2
Old Fake News
Titan Leeds was dead. There was no doubt whatsoever about that.
A hardworking and honest man—he had been a successful publisher in the city of Burlington, New Jersey, prior to his sad demise—Mr. Leeds passed away on Wednesday, October 17, in the year of our Lord 1733, at around half past three in the afternoon. The unhappy news of Leeds’s death was somberly recorded, printed and distributed in black-and-white for all to read: “’tis undoubtedly true that he is really defunct and dead,”16 the story of his passing reads, in part. And, even though it had been predicted in advance that he was not long for this world, the news of his loss at a relatively young age—he was still in his early thirties—must nevertheless have come as a shock to many in Burlington, a bustling community beside the Delaware River that had grown rapidly since its founding by a group of Quakers some five decades previous.
The person who was most shocked by it would probably have been Titan Leeds himself, as he was pretty darn sure he was still alive.
We can only guess at his exact reaction. But there’s good reason to believe that the very much non-deceased Mr. Leeds must have been, shall we say, quite put out upon reading the news of his untimely death. I mean...that’s the sort of thing that would throw you a bit, right? Any of us could be forgiven for freaking out a little. But it must have been especially confusing in the world of the 1730s, because, at that time, Leeds wouldn’t really have had many reference points for what was happening to him.
In our age, the unsettling experience of reading about your own death is, thankfully, still a pretty rare one—but we are at least broadly aware that it’s a possibility. We’ve probably all heard tales in the news of people it’s happened to: corpses mistakenly identified, or obituaries accidentally published early. “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” is such a well-known quote that it’s now virtually a cliché (even if a pedant would point out that Mark Twain never actually said quite those words).17 In 1980, the New York Times ran an obituary of the notorious hoaxer Alan Abel18—an editorial decision with seemingly obvious pitfalls, as became very apparent the following day when Abel held a press conference to announce that he’d staged his own death in order “to gain publicity.”19 (When Abel finally passed away, a full thirty-eight years later, the New York Times’s second go at his obituary wryly recorded that he “apparently actually did die.”20)
In other words, for us, premature death notices are “a thing.” Not only do we know that this kind of stuff sometimes happens, but many of us have probably, at some point, imagined what it might be like if it happened to us. (Admit it: “People mistakenly believe I’m dead, so I get to find out what everybody really thinks of me” is a thought that’s occurred to you in your darker moments.) In 2009, when the combination of a spoof website and the always overactive Twitter rumor mill temporarily killed Jeff Goldblum, the actor ended up going on The Colbert Report to deliver his own eulogy, which I think we can all agree is the classy way to handle something like that.21
But, for Titan Leeds—living, as he was, far nearer to the dawn of the era of mass media—this must have all been strange and new. Having people think you were dead because of something they’d read must have been far weirder even than it would be for us...and also far more infuriating. Not least because his own efforts to debunk the news were, shall we say, not 100 percent successful. Despite Leeds angrily insisting in print that he was very much alive, reports continued to appear for several years afterward, confidently asserting that he was definitely super dead. To add insult to injury, these reports insisted that whichever imposter was now writing angry screeds about still being alive under the name of the late Mr. Leeds should stop at once, because it was besmirching the beloved memory of the departed.
This all happened because the story of Leeds’s death hadn’t simply been an innocent mistake—a clerical error, say, or an unfounded rumor credulously repeated. It was actually a deliberate and gleeful falsehood, spread for two classic reasons: profit and mischief. It was a no-holds-barred (and remarkably successful) effort to boost sales on the part of an upstart publishing rival. It was Titan’s extra misfortune that this rival happened to have a particularly impish sense of humor. And, if Leeds was annoyed about that, he’d probably have been absolutely furious to learn that the two-bit huckster who’d fabricated his death as a cheap marketing stunt would, in the following decades, go on to become the most celebrated intellectual hero of the nascent United States.
In short, Titan Leeds was having a fairly brutal early encounter with what can only be described as “fake news.”
Titan’s post-truth predicament started for the simple reason that a rival almanac maker had turned up just down the river. In the America of the 1730s, almanacs were big business, and Titan Leeds was at the top of the game. He’d inherited publishing duties on the Leeds Almanac from his father, Daniel, when the old man was forced into retirement. Daniel Leeds had been born into a Quaker family, originally from Leeds in England (the small one in Kent, not the big one in Yorkshire).22 In the face of rising persecution, the Leeds family immigrated to the Americas in 1677, in an effort to escape the religious strictures of the Old World—only for Daniel to run smack-bang up against the religious strictures of the New World.
