The Unwritten Laws of Seattle’s Press
When a local paper targeted young women in its columns for 'assuming social superiority' at a dance, a vigilante citizen took matters into his own hands.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
An exciting incident which occurred in this town yesterday brings up the subject of the rights of the press, the abuse of its privileges and the remedy therefor. In the case of an indictment of an editor for as false and malicious a libel as was ever uttered, it was decided by the court that there is no law in this Territory for the punishment of that most infamous of crimes. What, then, are men to do whose personal character, social relations and domestic privacies are dragged and hauled up for public exhibition through the public prints? Ben Franklin said that the only proper remedy for newspaper defamation was the use of the cudgel. In this Territory, where there is no punishment provided by law for the malicious slanderer, an assault with a dangerous weapon is a penitentiary offence.
In the case alluded to, the publisher of a small advertising sheet, gratuitously circulated, has from time to time lampooned certain young ladies of high social station in an irreproachable manner, upon the plea that they were putting on airs and assuming social superiority; which certainly was no good reason for assailing them through the public prints in a manner highly offensive to feminine modesty and mortifying to their friends. One of our leading citizens, a married man and a friend of the young ladies, warned the publisher some time ago that a repetition of the offence would be punished. The warning was unheeded and the natural consequence followed in an assault which, though unlawful, had the sympathies of all fathers and brothers who respect the decencies and proprieties of social life.
The publisher of these scurrilous articles is no worse than hundreds of others in the community, who regard themselves and are regarded by others as respectable; he but reflected a very popular sentiment delighting in scandal. The newspaper publisher who drags purely social matters before the public for the purpose of slurring private character deserves to be clubbed, though the punishment may be unlawful.
“Ben Franklin... said that the only proper remedy for newspaper defamation was the use of the cudgel.”
This 1875 account of 'doxing' and social shaming in the press highlights a century-old struggle between the freedom of the press and the protection of private reputation. While we now debate online harassment and social media accountability, the frustration with 'accountability-free' media remains a persistent, unresolved civic tension in Seattle.
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