In today’s world of multimedia blogs, podcasts and other social media platforms, public letter writing might be viewed as something of a lost art form. But throughout American history, political letters have not only informed the public about important events, they have helped build an informed constituency around public affairs. They once were an even more powerful means of influencing public opinion than they are today.
Letters played an important role, for example, in convincing Americans to declare independence from Great Britain. Leaders of the American Revolution published open letters addressed to the public in local newspapers. One of the earliest of those was John Dickinson’s Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published in 1767 and 1768. Dickinson later became a member of the Continental Congress and a participant in the Constitutional Convention. And we all remember Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a collection of mostly letters published anonymously in 1776 in pamphlet form.
Public letters continue to play an important role in public affairs, including in my own corner of the political world. Earlier this month, for example, Cathy Woolard, a Democrat and former president of the Atlanta City Council whose tenure as the chair of the Fulton County Election Board ends tomorrow after a surprise resignation, wrote a letter to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp asking him to remove three Republican members of the State Election Board for allegedly violating Georgia’s open meetings law.
One particularly effective letter was written last year by two African American women on the Atlanta City Council after they were removed as the chairs of council standing committees. The letter, in the form of a half-page advertisement in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, described their removal by the council president as a form of “disenfranchisement” of Black women. After the ad ran, the council president reconsidered his appointments and named one of the letter’s authors as a committee chair.
Political letters in democracies help public officials communicate with those they represent on matters of civic importance, but all letters are not equally effective. Those that communicate a clear and desired outcome seem to work best. For an example, Paine wanted to arouse consciousness around the idea of the U.S. colonies becoming independent. The councilwomen wanted to retain their chairmanships of the council committees. Woolard wanted to expose what she believed to be partisan bias on a state election board that was supposed to be fair and objective.
Of course political leaders are not the only ones who use letters to shape public opinion — religious leaders do too. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail is considered today as one of the most important documents ever written on civil disobedience. King argued that we all have an obligation to speak out against evil: “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” The letter helped inform the public on the need for and importance of civil rights legislation that was eventually passed by Congress.
Today, political letters can often be found on the editorial pages of leading newspapers, but sometimes those op-ed pages are off-limits to local officials. To attract the widest readership, newspapers often want to publish only opinion pieces by better known and positioned political leaders. Perhaps that explains why the two Atlanta City Council members chose to purchase an ad to get their letter into the public arena rather than engage with the newspaper’s editorial staff.
Despite the difficulties and possible rejections, I recommend that public officials continue to try to get their local newspapers and online news sites to live up to their journalistic responsibilities to provide readers with diverse opinions and viewpoints on issues of importance. When I was a city council member, I met with relative success in getting my op-eds published. To accomplish this, first I got to know the editors in charge of the editorial pages. I gained from them a sense of their calendars and the topics and issues that interested them. Then I shared with them ideas, projects and programs I was working on and why I felt they were important to their readers. Finally, I exhibited a willingness to work with them, realizing that some editors wanted to be more hands-on than others in helping to develop column ideas and approaches.
Newspapers are still important, but not as much as they were in the days when I was an elected official. Biden’s letter to the public points out an obvious but sometimes overlooked aspect of today’s communication environment: Public officials can now bypass editors and traditional newspapers to reach constituents directly through social media. Yet no matter how much society and technology changes, letter writing will remain an important activity to ensure that the public has the information it needs to remain informed and educated. This is key to preserving democracy.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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