A thoughtful and self-taught man, much given, in his youth, to spiritual visons and occasional bursts of weeping, Daniel Leeds had a very particular and somewhat unorthodox personal philosophy—one that combined heterodox Christian mysticism with a deep love of science. It was his desire to spread the truth as he saw it that brought him to publishing—first with a pioneering almanac, and then with a grand philosophical and theological tract that represented the apex of his life’s work. He was utterly crushed when, angered by his nonconformist ideas and heavy use of astrology, his fellow Quakers in the community that had founded Burlington rejected his works, suppressing his first almanac and destroying almost every copy of his book.
But Daniel Leeds was unbowed, and, rather than settle for the quiet life, he returned to producing his almanac with renewed vigor—in addition to engaging in a long-running and incredibly bitter pamphlet war with his neighbors, a rolling series of feuds that ended up with Leeds being accused by one nemesis (he had several) of being a literal devil. He was, they wrote, “Satan’s harbinger.” Eighteenth-century Quaker beef could be savage.
Such notoriety may have made for some awkward moments on the streets of Burlington, but it wasn’t necessarily bad for business, and, from its origins as one of the first true almanacs in the American colonies, the Leeds Almanac found a sizable audience. By the time the acrimonious fallout from an ill-advised political alliance finally pushed Daniel to hand over the reins of the almanac to his teenage son, Titan, in 1714, it had a decades-long reputation as the leading almanac in the area.
The trouble with being a market leader, of course, is that it paints a big old target on your back for any rivals trying to enter the market. Which is exactly what an ambitious young chap named Benjamin Franklin took aim at when he decided to get into the almanac game.
These days, Franklin is remembered as one of the core Founding Fathers of the USA, the man who, above all others, was the great intellectual heavyweight of the American independence movement. Franklin was a multitalented genius, whose legacy stretches from pioneering experiments with electricity to creating America’s first public lending library, and from establishing the US postal system to the invention of bifocal glasses. I promise that I’m not going to make a habit of cut-and-pasting from Wikipedia in this book, but, to give you a sense of just how much of an irritating overachiever Benjamin was, the opening lines of his page identify him as “a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, Freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, humorist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat.”23
Honestly, it’s exhausting just reading it. Stay in your lane, Benjamin.
But back in 1732, Franklin was still in his twenties and wasn’t yet a leading anything. Having fled his native Boston at the age of seventeen to escape his elder brother’s shadow, he’d recently set up shop as a printer in Philadelphia, the swiftly growing city just down the river from Burlington. (These days, thanks to a few centuries of urban sprawl, Burlington is now a suburb of Philly). Franklin was good at his job, with a profitable newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, already in his burgeoning publishing stable. But if you wanted the big bucks back then, you really needed your diversified portfolio of media brands to extend into the almanac space.
Benjamin Franklin: annoying overachiever.
Almanacs, in case you’re not familiar with them, were effectively a guide to useful information that you might want to know in the coming year. Much as in the following centuries newspapers would do the job of bundling together sports results, TV listings, a bit of opinion, weather forecasts and some light astrology into something that people wanted to buy, almanacs did the same with...well, a bit of opinion, weather forecasts and some light astrology. (The TV listings were slightly less of a big deal in the 1730s.) For communities that still had farming at their hearts, the promise of such knowledge—when the sun would rise and set, when the tides would be high, when the seasons would change—was essential. One major almanac of the time, published by Nathaniel Ames in Massachusetts, had sales upward of fifty thousand copies a year—huge numbers for a still-young publishing industry.24 You can see why Franklin wanted a piece of that action.
And so it was that, in 1732, he launched Poor Richard’s Almanack, writing under the pseudonym of “Richard Saunders,” whom he characterized as an impoverished stargazer forced into publishing by a demanding wife who insisted that he do something to earn a living. (Franklin really loved a pseudonym. Spoiler warning: this is not the only time a pseudonym of Ben Franklin’s will play a significant role in this book.)
