Letters on letters

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Among the many unexpected delights of my experience writing a master’s thesis on colonial British-American history was researching pre-Revolutionary newspapering.

In particular, I came to know and love John Campbell, whom I would rate as a Founding Father of our trade. He was the son of the Boston postmaster and bookseller Duncan Campbell, and founded the Boston News-Letter in 1704.

I met Campbell in the aptly titled book The Public Prints, by Charles E. Clark, which is all about the earliest stirrings of a newspaper culture in the British-American colonies, from 1665-1740. We might take it for granted that newspapers have always been with us, but that’s not the case. You have to go back to the Thirty Years War — sometimes referred to as the real “first” world war, from 1618-1648 — to find the fully developed form of publicly disseminated and consumed bound-paper products bearing words that transmitted the occurrences of the (mostly) present moment.

Back then, those often came in the form of pamphlets full of propaganda. They contained lots of stuff about atrocities being committed by the various combatants in Europe and religiously spiced admonitions to punish unbelievers of various flavors.

Campbell’s rag was different. The Boston News-Letter’s title indicates what it was: a combination of “news” and “letters” relevant to a specific community, being Boston.

Campbell’s news gathering focused on reprinting dispatches culled from the papers in London; publishing monarchical proclamations and policies; and also shipping news, which gave locals a sense of when, where and how they could expect trade and communications from the Mother Country and its colonies overseas.

The other component of this was letters. Literally: letters sent to the newspaper office and reset into print, relating the occurrences of the then-rural provinces of Massachusetts.

There were stories of mighty storms that blew down trees and crushed barns and homes, strange celestial observations such as comets and meteor showers (with dubious interpretations of their meaning), shipwrecks and piratical attacks, skirmishes and battles with the French up north in present-day Canada, rumors of disease and hokum cures for such, denunciations of political rivals and all the other rhetorical accouterments of what we call “civilization.”

And what is “civilization” but communication, played out in a discursive style that, while often defined by division and disagreement, ultimately weaves a narrative that has at least its basics in common?

That’s a windy rhetorical question, but it’s in keeping with the free-wheeling spirit of commentary that animates one of my favorite (and sometimes least favorite) parts of the job: receiving and considering letters to the editor. 

I’ve written about John Campbell before, but he always comes to mind during election season, when I — as his editorial descendant — am especially inundated by letters to… me. “The Editor.”

The news business has undergone many changes over the past 500 or so years. We’ve evolved and devolved to varying degrees in terms of the tools we use to get the news and the style with which we deliver it. Some of us have been better practitioners of the trade than others (there’s a yawning chasm between Walter Cronkite and Jesse Watters) but the “letters” section has persisted. And I’m thankful for that.

There’s nothing that can quite match the earnest expression of a community’s opinions, collected and reproduced in one place for all to read. Social media was supposed to be the ultimate forum for this kind of communication, but 20 years after the public launching of Facebook, I think we can all agree that it hasn’t delivered anything close to a meaningful space for civic conversation. Yet, the letters to the editor somehow feel more legitimate — even when they’re a pain in the ass.

Ultimately, as we evolve into a society in which artificial intelligence and predictive, generative information fills in the mental gaps that once stood for contemplation, it’s a burdensome though pleasurable (perhaps pleasurable because it’s burdensome) experience to receive your letters. 

With that, I’ll sign off on this week before the 2024 election with the same line I wrote two years ago, to close a similar article: “Thanks for writing, and keep reading.”

Eds. note: As of the Thursday, Nov. 7 edition of the Reader, letters to the editor will again be accepted up to 300 words in length. We appreciate your patience with our temporary 200-word limit, which enabled us to accommodate as many letters as possible in the pre-election period.