In early 2017, the Washington Post debuted a new masthead with the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” At about the same time, the New York Times announced a new advertising slogan: “The truth is more important now than ever.” With their new slogans, these papers hoped to renew their commitments to the value of truth and fearless journalism. Whether they knew it or not, they were joining a long lineage of newspapers that printed pithy mottoes in response to an era of rapid political change.
The American Revolution was one such era. The imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, the war of the 1770s and 1780s, and the challenges of the new republic during the 1780s and 1790s each posed important questions about the press’s role in society. Some of these questions were quite practical: should American newspapers continue to reprint most of their news from London papers, especially those that (for Patriots at least) had become objects of suspicion? Other questions were more profound: should papers offer a balanced and impartial perspective? Should they pursue truth at all costs? Who should determine what that truth was in the first place?
From the 1760s through the 1790s, American printers answered these questions, in part, through their mastheads. A masthead, printed at the top of the front page, described the essential information about a newspaper: its name, price, publisher, and its location. For many years, there was little other information available to readers in mastheads. If newspapers printed mottoes they were often formulaic, inherited from London papers. But in the era of the revolution, printers often began to use their mastheads to locate their papers’ positions on a broader landscape of culture and politics. They did this by inserting a motto (sometimes more than one) just below the paper’s name, to describe its printer’s purpose or ambition. Sometimes, printers accompanied these mottoes with woodcut images that complemented or extended the points raised by the motto.
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