By this point, feuds between rival prognosticators were already a well-established facet of the normally mild-mannered American almanac scene, with some competitors fulminating against their rivals in yearly doses of invective. (In 1706, one Boston almanac author, Samuel Clough, instructed his rival, Nathaniel Whittemore, to—and this is an exact quote—“jog on.”25) But, whereas most of these feuds basically came down to saying, “You’re rubbish at doing almanacs,” Franklin chose a more sly approach to taking a pop at his main competitor—one that was also a lot funnier. He had “Saunders” write in his introduction that, honestly, he would have jumped at the opportunity to publish a profitable almanac many years earlier, if it wasn’t for the fact that, out of the kindness of his heart, he didn’t want to ruin the business of his “good Friend and Fellow-Student, Mr. Titan Leeds.”
The only reason he’d now changed his mind, he said, was that very sadly this wouldn’t be a problem for much longer—because Titan Leeds was going to die shortly. Or, as he put it, “inexorable Death, who was never known to respect Merit, has already prepared the mortal Dart, the fatal Sister has already extended her destroying Shears, and that ingenious Man must soon be taken from us.”26 We pause here briefly to note that The Fatal Sister Has Extended Her Destroying Shears is an absolutely brilliant title for a metal album that is currently just sitting there unclaimed.
Franklin predicted that Titan Leeds would die, “by my Calculation made at his Request, on Oct. 17. 1733. 3 ho. 29 m. P.M. at the very instant of the conjunction of the Sun and Mercury,” adding for a bit of color that there was a disagreement with Leeds about the exact date: “By his own Calculation he will survive till the 26th of the same Month.”
It’s a good joke, although it wasn’t even one of Franklin’s own—he’d pinched it from Jonathan Swift, who, in 1708, had pulled the exact same stunt on an astrologer and almanac author named John Partridge, predicting in a fake almanac published under a pseudonym that “he will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever.”27 Franklin, no fan of astrology, was certainly aware of Swift’s hoax (and the fact that Daniel Leeds had been an advocate of Partridge) and was winking at any in-the-know readers who would recognize it too.
Unfortunately for Titan Leeds, he was very much not in on the joke. Where his father had been blessed with a decent sense of humor, Titan was (in the words of one scholar) “a serious, self-righteous, gullible, practical man who appeared to take things at face value.”28 As a result, he did what any playground bully could tell you was the absolute worst thing to do: he took the bait. Responding to “Poor Richard” a year later, in his almanac for the year 1734 (almanac feuds were a little slower than Twitter), he attacked his rival for “gross Falsehood,” branded him “a Fool and a Liar,” and proudly boasted that “notwithstanding his false Prediction, I have by the Mercy of God lived to write a diary for the Year 1734, and to publish the Folly and Ignorance of this presumptuous Author.”29
That was the only excuse Franklin needed, and so he took his hoax to the next level. First in his 1734 almanac, in which he expressed shock at the terribly unkind things written about him and suggested that this indicated his dear old friend Leeds almost certainly was dead, and somebody meaner was writing his almanac in his place. And then, in the following year’s edition, he announced that he had now confirmed that Leeds had indeed died on the predicted day, before lamenting that he had “receiv’d much Abuse from the Ghost of Titan Leeds, who pretends to be still living, and to write Almanacks in spight of me and my Predictions.”
Exactly how long Franklin would have gone on taunting Leeds in his almanacs, and how Leeds would have reacted to the continued proclamations of his death, is something that we will sadly never know. That’s because, in 1738, just when the whole thing was in danger of becoming really confusing, Titan Leeds simplified the situation by actually dying.
That, you would think, should have been the end of it—not least because most people’s reaction to the sudden real-life death of the person whose death they’d been joking about would probably be to, I don’t know, feel a bit guilty and not mention it again. That would be your reaction, right?
That was not Franklin’s reaction.
No, instead, in 1739, he published a fake letter from the ghost of Titan Leeds, confirming that “Poor Richard” had been right all along, he really had died in 1733, and asserting that the almanac the real Titan Leeds had been publishing for years was the work of imposters.
Let us speak plainly: Benjamin Franklin was a massive fucking troll.
He was also a successful troll, because it worked. Poor Richard’s Almanack became a huge hit, while the Leeds Almanac went into decline and ceased publication about a decade later. Franklin’s almanac was sharper and more entertaining than its competition, and his business practices were more ruthless. He hadn’t just been having a cheeky pop at astrology in his writing; he’d also been reminding the audience of the Leeds family’s association with strange beliefs and those old slurs about them being “Satan’s harbinger.” The fact that what he was writing wasn’t actually true...didn’t seem to matter very much.
