The founding generation did not have Twitter, Facebook, blogs, or broadcasting, but they did understand the power of symbolic expression to command attention and rally supporters.
When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, imposing taxes on English subjects in the colonies, an outpouring of newspaper articles and pamphlets vociferously opposed the tax. That continued as additional laws raised the ire of colonists. Writers like James Otis, Jr., John Dickinson, and John Adams were well-educated lawyers and politicians, and many of their essays against Parliament’s laws defended the rights of the colonists by invoking English history as well as the country’s great constitutional documents like Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and the English Bill of Rights.
The newspapers and pamphlets were effective in articulating legal arguments, but they had serious limitations. Many people in the colonies could not read, and even many who could read nevertheless lacked the education to fully grasp the arguments of sophisticated writers. Leaders of the opposition knew they needed a strategy to bring large numbers of people into the debate in order to show Parliament that there was widespread opposition to its measures. In other words, they had to find a way to democratize protest.
For the opposition leaders, symbolic speech proved the most effective strategy to make protest popular. Why? Symbolic expression involving liberty trees and effigies attracted huge crowds to the public square; in Boston, thousands came out in a town with a population of about 16,000.
Symbols also brought immediate clarity to complex issues; people understood that an effigy of a British official hanging from a liberty tree represented the tyranny of a faraway Parliament even if they were not well versed in law and history. And symbols could have shock value similar to burning a flag or taking a knee today. Hanging effigies of hated officials along with an effigy of the devil, the representation of all evil in Puritan theology, was about the most scandalous thing a protestor could do in Boston.