The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  Almost from the beginning of America’s national history, many imaginative writers, defenders of elegance, and spiritual seekers of various sorts found that by attacking Franklin they could attack many of America’s middle-class values. Aristocratic-minded Federalists scorned the emerging penny-getting world of 1800 and saw Franklin as its symbol. He was the one “who has the pence table by heart and knows all the squares of multiplication.”15 All of the things that turned Franklin into a middling folk hero became sources of genteel contempt and ridicule. Those who believed that Franklin’s Autobiography was supposed “to promote good morals, especially among the uneducated class of the community,” declared the North American Review in 1818, could not be more wrong. “The groundwork of his character, during this period, was bad; and the moral qualities, which contributed to his rise, were of a worldly and very profitable kind.”16 In the minds of these imaginative intellectuals Franklin came to stand for all of America’s bourgeois complacency, its get-ahead materialism, its utilitarian obsession with success—the unimaginative superficiality and vulgarity of American culture that kills the soul. He eventually became Main Street and Babbittry rolled into one—a caricature of America’s moneymaking middle class.

  When Edgar Allan Poe wrote a satirical piece on the dry and systematic ways of “The Businessman” (1845), he never mentioned Franklin by name, but any reader would have known who his model was. A businessman, said Poe, loved order and regularity and hated geniuses—all those imaginative sorts who violated the “fitness of things.” Unlike fanciful geniuses who were apt to write poetry, a businessman was the product of “those habits of methodical accuracy” that had been “thumped” into him; thus with his “old habits of system,” wrote Poe, using one of Franklin’s favorite phrases, the successful businessman was carried “swimmingly along.”17

  Everyone who had a quarrel with superficial bourgeois America necessarily had a quarrel with Franklin, for he was, as Herman Melville said, “the type and genius of his land. Franklin was everything but a poet.” In his novel Israel Potter (1855), Melville created a vivid and wonderfully satiric picture of Franklin. His Franklin was “the homely sage and household Plato,” who possessed “deep worldly wisdom and polished Italian tact, gleaming under an air of Arcadian unaffectedness.” He was at one and the same time “the diplomatist and the shepherd ...; a union not without warrant; the apostolic servant and dove. A tanned Machiavelli in tents.” Melville’s Franklin, as his character Israel Potter describes him, was “sly, sly, sly.” “Having carefully weighed the world, Franklin,” wrote Melville, “could act any part in it... printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor-man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit,” anything and everything but a poet.18

  Nineteenth-century Americans, like the characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Biographical Stories,” were not sure why Franklin had become so famous. It was doubtful, said Hawthorne’s storyteller, “whether Franklin’s philosophical discoveries, important as they were, or even his vast political services, would have given him all the fame which he acquired.” Instead, it was as the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack that Franklin had become “the counselor and household friend to almost every family in America.” No matter that Franklin’s proverbs “were all about getting money and saving it,” they were “suited to the condition of the country.”19

  The condition of the country was capitalistic, and that was what made Franklin both a hero and a villain to so many people. He was the patron saint of business, and since the business of America, as President Calvin Coolidge liked to say, was business, Franklin became America itself. Gilded Age defenders of business like T. L. Haines simply borrowed Franklin’s maxims and turned them into manuals for making money and getting ahead.20

  Since Franklin had become so identified with the art of getting, saving, and using money, it was inevitable that scholars seeking to understand the sources of capitalism would sooner or later fasten upon Franklin. In his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the great German sociologist Max Weber found Franklin to be a perfect exemplar of the modern capitalistic spirit. No one, wrote Weber, expressed the moral maxims underlying the ethic of capitalism better than Franklin. For Franklin, “honesty is useful, because it assures credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are virtues.” But Franklin was not a hypocrite, wrote Weber; as revealed by his character “in the really unusual candidness of his autobiography,” his virtues were not designed to aggrandize the individual. “In fact,” said Weber, “the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life,” had nothing to do with individual happiness. “It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational.” In Weber’s opinion Franklin believed that “man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose in life,” regardless of his actual material needs. This was “a leading principle of capitalism,” akin to certain religious feelings in its intensity and asceticism. “Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colourless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinist father drummed into him again and again in his youth: ‘Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.’” Franklin’s ethic, Weber concluded, was the ethic of capitalism, expressed “in all his works without exception.”21

  Since apparently no imaginative writer, artist, or intellectual could like capitalism, it went without saying that nearly all these sensitive souls would dislike Franklin, the proto-capitalist. Someone who thought that the end of life was merely the making of money obviously lacked depth and spirituality. And if Franklin was superficial and soulless, so too was America. With his apparently shriveled spirit, Franklin was everything that imaginative artists found wrong with America.

