The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  THE MAN OF MANY MASKS

  Franklin is not an easy man to get to know. Although he wrote more pieces about more things than any of the other Founders, Franklin is never very revealing of himself. He always seems to be holding something back—he is reticent, detached, not wholly committed. We sense in Franklin the presence of calculated restraint—a restraint perhaps bred by his spectacular rise and the kind of hierarchical and patronage-ridden world he had to operate in.28 Certainly there were people in Philadelphia who never let him forget “his original obscurity,” and that he had sprung from “the meanest Circumstances.”29 Despite his complaining that he was never able to order things in his life, we sense that he was always in control and was showing us only what he wanted us to see. Only at moments in the early 1770s and at the end of his life do we sense that the world was spinning out of his grasp.

  Beyond the restrained and reserved character of his personal writings is the remarkable character of his public writings, especially his Autobiography—“this most famous of American texts,” as one scholar calls it.30 Literary scholars have continually interpreted and reinterpreted the Autobiography but still cannot agree on what Franklin was trying to do in writing it. Among the Founders, Jefferson and Adams also wrote autobiographies, but theirs are nothing like Franklin’s. His resembles a work of fiction in that we cannot be sure that the narrative voice is the same as the author’s. Indeed, much of the reader’s enjoyment of the Autobiography comes from the contrast between Franklin’s descriptions of the “awkward ridiculous Appearance” the teenaged printer made upon his arrival in Philadelphia and “the Figure I have since made there.”31 It is hard to interpret the Autobiography, since, as scholars have pointed out, Franklin moves between several personas, especially between the innocence of youth and the irony of a mature man.32

  In all of Franklin’s writings, his wit and humor, his constant selfawareness, his assuming different personas and roles, make it difficult to know how to read him. He was a man of many voices and masks who continually mocks himself.33 Sometimes in his newspaper essays he was a woman, like “Silence Dogood,” “Alice Addertongue,” “Cecilia Short-face,” and “Polly Baker,” saucy and racy and hilarious. At other times he was the “Busy Body,” or “Obadiah Plainman,” or “Anthony Afterwit,” or “Richard Saunders,” also known as “Poor Richard,” the almanac maker. Sometimes he wrote in the London newspapers as “An American” or “A New England-Man.” But other times he wrote as “A Briton” or “A London Manufacturer,” and shaped what he wrote accordingly. During his London years he wrote some ninety pseudonymous items for the press using forty-two different signatures.34 For each of the many pieces he wrote both in Philadelphia and in London he had a remarkable ability to create the appropriate persona. Indeed, all of his many personas contribute nicely to the particular purpose of his various works, whether they are essays, skits, poems, or satires. “Just as no other eighteenth-century writer has so many moods and tones or so wide a range of correspondents,” declares the dean of present-day Franklin scholars, “so no other eighteenth-century writer has so many different personae or so many different voices as Franklin.” No wonder we have difficulty figuring out who this remarkable man was.35

  Of all the Founders, Franklin had the fullest and deepest understanding of human nature. He had a remarkable capacity to see all sides of human behavior and to appreciate other points of view. He loved turning conventional wisdom on its head, as, for example, when he argued for the virtue and usefulness of censure and backbiting.36 But then again are we sure that he is not putting us on? He certainly enjoyed hoaxes and was the master of every rhetorical ploy. No American writer of the eighteenth century could burlesque, deride, parody, or berate more skillfully than he. He could praise and mock at the same time and could write on both sides of an issue with ease.

  It is easy to miss the complexity and subtlety of Franklin’s writing. He praises reason so often that we forget his ironic story about man’s being a reasonable creature. In his Autobiography he tells us about how he abandoned his youthful effort to maintain a vegetarian diet. Although formerly a great lover of fish, he had come to believe that eating fish was “a kind of unprovok’d Murder.” But one day when he smelled some fish sizzling in a frying pan, he was caught hanging “between Principle and Inclination.” When he saw that the cut-open fish had eaten smaller fish, however, he decided that “if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” And so he had heartily dined on cod ever since. “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature” he concluded, “since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”37

  None of the Founders was more conscious of the difference between appearance and reality than Franklin. Not only did he continually comment on that difference, but he was never averse to maintaining it. If one could not actually be industrious and humble, he said, at least one could appear to be so.