Which, in many ways, is the point of this book. Because, as we’ll see, throughout history, when we’ve been faced with the choice between what’s true and what’s a good story, we tend to go for the good story.
But let’s back up a bit: we need to look at exactly how the strange and confusing new world of mass media that Titan Leeds was living in came about. The idea of “news,” and the hunger for it, was of course not new. People have always wanted to know stuff, and particularly to know stuff that somebody else doesn’t know: what’s happening beyond the horizon, or on the other side of a closed door or behind someone’s back.
This was particularly the case in earlier centuries when travel was harder and rarer; news moved no faster than a horse, and arrived rarely if ever—and so was hungrily consumed whenever it showed up. In Wales in the eleventh century, the monks at two remote monasteries a hundred miles apart were so eager for fresh information that once every three years they would do swapsies, each sending a news-monk on the hazardous journey across Snowdonia to spend a week living at the other monastery, where they would deliver all the latest gossip.30
But from the middle of the fifteenth century onward, things would begin to change dramatically. Disentangling exactly what caused what during this period in Europe’s history is...tricky, because bluntly there was a huge amount of stuff going on all over the place: almost constant wars, religious schisms aplenty, the discovery of new lands, more contact with other cultures and the rediscovery of ancient texts from previous ages. But in the interests of simplicity, let’s say that there were three major changes during this time that would transform our basic human desire to know stuff into something far more consequential: an information explosion that would shape the world in strange and profound ways.
One of these was the gradual development of reliable and extensive postal networks. Another was the rise of the merchant class as international trade expanded, a new wealthy elite with connections and interests that could span a continent, for whom the latest news wasn’t merely interesting—it was extremely valuable. And the third, of course, was the innovation of the printing press.
The postal networks meant that all of a sudden news didn’t need to be delivered in person: one individual could both send and receive news from the comfort of their home, without the need for dangerous travel or an army of messengers (or indeed an actual army, to make sure the messengers reached their destination safely). The letter quickly became the favored medium for news addicts of all sorts—and eventually, it became a business opportunity too.
By the late sixteenth century, a new profession had emerged: the newsletter writer. Starting in the great cities of Italy, these novellanti would gather all the latest and most reliable information from their contacts and write them up into manuscript letters that would be posted across the continent to their subscribers: wealthy politicians and businessmen who paid a hefty amount for such a service. Savvy and impeccably well connected, with a business built on the reliability of their information, these people were, as Andrew Pettegree describes them in his book The Invention of News, “the first news agencies.”31
Meanwhile, in 1439, Johannes Gutenberg had introduced the movable-type printing press to Europe, and in doing so set off a Sudden and Confusing Change Bomb, the shrapnel from which would fly with reckless abandon across the continent for many centuries. All of a sudden, the ability to communicate to wide audiences wasn’t limited by how many scribes you could afford; the ability of the establishment powers to act as gatekeepers of information began to erode. From the beginning, print was an extremely capitalist enterprise: mostly done by commercial firms on a for-profit basis, highly competitive and largely unregulated by the powers of the state or the church (at least, until they worked out that people were doing Protestantism with it). For centuries, the price of a book had remained fairly stable, at “fuck loads.” After Gutenberg came along, it dropped at a rate of around 2 percent every year for more than a century. That might not sound like a huge amount on a year-by-year basis, until you think about how that works out in compound terms over many decades: in 1450, a single book would set you back the equivalent of many months’ average wages. By 1600, it could cost you less than a day’s pay packet.32
These sets of developments—business, post and printing—toddled merrily alongside one another for a century and a half, cheerfully causing havoc left and right, until in Strasbourg in 1605 they finally collided thanks to a young man called Johann Carolus.
Carolus was a bookbinder and bookseller by trade—but crucially, he’d also recently got himself a side hustle in the newsletter game. Strasbourg was a great place to do that from, a buzzing hub for both business and postal networks. But of course, the handwritten newsletter business had a natural ceiling on how much you could grow your trade: namely, how fast you could write. And so it was that Johann looked at the two sides of his income: on the one hand, printed books. On the other, laboriously hand-crafted letters. Printed books; handwritten letters. Hmm.
