Category: Blogs and bloggers

I started reading Bernard Bailyn’s fascinating book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and was struck by his description of pamphleteering as the primary means by which revolutionary ideas were spread:

It was in this form — as pamphlets — that much of the most important and characteristic writing of the American Revolution appeared. For the Revolutionary generation, as for its predecessors back to the early sixteenth century, the pamphlet had peculiar virtues as a medium of communication. Then, as now, it was seen that the pamphlet allowed one to do things that were not possible in any other form.

Bailyn offers this quote from Orwell:

The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and “high-brow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of “reportage.” All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.

Bailyn continues:

The pamphlet’s greatest asset was perhaps its flexibility in size, for while it could contain only a very few pages and hence be used for publishing short squibs and sharp, quick rebuttals, it could also accomodate much longer, more serious and permanent writing as well. Some pamphlets of the Revolutionary period contain sixty or even eighty pages, on which are printed technical, magisterial treatises. Between the extremes of the squib and the book-length treatise, however, there lay the most commonly used, the ideally convenient length: from 5,000 to 25,000 words, printed on anywhere from ten to fifty pages, quarto or octavo in size.

The pamphlet of this middle length was perfectly suited to the needs of the Revolutionary writers. It was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument — to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions; it could accomodate the elaborate involutions of eighteenth-century literay forms; it gave range for the publication of fully-wrought, leisurely-paced sermons; it could conveniently carry state papers, collections of newspaper columns, and strings of correspondence. It was in this form, consequently, that “the best thought of the day expressed itself”; it was in this form that “the solid framework of constitutional thought” was developed; it was in this form that “the basic elements of American political thought of the Revolutionary period appeared first.” And yet pamphlets of this length were seldom ponderous; whatever the gravity of their themes or the spaciousness of their contents, they were always essentially polemical, and aimed at immediate and rapidly shifting targets: at suddenly developing problems, unanticipated arguments, and swiftly rising, controversial figures. The best of the writing that appeared in this form, consquently, had a rare combination of spontaneity and solidity, of dash and detail, of casualness and care. (pp. 2-4)

Bailyn goes on to identify three main types of pamphlet: the direct response to a current event, the “chain-reacting polemic” – a series of back-and-forth debates “which characteristically proceeded with increasing shrillness until it ended in bitter personal vituperation,” (my emphasis) and ritualistic commemorative orations.

At any rate, I think it’s clear that if the Revolutionary generation had lived today they would’ve been ardent bloggers. 😉