  Although he wrote against disguise and dissimulation and asked, “Who was ever cunning enough to conceal his being so?” we nevertheless know that he was the master of camouflage and concealment. “We shall resolve to be what we would seem,” he declared, yet at the same time he seems to have delighted in hiding his innermost thoughts and motives. “Let all Men know thee,” Poor Richard said, “but no man know thee thoroughly: Men freely ford that see the shallows.”38

  While sometimes bowing to the emerging romantic cult of sincerity, he remained firmly rooted in the traditional eighteenth-century world of restraining one’s inner desires and feelings in order to be civil and get along. He never thought that his characteristic behavior—his artful posing, his role playing, his many masks, his refusal to reveal his inner self— was anything other than what the cultivated and sociable eighteenth century admired. He was a thoroughly social being, enmeshed in society and civic-minded by necessity. Not for him the disastrous assertions of antisocial autonomy and the outspoken sincerity of Molière’s character Alceste in Le Misanthrope. Like many others of his day, Franklin preferred the sensible and prudent behavior of Alceste’s friend Philinte, who knew that the path of good sense was to adapt to the pressures and contradictions of society.39 Unlike, say, John Adams, Franklin never wore his heart on his sleeve; he kept most of his intentions and feelings to himself. He was a master at keeping his own counsel. As Poor Richard said, “Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead.”40

  Franklin is so many-sided, he seems everything to everyone, but no image has been more powerful than that of the self-improving businessman. This modern image of Franklin began to predominate with the emergence of America’s democratic capitalism in the early republic; and, like Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of that rambunctious democratic America, Franklin’s personification of its values has had a remarkable staying power. Just as we continue to read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for its insights into the democratic character of our society in our own time nearly two centuries later, so too do we continue to honor Franklin as the Founder who best exemplifies our present-day democratic capitalist society. As the symbol of an American land of opportunity where one works hard to get ahead, Franklin continues to have great meaning, especially among recent immigrants.

  But to recover the historic Franklin we must shed these modern images and symbols of Franklin and return to that very different, distant world of the eighteenth century. Only then can we go on to understand how the symbolic Franklin was created.

  ONE

  BECOMING A GENTLEMAN

  BOSTON BEGINNINGS

  Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706 (January 6, 1705, in the old-style calendar), of very humble origins, origins that always struck Franklin himself as unusually poor. Franklin’s father, Josiah, was a nonconformist from Northamptonshire who as a young man had immigrated to the New World and had become a candle and soap maker, one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts. Josiah fathered a total of seventeen children, ten, including Benjamin, by his second wife, Abiah
Folger, from Nantucket. Franklin was number fifteen of these seventeen and the youngest son.

  In a hierarchical age that favored the firstborn son, Franklin was, as he ruefully recounted in his Autobiography, “the youngest Son of the youngest Son for 5 Generations back.”1 In the last year of his life the bitterness was still there, undisguised by Franklin’s usual irony. In a codicil to his will written in 1789 he observed that most people, having received an estate from their ancestors, felt obliged to pass on something to their posterity. “This obligation,” he wrote with some emotion, “does not lie on me, who never inherited a shilling from any ancestor or relation.”2

  Because the young Franklin was unusually precocious (“I do not remember when I could not read,” he recalled), his father initially sent

  Franklins birthplace on Milk Street, Boston, across from the Old South Church

  the eight-year-old boy to grammar school in preparation for the ministry.3 But his father soon had second thoughts about the expenses involved in a college education, and after a year he pulled the boy out of grammar school and sent him for another year to an ordinary school that simply taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. These two years of formal education were all that Franklin was ever to receive. Not that this was unusual: most boys had little more than this, and almost all girls had no formal schooling at all. Although most of the Revolutionary leaders were college graduates—usually being the first in their families to attend college—some, including Washington, Robert Morris, Patrick Henry, Nathanael Greene, and Thomas Paine, had not much more formal schooling than Franklin. Apprenticeship in a trade or skill was still the principal means by which most young men prepared for the world.

  Franklin’s father chose that route of apprenticeship for his son and began training Franklin to be a candle and soap maker. But since cutting wicks and smelling tallow made Franklin very unhappy, his father finally agreed that the printing trade might better suit the boy’s “Bookish Inclination.”4 Printing, after all, was the most cerebral of the crafts, requiring the ability to read, spell, and write. Nevertheless, it still involved heavy manual labor and was a grubby, messy, and physically demanding job, without much prestige.

  In fact, printing had little more respectability than soap and candle making. It was in such “wretched Disrepute” that, as one eighteenth-century New York printer remarked, no family “of Substance would ever put their Sons to such an Art,” and, as a consequence, masters were “obliged to take of the lowest People” for apprentices.5 But Franklin fit the trade. Not only was young Franklin bookish, but he was also nearly six feet tall and strong with broad shoulders—ideally suited for the difficult tasks of printing. His father thus placed him under the care of an older son, James, who in 1717 had returned from England to set himself up as a printer in Boston. When James saw what his erudite youngest brother could do with words and type, he signed up the twelve-year-old boy to an unusually long apprenticeship of nine years.

