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Abstract

The past may be “uncomfortable,” the Washington Post pointed out on July 1, 1966, before adding a far more serious observation: “[t]he suppression of history—which is to say the judgment of historians—is an incongruity of a free society.” A year earlier, Helen C. Frick sued Professor Sylvester K. Stevens in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland County Court of Common Pleas to prevent the publication of his recent history book, Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation. She claimed that the book libeled her deceased father and caused her a loss of standing in the public’s estimation and emotional distress. Judge Clinton R. Weidner indicated his intention to decide the case on the state’s libel laws rather than to dismiss the suit on a First Amendment basis. Equally troubling, Weidner sided with Frick’s attorneys on their evidentiary objection to preclude Stevens from having distinguished historians testify as experts as to the merits of his book. In issuing his ruling, Weidner determined that the historian experts would simply provide otherwise inadmissible hearsay. Professional historians had, on at least eight occasions, testified as experts in state and federal trials as well as before Congress on critical issues such as arms reductions and neutrality legislation. Ironically, if not hypocritically, in 1935 Frick employed a professional historian, Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of Princeton University, when her curator sued her for libel. Perhaps from the vantage of the present, Frick’s lawsuit appears bizarre but in 1965 Pennsylvania’s libel laws included the phrase “tending to blacken the memory of the dead,” as did several other states, and in theory, these laws made her lawsuit feasible.

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