Johann Carolus put two and two together, and made THE NEWS.
Essentially, Carolus invested in disruptive new technology in order to scale his media start-up during a growth-hacking phase. The product of that moment of inspiration was the super snappily titled Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, the world’s first-ever print newspaper. It wasn’t much like today’s newspapers, granted: more like a small book in its quarto format, and lacking modern innovations such as pictures, headlines or being interesting. Relation stuck very firmly to the manuscript newsletter format of a dry, undifferentiated list of factual announcements about which important people were currently in which cities, with no effort made to explain who those people were to anybody who wasn’t elite enough to know already. (I mean, okay, in that respect it was quite like a modern newspaper’s diary column.)
A woodcut of somebody flogging Relation.
But Relation was a huge success, and within a few years the idea of the newspaper was being copied in more and more cities across northern Europe. The second newspaper, Aviso Relation oder Zeitung, began publishing in Wolfenbüttel in 1609. Frankfurt, Berlin and Hamburg followed up with their own newspapers in the next decade;33 by 1619, Amsterdam had two competing newspapers.34 During the seventeenth century, around two hundred newspapers were founded in Germany alone.
The notion was less popular in southern Europe, however; the Italians, pioneers of the manuscript newsletter, turned their noses up at this newfangled nonsense. They weren’t the only ones: while the news explosion of the early seventeenth century was greeted with glee by many of the information-hungry population, it also provoked mockery, derision and alarm—much of it in ways that are strikingly familiar to the modern reader.
Anxiety over false news, especially among elites who worry about no longer being gatekeepers; a lack of trust in professional news outlets, contrasted with too much trust in information passed on by someone you know personally; widespread fears about the effects of information overload; disdain for people with “news addiction.” They’re all prominent features of our twenty-first-century infopanics, but each one of them was also commonplace in the seventeenth century. Often in exactly the same words.
Take news addiction, for a start. Very quickly the Germans came up with a word for this: Neuigkeitssucht, which does literally mean “news addiction”35 and which was despairingly described as the “horrible curiosity of certain people to read and hear new things.”36 In the Netherlands, those obsessed with the latest news were mocked for their addiction: a pamphleteer from the south mocked the northerners because of their insatiable news habit, having them say, “We must read the new Tidings, or we shall not have any patience.” The English playwright and satirist Ben Johnson mocked both the production and the consumption of news in several plays in the 1620s, notably News from the New World Discovered in the Moon and The Staple of News.
Not only was there a great deal of eye-rolling about this insatiable hunger for news, but there was widespread anxiety about the awful effects of this explosion of printed material on both people and society. Just as it is today, information overload was a profound concern, spoken of in apocalyptic terms. In 1685, the French scholar Adrien Baillet wrote apocalyptically: “We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”37
(Also much as it is today, this information overload was talked about as though it was a totally new phenomenon, unique to the age they were living in; in fact people have been moaning about there being too much stuff to read for millennia. It’s even in the Bible—“Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” moans Ecclesiastes 12:12. Meanwhile, in the first century, the Roman philosopher Seneca was complaining that “the abundance of books is distraction.”)
But while that sense of shame at your unread book pile may be a timeless feeling, for the people living at the beginning of the news age there were good reasons to feel that things were getting a bit much. For starters, there really was a lot going on.
As Robert Burton wrote in his 1621 emo classic The Anatomy of Melancholy: “I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumors of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies and sea-fights; peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, corantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created, tomorrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.”38
It’s possible that Robert Burton may have needed to unplug for a little bit. Take a break to focus on his well-being. Maybe a long weekend away.
Burton doesn’t stop there. Like Baillet, he looked at the sudden profusion of print and predicted a coming book apocalypse: “Who could be such a greedy glutton of books, who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.”39
And elsewhere in The Anatomy of Melancholy he appears to be complaining about a profusion of clickbait and hot takes, noting that “it is a kind of policy in these days, to prefix a fantastical title to a book which is to be sold... As Scaliger observes, ‘nothing more invites a reader than an argument unlooked for, unthought of, and sells better than a scurrile pamphlet.’”40 (I don’t know if Twitter is looking for a new corporate slogan, but I reckon “an argument unlooked for” would fit pretty well.)
