The system that the Founders created was remarkably resilient, even if American politics never fully lived up to Madison’s ideal of thoughtful deliberation. Right from the start, for example, it was clear that the newspapers would not be run by wise literati but by rabid partisans such as Philip Freneau, editor of the National Gazette, the house organ of Jefferson and Madison’s newly formed Democratic-Republican Party. Far from moderating political passions, Freneau stoked hatred of his political rivals, the Federalists, and their leader, Alexander Hamilton, even publishing an anti-Semitic poem comparing Hamilton’s work at the Treasury Department to that of Jewish moneylenders. In the 1820s, opponents of Andrew Jackson argued that he was using the press for demagogic purposes by making direct appeals to the public in partisan Democratic newspapers. Jefferson himself considered Jackson “a dangerous man” who was “unfit” for the presidency, saying in 1825 that Jackson’s popularity “has caused me to doubt more than anything that has occurred since our Revolution.”
In 1844, Samuel Morse’s demonstration of the telegraph—his first message, sent from the U.S. Supreme Court chambers in Washington to Baltimore, was, “What hath God wrought?”—sparked what the historian Daniel Walker Howe called the “communications revolution” of the 19th century. As America’s territory grew larger, the telegraph in effect made the country smaller, counteracting the slow communications the Founders had counted on. “Time and space has been completely annihilated,” a correspondent wrote after Morse’s telegraph demonstration. Instant communication made it possible for people to learn the results of political conventions and wars in real time—and to form and share opinions just as hastily.
The telegraph was only the first in a series of new technologies that political theorists saw as threats to democracy. In the 20th century, the journalist Walter Lippmann wrote that movies would encourage viewers to substitute the “pictures in their heads” for empirical truth. The political theorist Hannah Arendt noted that technology made it possible to distort historical evidence, as when Stalin airbrushed his rival Trotsky out of photographs of the Russian Revolution.
Arendt and Lippmann proposed creating spaces where judges and journalists could evaluate evidence dispassionately and reach reliable conclusions about truth. But in the 20th century as in the 18th, democracy turned out to be more durable than the literati feared. Their guardianship wasn’t just unnecessary; at times it could be actively harmful. Jefferson himself had promoted scientific racism. In the Progressive era, many scientists and ministers were enthusiastic supporters of eugenics, or “the science of human improvement through better breeding.” The Supreme Court upheld laws mandating the sterilization of the so-called feeble-minded; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of America’s greatest jurists, wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”