  No artist found more wrong with Franklin and America than did the English writer D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence’s hilarious attack in his Studies in Classic American Literature in 1923 is the most famous criticism of Franklin ever written. To Lawrence, Franklin embodied all those shallow bourgeois moneymaking values that intellectuals are accustomed to dislike. Franklin was “this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat,” the “sharp little man,” the “middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor Franklin,” “sound, satisfied Ben,” who was a “virtuous little automaton” and “the first downright American.”22

  Lawrence was not the only creative writer to find Franklin a convenient means for saying something about America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, one of the most American characters in all of literature, was an earnest believer in Franklin’s message of self-improvement as a young boy.23 Franklin’s resolutions in fact became a model for the young Gatsby’s self-imposed schedule: “Rise from bed, 6.00 a.m.,” “Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling, 6.15-6.30,” “Study electricity, etc., 7.15-8.15,” “Work, 8.30-4.30 p.m.,” “Baseball and sports, 4.30-5.00,” “Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it, 5.00-6.00,” “Study needed inventions, 7.00-9.00.” If these weren’t enough, Gatsby added some “General Resolves” that the abstemious Franklin might have approved of:“No wasting time at Shafters,” “No more smokeing or chewing,” “Read one improving book or magazine per week,” “Save ... $3.00 per week.” With such resolutions, as Gatsby’s father said, the young boy “was bound to get ahead.” Franklin’s resolves became part of what Fitzgerald wanted to say about Gatsby’s desire to realize the so-called American dream.

  No matter that this dream eluded Gatsby, as Fitzgerald thought it eluded all Americans. As long as Americans keep trying to grasp that “green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” Franklin will remain a central figure in American mytholo
gy. His remarkable life seems to reaffirm for all Americans the possibility of anyone’s, however humble his birth and background, making it.24

  THE HISTORIC EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANKLIN

  Gatsby may be a powerful representative American character, but he is a fictional figure. Franklin, on the other hand, was a real person, not invented. Or was he? Does Franklin’s Autobiography, perhaps the most widely read autobiography in the world, give us an accurate picture of the man? Much of twentieth-century literary criticism of the Autobiography has emphasized Franklin’s sophistication, humor, and sense of irony as a writer. How seriously must we take Franklin? Is young Franklin, the character of the first two sections of the Autobiography, really the same person as the older Franklin, the author? Do we really know Franklin, know him as well as we know, say, Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby?

  In fact, the historic Franklin, the Franklin of the eighteenth century, seems to elude us as much as Gatsby’s ever receding green light eluded him. When we actually recover the Franklin of the eighteenth century, he does not seem to fit the image we have created of him. First of all, his life was not really about the making and saving of money. He was in fact the most benevolent and philanthropic of the Founders and in some respects the least concerned with the getting of money. Despite achieving fame as a scientist, he never believed that science was as important as public service. Indeed, at the age of forty-two, he retired from business and devoted the remainder of his life to serving his city, his colony, his empire, and then, after independence in 1776, his state and the United States.

  Far from being the spokesman for moneymaking and bourgeois values, Franklin repeatedly mocked those who were caught up “in the Pursuit of Wealth to no End.” In 1750, he wrote that at the end of his life “I would rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich.”25 He continually warned against the abuse of money in politics and in fact urged that governmental officials should serve without pay. After his retirement from business in 1748 he often thought like a genteel aristocrat, not a tradesman.

  Although he may have eventually become the supreme symbol of America, he was certainly not the most American of the Founders during his lifetime. Indeed, one might more easily describe him as the least American and the most European of the nation’s early leaders. He was undoubtedly the most cosmopolitan and the most urbane of that group of leaders who brought about the Revolution. He hobnobbed with lords and aristocrats in Britain and the rest of Europe. He conversed with kings and even dined with one. No other American, even Jefferson, knew more Europeans or was more celebrated abroad in more countries than Franklin.

  As historian Carl Becker once pointed out, Franklin “was acquainted personally or through correspondence with more men of eminence in letters, science, and politics than any other man of his time.”26

  Certainly no other American leader lived more years abroad than Franklin. In fact, Franklin spent the bulk of the last thirty-three years of his life living outside of America, in Britain and France. At several points it was doubtful whether he would ever return to America, or wanted to— or even cared much about America. Far from being a natural and thoroughgoing American, Franklin at several points in his life experienced what we today might call the anxiety of national identity. He was not sure where he rightly belonged. Was he English? Or British? Or did he really belong in France? We should not take his Americanness for granted. Nor should we take his participation in the Revolution for granted.

  At the beginning of the imperial crisis in the early 1760s—the crisis that would end with the breakup of the British Empire and the independence of the United States—no one could have identified Franklin with a radical cause. Certainly, no one could have predicted that he would become one of the leaders of the American Revolution. In 1760 there were few Englishmen who were as dedicated to the greatness of the British Empire as he.