That criticism of “scurrile pamphlets” was also common in the seventeenth century. While the early newsletters, with their elite subscribers, traded on a reputation for trustworthy and reliable information, the same couldn’t be said for everything that was bring printed. While many were addicted to the latest news, there was also widespread distrust of it.41 People were skeptical of what they read in print: many still believed that manuscript letters were inherently more trustworthy; the most trustworthy information was that delivered in person by someone you knew.42
Simply put, lots of people thought there was a lot of fake news around.
They may have had a point. To take just one example: a famous pamphlet that was published in 1614, under the snappy title of True and Wonderful: A Discourse relating a strange and monstrous serpent (or dragon) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great annoyance and divers slaughters both of men and cattell, by his strong and violent poison, in Sussex two miles from Horsham, in a woode called S. Leonards Forrest, this present month of August, 1614. With the true generation of serpents.
Now, Horsham may not seem like an especially promising location for dragon hunting: it’s a small, pleasant market town, today perhaps best known to many people as the place where you realize you’ve got on the wrong half of the train and are now going to Bognor Regis. England has many vast, dark and impenetrable ancient woodlands where dragons might plausibly lurk, but Saint Leonard’s Forest probably wouldn’t be near the top of that list.
But that didn’t stop the publisher in question, one John Trundle, putting out the “certain and too true” report of the nine-foot-long dragon, with black-and-red scales, which could run as fast as a man, left a toxic trail behind it like a snail and could spit poison twenty-five yards—by which means it had already killed two people. Most ominously, it had two large budding growths on either side of its body, suggesting that it was in the process of growing wings.43
Trundle was exactly the kind of publisher who provoked the widespread skepticism of news in the age: he had a long and infamous history of publishing, basically, trash. If it was implausible but eye-catching, he’d publish it. He was widely attacked by commentators and rivals, as were the many other publishers who traded in the sensationalist and the gory—one anonymous pamphleteer in 1617 blasted the plethora of “fond fables of flying Serpents, or as fond delusions of devouring Dragons, of Men or women burned to death miraculously without fire, of dead men rising out of their graves”44 that were making it into print. (The pamphlet making this criticism was about “a mighty sea monster, or whale” that had supposedly washed ashore in Essex.)
The anxiety around false news in the seventeenth century was at its strongest in the establishment, who were bluntly not happy about the people being able to just print and distribute anything they wanted. In England this came to a head in the late 1600s, in a country still in turmoil following the English Civil War and the subsequent Restoration. Laws regulating printing presses were introduced, with the king’s forces having the power to search premises for illegal presses. It wasn’t just printing that they were worried about either—in a classic example of trying to suppress the medium because you’re worried about the message, the elite were also freaking out about coffeehouses.
Coffee, much like the newspaper, was a new and frightening phenomenon. London’s first coffeehouse was established by a Greek immigrant in 1652, and it quickly became a runaway success. Imitators rapidly sprang up, and within a few decades coffee was established as a vital part of the city’s lifeblood. Not only were people drinking coffee, but—to the horror of the establishment—they were having very intense discussions about politics in the coffeehouses. Some of them may even have been spreading fake news while doing so! It couldn’t stand.
On December 29, 1675, King Charles II decided that enough was enough and issued “A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses,” in which it was noted that “in such Houses, and by occasion of the meetings of such persons therein, divers False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of His Majesties Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm.”45 Under the proclamation, all coffeehouses in England (and in Wales, and in the disputed Scottish border territory of Berwick-upon-Tweed) would be forced to close in just twelve days’ time, on January 10. The reaction from the caffeine-dependent great and good of London was swift and grumpy: absolutely no goddamn way would they be deprived of their coffee. Charles II was forced to back down and canceled his coffee ban days before it was due to come into effect.
In October 1688, King James II tried again, this time focusing on the message, issuing a proclamation “To Restrain the Spreading of False News.” Punishment would be inflicted on any “Spreaders of false News, or Promoters of any malicious Slanders and Calumnies,” particularly any “who shall utter or publish any Words or Things to incite and stir up the People to Hatred or Dislike of Our Person, or the Established Government.”46 You can understand why he might have been nervous: at that point a Dutch fleet was preparing to invade England. Unfortunately for James, the attempt to suppress false news didn’t help very much: he was deposed by his daughter and fled the country a little over a month later.