  That boy, as Franklin later recalled in his Autobiography, was “extremely ambitious” to become a “tolerable English Writer.”6 Although literacy was relatively high in New England at this time—perhaps 75 percent of males in Boston could read and write and the percentage was rapidly growing— books were scarce and valuable, and few people read books the way Franklin did.7 He read everything he could get his hands on, including John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Plutarch’s Lives, Daniel Defoe’s Essay on Projects, the “do good” essays of the prominent Boston Puritan divine Cotton Mather, and more books of “polemic Divinity” than Franklin wanted to remember.8 He even befriended the apprentices of booksellers in order to gain access to more books. One of these apprentices allowed him secretly to borrow his master’s books to read after work. “Often,” Franklin recalled, “I sat up in my Room reading the greatest Part of the Night, when the Book was borrow’d in the Evening & to be return’d early in the Morning lest it should be miss’d or wanted.”9 He tried his hand at writing poetry and other things but was discouraged with the poor quality of his attempts. He discovered a volume of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator papers and saw in it a tool for self-improvement. He read the papers over and over again and copied and recopied them and tried to recapitulate them from memory. He turned them into poetry and then back again into prose. He took notes on the Spectator essays, jumbled the notes, and then attempted to reconstruct the essays in order to understand the way Addison and Steele had organized them. All this painstaking effort was designed to improve and polish his writing, and it succeeded; “prose Writing” became, as Franklin recalled in his Autobiography, “of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement.” In fact, writing competently was such a rare skill that anyone who could do it well immediately acquired importance. All the Founders, including Washington, first gained their reputations by something they wrote.”10

  In 1721 Franklin’s brother, after being the printer for another person’s newspaper, decided to establish his own paper, the New England Courant. It was only the fourth newspaper in Boston; the first, published in 1690, had been closed down by the Massachusetts government after only one issue. The second, the Boston News-Letter, was founded in 1704; it became the first continuously published newspaper not only in Boston but in all of the North American colonies. The next Boston paper, begun in 1719 and printed by James Franklin for the owner, was the Boston Gazette."11 These early newspapers were small, simple, and bland affairs, two to four pages published weekly and containing mostly reprints of old European news, ship sailings, and various advertisements, together with notices of deaths, political appointments, court actions, fires, piracies, and such matters. Although the papers were expensive and numbered only in the hundreds of copies, they often passed from hand to hand and could reach beneath the topmost ranks of the city’s population of twelve thousand, including even into the ranks of artisans and other “middling sorts.”

  These early papers were labeled “published by authority.” Remaining on the good side of government was not only wise politically, it was wise economically. Most colonial printers in the eighteenth century could not have survived without government printing contracts of one sort or another. Hence most sought to avoid controversy and to remain neutral in politics. They tried to exclude from their papers anything that smacked of libel or personal abuse. Such material was risky. Much safer were the columns of dull but innocuous foreign news that they used to fill their papers, much to Franklin’s later annoyance. It is hard to know what colonial readers made of the first news item printed in the newly created South Carolina Gazette of 1732: “We learn from Caminica, that the Cossacks continue to make inroads onto polish Ukrania.”12

  James Franklin did not behave as most colonial printers did. When he decided to start his own paper, he was definitely not publishing it by authority. In fact, the New England Courant began by attacking the Boston establishment, in particular the program of inoculating people for smallpox that was being promoted by the Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and his father. When this inoculation debate died down, the paper turned to satirizing other subjects of Boston interest, including pretended learning and religious hypocrisy, some of which provoked the Mathers into replies. Eager to try his own hand at satire, young Benjamin in 1722 submitted some essays to his brother’s newspaper under the name of Silence Dogood, a play on Cotton Mather’s Essays to Do Good, the name usually given to the minister’s Bonifacius, published in 1710. For a sixteen-year-old boy to assume the persona of a middle-aged woman was a daunting challenge, and young Franklin took “exquisite Pleasure” in fooling his brother and others into thinking that only “Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity” could have written the newspaper pieces."13

  These Silence Dogood essays lampooned everything from funeral eulogies to “that famous Seminary of Learning,” Harvard College. Although Franklin’s satire was generally and shrewdly genial, there was often a bite to it and a good deal of social resentment b
ehind it, especially when it came to his making fun of Harvard. Most of the students who attended “this famous Place,” he wrote, “were little better than Dunces and Blockheads.” This was not surprising, since the main qualification for entry, he said, was having money. Once admitted, the students “learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquire’d at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.”14 One can already sense an underlying anger in this precocious and rebellious teenager, an anger with those who claimed an undeserved social superiority that would become an important spur to his ambition.

  When Franklin’s brother found out who the author of the Silence Dogood pieces was, he was not happy, “as he thought, probably with reason,” that all the praise the essays were receiving tended to make the young teenager “too vain.” Franklin, as he admitted, was probably “too saucy and provoking” to his brother, and the two brothers began squabbling. James was only nine years older than his youngest brother, but he nonetheless “considered himself as my Master & me as his Apprentice.” Consequently, as master he “expected the same Services from me as he would from another; while I thought he demean’d me too much in some he requir’d of me, who from a Brother expected more Indulgence.” 15