This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 6, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Anonymous speech, far from an insidious plot, is an American institution and one that ought to be preserved.

I spoke last week with Robert McDonald and associate professor of history at the U.S.

Military Academy about anonymous speech, past and present.

A big part of the political debate that's going on right now in the United States

is to what extent the public is entitled for the purposes essentially of

some definition of accountability to what extent is the public really entitled to know who is paying for, who is supporting

certain political messages.

But of course that question of anonymous speech in the United States goes back a very long time even before the United States got started.

No, that's absolutely right. I mean you think about founders like Benjamin Franklin published as

poor Richard and Richard Saunders in Silence Do Good using pseudonyms or

just writing anonymously was extremely common especially in political speech in the 18th century.

You have Madison, Hamilton, John Jay writing as Publius, the Federalist Papers, John Dickinson

writing as a farmer from Pennsylvania.

The idea in the 18th century was if somebody attached one's name to political speech, perhaps

in addition to advancing the argument maybe they were

advancing themselves and that was considered unseemly and potentially dangerous.

In the Enlightenment the idea was that what mattered was the idea itself.

Tom Payne wrote the second edition to Common Sense

with an acknowledgement that people had been questioning who in fact the

author of this publication is as he wrote and he said that it was wholly

unnecessary to the public for the thing that mattered was the view itself the

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