England’s press-licensing laws were allowed to lapse by 1695, and the result was a second explosion of news outlets. This brought with it all the problems that we still see in the media today. By 1734, the Craftsman had already identified one of the key structural problems with the press—namely, their tendency to copy stuff from one another until there’s a full-on bullshit feedback loop underway: “When a piece of false intelligence gets into one paper, it commonly runs thro’ them all, unless timely contradicted by those who are acquainted with the particular circumstances.”47
This was exacerbated by the rise of the press across the ocean in America—the flow of information between England and its colony provided many more opportunities to copy news from each other, but with additional effort barrier to actually checking what was really going on across the sea. Wild rumors and complete fabrications about what was happening across the pond would bounce back and forth between England and America, becoming exaggerated with every telling.
Perhaps the best example of this is the way that a courtroom speech by a supposedly hard-done-by woman was sent back and forth across the Atlantic for several decades in the mid-1700s, being republished over and over again, the central story mutating multiple times as new copies were created, its message gaining rhetorical power as the historical context around it changed. This was the speech of Polly Baker.
To the modern eye, Polly Baker’s narrative seems purpose-built to go viral—which, in an eighteenth-century kind of way, it did. First published on April 15, 1747, in the London General Advertiser, it claimed to be a transcript of a speech Ms. Baker had given at her trial across the ocean, “at Connecticut near Boston in New-England.” Baker was being prosecuted for having a bastard child; not only that, but this was the fifth time she had been before the court on such a charge. But rather than being ashamed, Polly Baker was forthright. How was it fair, she argued, that she had been convicted multiple times for having illegitimate children, but the fathers of the children had got off without even a rap on the knuckles? “I have brought Five fine Children into the World, at the Risque of my Life; I have maintain’d them well by my own Industry,” she said. “I have hazarded the Loss of the Publick Esteem, and have frequently endured Publick Disgrace and Punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble Opinion, instead of a Whipping, to have a Statue erected to my Memory.”
Her speech was so forceful, the preamble to the text in the General Advertiser told us, that not only did the court refrain from punishing her, but one of the judges was so moved by her words that he got married to her the very next day. It seems ready-made to be translated into the language of mid-2010s viral inspiration sites: This Woman Shut Down a Court with a Powerful Speech about Slut-Shaming—and What Happened Next Will Amaze You.
This was, very clearly, Good Content. And so the republishing machine of the British press got to work. The day after Ms. Baker made her debut in the General Advertiser, at least five other London newspapers ran the speech, as well. It spread to papers in other cities: Northampton, Bath, Edinburgh, Dublin. A few weeks later, the news magazines, with their longer lead times, published it too. (None of them, fairly obviously, had had the time to pop over to Connecticut to see if they could track Polly down; the geographical effort barrier once again providing excellent cover for untruth to spread.) Not only did it get copied, but changes to the text started to appear, whether through error or intent—the most notable of these being in the Gentleman’s Magazine, which decided that her simply marrying a judge wasn’t enough of a plot twist, and they should have fifteen children together, as well. Exactly when those fifteen children were supposed to have been birthed was unclear, as the text was ambiguous about when the events had taken place.
A few months later, in July, the story had crossed the Atlantic and found its way into the nascent newspaper market of the American colonies, making its debut first in Boston, before migrating down the coast to New York and Maryland. Despite it being at least a little bit easier for the American press to look into the tale’s authenticity, it’s not clear that anybody bothered—which, honestly, is hardly surprising. Even in the age of telephones and Google, trying to establish that something didn’t happen can be remarkably gnarly. At a time when there were only twelve newspapers in the country and the idea of the intrepid investigative journalist was still over a century away, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they maybe felt they had better things to do. It was perfectly common practice to republish material from Britain’s more developed press; the effort barrier to checking may have been reduced, but it got replaced with the assumed authority bestowed by the reputation of the British press. It was several of those structural problems rolled into one: there was a lack of imagination in the assumption that the British press must be reliable, which fed into a bullshit feedback loop on a grand scale.
So, rather than spurring on any further action (whether to delve deeper, or to debunk), Polly’s rallying cry against sexist double standards quietly made its way into the canon of the collective consciousness, becoming one of those old favorites—the stories that form the background hum of the public psyche, whipped out every now and again when somebody wants to make a point. For the next few decades, it would crop up again and again; it was republished in newspapers, magazines, books; it was translated into Swedish and French. As a symbol of an ordinary person making a stand against unjust laws, it became big in the world of deism—the theological movement that argued against an interventionist God and the arbitrary authority of the Church—which would be a major intellectual influence on both the French and American revolutions.
