How 'letters to the editor ' gave us 1st Amendment

How

'letters to the editor ' gave us 1st Amendment

When he was 15 years

old, working as an apprentice in his brother's newspaper,

Benjamin Franklin and his brother took issue with the

ethics of the Boston City Council on a matter involving

conflicts of interest. Fearing the wrath of the council,

his brother would not publish these views in his paper.

Soon, a series of anonymous

letters critical of the City Council's actions began

appearing daily under the door of the paper's office when

Ben and his brother opened for business each morning. The

paper published these "letters to the editor."

After receiving a few of

these letters under the door, Ben's brother began to

suspect who the author was; so he laid a trap and caught

Ben at dawn as he was slipping another letter under the

door jam.

However, the main charges

already had been published; feeling libeled, the council

had Ben's brother arrested. They demanded that he name

the source of the critical letters. He refused to

implicate his younger brother as the author of the

letters, and he remained in jail for several months as

Ben continued to publish the paper.

Broken in health and spirit

after his imprisonment in an 18th century jail, Ben's

brother finally was released, but he harbored resentment

toward Ben as the cause of his misfortune. Soon

afterwards, young Ben ran off to begin a new career in

publishing in Philadelphia.

The rest of Ben's story is

history, and there was one final chapter written at the

end of his life.

The ordeal from powerful

men taking legal action against a publisher to suppress

criticism from "letters to the editor" became

the impetus for Franklin's insisting that Freedom of the

Press be the first amendment to the Constitution of the

United States of America listed in the Bill of Rights,

first among the many freedoms we enjoy as citizens of the

United States of America.

Frank Cawood

Peachtree City

[Editor's note: Frank

Cawood is a stockholder in The Citizen's parent company.]