimately, is the historical relationship of letters to the public, the book may trigger the antipathies of literary scholars toward history. (You know, some folks just don't like mixing their carrots and peas.)

Maybe it's best to call it an interpretive text and leave it at that. However one approaches Warner's Letters, he or she can be sure to find the reading dense and slow-going. That's not to say Warner doesn't have some provocative ideas worth mulling over.

A chapter worth reading, for instance, is the one on the Zenger trial of the 1730s because that case, perhaps more than any other, depicts a dramatic shift in the role of public media from hegemonic authority to the policing "supervision" of the people. In 1733, John Peter Zenger began publication of the New York Weekly Journal to oppose and expose the royal agenda of William Bradford's New York Gazette. The Gazette served as a mouthpiece for the Crown, thus distributing only that information thought necessary by the King. When Zenger's paper introduced in its first essay the idea of "liberty of the press," the Gazette sued for libel. What made Zenger's victory in this case remarkable was that it appealed to the jury instead of the judge for its final verdict because the jury represented the public to which the Journal had supposedly given offense. From that point, until the Revolution, public print endorsed a civic operation of checks and balances on venues like the Gazette. Inevitably, tension heightened between the foreign overseer and diversified colonial body of public will.

Warner also gives an interesting, though by no means original, reading of Ben Franklin's Autobiography. Franklin, America's representative republican statesman, introduces a problem in our thinking about what republicanism and an exemplar of that political position means. The very idea of republicanism stands against individual authority within the state. Its premise rests on the sacrifice of the individual to the public good. Therefore a singular embodiment of republican statesmanship is rife with contradiction. So how does he pull it off? Through public print, of course. We all know that Franklin created himself through his publications, and that the Franklin of letters is not necessarily the actual person. Like Zenger's Journal, Franklin strategically fashioned an avatar of the public record whereby anyone and everyone could embody the Franklin ideal.

Warner also gives a similar reading of republican poetry and fiction which, I think, only a handful of people will find interesting. Once you have the Zenger bit down, you really have Warner's approach to republican letters in general down. The culmination of all this empowerment of public print is, of course, the constitution which will transfer matters of common law and custom to legal documents of authority, whether or not public consensus around its ideas actual exists.

Good luck with this one!