It was in this context that Polly’s speech got its second great lease of life, more than two decades after it was first published—which also led to the true story behind it being finally unmasked. In 1770, the anecdote appeared in a newly rewritten and far more melodramatic form, in a bestselling French history book by the Abbé Raynal—an ex-priest with a shaky grasp of history but a certain skill with agitprop. (At least, some of it was written by him; large sections were contributed by the somewhat more talented philosopher Denis Diderot, alongside a host of other collaborators. It’s quite possible that Diderot was the one who added Polly’s story to the text, as he seems to have been a fan of it.)
In the febrile atmosphere of prerevolutionary France, Polly Baker’s oppression at the hands of tyrannical New England lawmakers struck a chord and became wildly popular. Raynal’s history was reprinted multiple times in authorized and unauthorized editions, and other French versions of Polly’s story appeared in the 1770s and 1780s. Which is how it came to be that, one day in 1777 or 1778, as the American Revolution was in full swing, Raynal paid a visit to America’s minister in France, only to find him discussing the abbé’s popular history book with a visitor from Connecticut.
None of the three people at this meeting ever wrote about what went on in the room where it happened. Instead, we have the story secondhand, via the then future American president Thomas Jefferson, who said he was told some years later what had played out that day. As with much of history, a pinch of salt is required.
The rough outline is this: the two Americans were discussing Raynal’s book, and how bad it was, when, unexpectedly, Raynal walked in. The Connecticuter, one Silas Deane, greeted Raynal by cheerfully telling him they had just been chatting about how many errors were in his book. (Side note: as an author, I beg you, please do not do this—it’s just rude; give it at least a couple of minutes of small talk first.) Raynal protested that there were no errors and that he’d been extremely careful to make sure that every fact in the book was authoritatively sourced.
“But what about Polly Baker?” asked Deane. “That’s in there, and it definitely never happened.”
“On the contrary,” Raynal insisted, “I had an unimpeachable source for that, although I can’t quite remember off the top of my head what it was, right now.”
At this point, the American minister—one Mr. Benjamin Franklin—found himself unable to control his laughter anymore.
That was because it had been he who created the entire tale of Polly Baker, three decades earlier, and planted it in the British press. His career in faking hadn’t ended with his untimely declaration of Titan Leeds’s death.
In fact, it hadn’t begun there either.
Franklin actually started his career of deceit in the news industry as a teenager, in 1722, when his older brother, James, banned him from writing for the New-England Courant, the newspaper James published. Pissed off at this stifling of his creative powers, young Benjamin did what any enterprising sixteen-year-old would do: he invented a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood and submitted articles under her name. (Something you’ll know if you’ve watched the important documentary film National Treasure, starring Nicholas Cage.) James Franklin, completely oblivious to their true author, published fourteen of these letters, and Ms. Dogood attracted quite a following, including several offers of marriage.
His first foray into perfidy being such an emphatic success, Franklin cheerfully carried on where Silence Dogood had left off. By 1730, he was publishing his own newspaper in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Gazette, in which he printed an entirely fictional account of a witch trial. In reality, there hadn’t been any notable witch trials in America for several decades. He then moved on to Poor Richard’s Almanack (once again writing in the voice of an invented character), where he killed the unfortunate Mr. Leeds.
To give you an idea of just how much effort Franklin put into even his pettiest hoaxes, in 1755 he printed and inserted an entire fake chapter into the Bible (the very much nonexistent fifty-first chapter of Genesis) simply so he could win an argument with a posh English lady.48
Polly Baker hadn’t really been intended to foment revolutionary fervor; she’d been created mostly for Franklin’s own amusement. It was joke that had just...got a bit out of hand.
This was all happening in the early years of the mass media; the kind of news industry that we’re used to wouldn’t properly emerge for several decades. And yet there were still many elements to it that we recognize today: the unthinking republishing of news without checking its veracity, the audience’s uneasy mixture of distrust and credulity, the way that a story that’s too good to be true will thrive regardless. And all of those things would continue as the news industry continued to expand into the kind of belching content behemoth we’re familiar with in our time. That’s what we’ll look at in the next chapter—where we’ll discover that Polly Baker was far from the only time that a joke got a bit out of hand.