  It was then hard to see any difference at all between Franklin and the man who would eventually come to symbolize for Americans the arch-Tory and the foremost enemy of American liberty and American independence: Thomas Hutchinson. Both Franklin and Hutchinson were good Enlightenment figures—literate, reasonable men, with a deep dislike of religious enthusiasm. Both were imperial officials, dedicated to the British Empire. They had in fact cooperated in forming the Albany Plan of Union in 1754, which presented a farsighted proposal for intercolonial cooperation and imperial defense. Both Franklin and Hutchinson were getting-along men—believers in prudence, calculation, affability—and they made their way in that monarchical society by playing their parts. Both were believers in the power of a few reasonable men, men like themselves, to run affairs. Both regarded the common people with a certain patronizing amusement, unless, of course, they rioted—then the two officials were filled with disgust.

  It is hard from the vantage point of the early 1760s to predict that the paths of Franklin and Hutchinson would eventually diverge so radically In many respects Franklin seems the least likely of revolutionaries. Certainly his participation in the Revolution was not natural or inevitable; indeed, Franklin came very close to remaining, as his son did, a loyal member of the British Empire. On the face of it, it is not easy to understand why Franklin took up the Revolutionary cause at all.

  First of all, Franklin, unlike the other Founders, was not a young man. He was seventy in 1776—not the age that one associates with passionate revolutionaries. He was by far the oldest of the Revolutionary leaders— twenty-six years older than Washington, twenty-nine years older than John Adams, thirty-seven years older than Jefferson, and nearly a half century older than Madison and Hamilton. Because he came from an entirely different generation from the rest of the Founders, he was in some sense more deeply committed to the British Empire than they were.

  More important, unlike these other Revolutionary leaders, Franklin already had an established reputation; indeed, prior to the Revolution he was already world-famous. He had everything to lose and seemingly little to gain by participating in a revolution. The other American Revolutionary leaders were young men, virtually unknown outside of their remote provinces. We can generally understand why they might have become revolutionaries. They were men of modest origins with high ambitions who saw in the Revolution opportunities to achieve that fame that Hamilton called “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.”27 But Franklin was different. He alone already had the position and the fame that the others only yearned for. He was already known all over Britain and the rest of Europe. Because of his discoveries concerning electricity, which were real contributions to basic science, he had become a celebrity throughout the Atlantic world. He had become a member of the Royal Society and had received honorary degrees from universities in America and Britain, including St. Andrews and Oxford. Philosophers and scientists from all over Europe consulted him on everything from how to build a fireplace to why the oceans were salty. Well before the Revolution he was one of the most renowned men in the world and certainly the most famous American.

  Since he scarcely could have foreseen how much the Revolution would enhance his reputation and turn him into one of America’s greatest folk heroes, why at his age would he have risked so much?

  We do not usually ask the question of why Franklin became a revolutionary. Somehow we take his participation in the Revolution for granted. Because he is so identified with the Revolution and with America, we can scarcely think of him as anything but a thoroughgoing American. But this is a problem of what historians generally call whiggism—the anachronistic foreshortening that tends to see the past and persons in the past as anticipations of the future. Franklin has become such a symbol of America that we have a hard time thinking of him as anything but an American folk hero or the spokesman for American capitalism. We have more than two hundred years of images imposed on Franklin that have to be peeled away before we can recover the man who existed before the Revolution. Franklin in the late 1760s and early 1770s was not fated to abandon the British Empire and join the American cause. How he be
came estranged from that empire and became, almost overnight, a fiery revolutionary is an important part of the story of his Americanization.

  In many respects Franklin in 1776 emerged as the quintessential republican, dedicated to a world in which only talent counted, not who your father was or whom you married. Once Franklin joined the Revolutionary cause, he inevitably became a fervent believer in a republican world where leaders were disinterested gentlemen, free from any occupation and the cares of making money. Franklin, long since retired from his printing business, was in 1776 more than willing to devote himself to the service of the new United States without any expectation of monetary reward. No one except Washington gave more of himself to the new nation.

  The eight years Franklin spent abroad as the chief envoy from the United States to France furthered the process of his Americanization. Amid the luxury of the French court, the most sophisticated in all of Europe, Franklin became much more self-conscious of his image as the representative American, as the symbol of the simplicity of the New World and its difference from the corruptions of the Old World. Because the French needed this symbol before the Americans themselves did, they first created the image of Franklin as the rustic democrat, as the simple untutored genius from the wilds of America who had become one of the world’s great scientists and writers. Franklin was well aware of this image and developed and used it on behalf of the American cause.

  As important as Franklin’s French experience was in his Americanization, however, it was in the several decades immediately following his death in 1790 that the modern image of Franklin as the self-made bourgeois moralist and spokesman for capitalism was really created. As the new American republic developed into much more of a democratic, moneymaking society than anyone had anticipated, the need for a Founder who could represent the age’s new egalitarian and commercial forces became ever more pressing. Only with the publication of his Autobiography in 1794 did the idea of Franklin as the folksy embodiment of the self-made businessman and the creator of the American dream begin to gather power, until today, more than two centuries later, the historic Franklin of the eighteenth century remains buried beneath an accumulation of images. Consequently, despite hundreds of biographies and studies of Franklin and over three dozen volumes of his papers magnificently published in a modern letterpress edition, we still do not fully know the man.