Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

  Eminence Grise

  Even as he indulged in the frivolities of prerevolutionary Paris, Franklin focused much of his writing on his egalitarian, antielitist ideas for building a new American society based on middle-class virtues. His daughter, Sally, sent him newspaper clippings about the formation of a hereditary order of merit called the Society of the Cincinnati, which was headed by General Washington and open to distinguished officers of the American army who would pass the title down to their eldest sons. Franklin, replying at the beginning of 1784, ridiculed the concept. The Chinese were right, he said, to honor the parents of people who earned distinction, for they had some role in it. But honoring a worthy person’s descendants, who had nothing to do with achieving the merit, “is not only groundless and absurd but often hurtful to that posterity.” Any form of hereditary aristocracy or nobility was, he declared, “in direct opposition to the solemnly declared sense of their country.”

  He also, in the letter, ridiculed the symbol of the new Cincinnati order, a bald eagle, which had also been selected as a national symbol. That provoked one of Franklin’s most famous riffs about America’s values and the question of a national bird:

  I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character, he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, near the river where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labors of the fishing-hawk…The turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and a true original native of America…He is (though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards.56

  Franklin heard so frequently from people who wanted to emigrate to America that in early 1784 he printed a pamphlet, in French and English, designed to encourage the more industrious of them while discouraging those who sought a life of upper-class leisure. His essay, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” is one of the clearest expressions of his belief that American society should be based on the virtues of the middle (or “mediocre,” as he sometimes called them, meaning it as a word of praise) classes, of which he still considered himself a part.

  There were few people in America either as poor or as rich as those in Europe, he said. “It is rather a general happy mediocrity that prevails.” Instead of rich proprietors and struggling tenants, “most people cultivate their own lands” or follow some craft or trade. Franklin was particularly harsh on those who sought hereditary privilege or who had “no other quality to recommend him but his birth.” In America, he said, “people do not enquire of a stranger, What is he? but, What can he do?” Reflecting his own pride in discovering that he had hardworking forebears rather than aristocratic ones, he said that a true American “would think himself more obliged to a genealogist who could prove for him that his ancestors and relations for ten generations had been ploughmen, smiths, carpenters, turners, weavers, tanners or even shoemakers, and consequently that they were useful members of society, than if he could only prove that they were Gentlemen, doing nothing of value but living idly on the labor of others.”

  America was creating a society, Franklin proclaimed, where a “mere man of Quality” who does not want to work would be “despised and disregarded,” while anyone who has a useful skill would be honored. All of this made for a better moral clime. “The almost general mediocrity of fortune that prevails in America, obliging its people to follow some business for subsistence, those vices that arise usually from idleness are in a great measure prevented,” he concluded. “Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of morals and virtue.” He purported to be describing the way America was, but he was also subtly prescribing what he wanted it to become. All in all, it was his best paean to the middle-class values he represented and helped to make integral to the new nation’s character.57

  Franklin’s affection for the middle class and its virtues of hard work and frugality meant that his social theories tended to be a blend of conservatism (as we have seen, he was dubious of generous welfare laws that led to dependency among the poor) and populism (he was opposed to the privileges of inheritance and to wealth idly gained through ownership of large estates). In 1784, he expanded on these ideas by questioning the morality of excess personal luxuries.

  “I have not,” he lamented to Benjamin Vaughan, “thought of a remedy for luxury.” On the one hand, the desire for luxury spurred people to work hard. He recalled how his wife had once given a fancy hat to a country girl, and soon all the other girls in the village were working hard spinning mittens in order to earn money to buy fancy hats. This appealed to his utilitarian sentiments: “Not only the girls were made happier by having fine caps, but the Philadelphians by the supply of warm mittens.” However, too much time spent seeking luxuries was wasteful and “a public evil.” So he suggested that America should impose heavy duties on the importation of frivolous fineries.58

  His antipathy to excess wealth also led him to defend high taxes, especially on luxuries. A person had a “natural right” to all he earned that was necessary to support himself and his family, he wrote finance minister Robert Morris, “but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it.” Likewise, to Vaughan, he argued that cruel criminal laws had been wrought by those who sought to protect excess ownership of property. “Superfluous property is the creature of society,” he said. “Simple and mild laws were sufficient to guard the property that was merely necessary.”59

  To some of his contemporaries, both rich and poor, Franklin’s social philosophy seemed an odd mix of conservative and radical beliefs. In fact, however, it formed a very coherent leather-apron outlook. Unlike many subsequent revolutions, the American was not a radical rebellion by an oppressed proletariat. Instead, it was led largely by propertied and shopkeeping citizens whose rather bourgeois rallying cry was “No taxation without representation.” Franklin’s blend of beliefs would become part of the outlook of much of America’s middle class: its faith in the virtues of hard work and frugality, its benevolent belief in voluntary associations to help others, its conservative opposition to handouts that led to laziness and dependency, and its slightly ambivalent resentment of unnecessary luxury, hereditary privileges, and an idle landowning leisure class.

  The end of the war permitted the resumption of amiable correspondence with old friends in England, most notably his fellow printer William Strahan, to whom he had written the famous but unsent letter nine years earlier declaring “You are now my enemy.” By 1780, he had mellowed enough to draft a letter signed “Your formerly affectionate friend,” which he then changed to “Your long affectionate humble servant.” By 1784, he was signing himself “Most affectionately.”

  Once again, they debated Franklin’s theories that top government officials should serve without pay and that England’s society and government were inherently corrupt. Now, however, the tone was bantering as Franklin suggested that the Americans, who “have some remains of affection” for the British, perhaps should help govern them. “If you have not sense and virtue enough left to govern yourselves,” he wrote, “dissolve your present old crazy constitution and send members to Congress.” Lest Strahan not realize he was joking, Franklin confessed, “You will say my advice smells of Madeira. You are right. This foolish letter is mere chitchat between ourselves over the second bottle.”60

  Franklin also spent the early summer of 1784 adding more to his memoirs. He had written about 40 percent of what would become his famous Autobiography at Bishop Shipley’s in Twyford in 1771. Now he responded to a request from Vaughan, who said that Franklin’s story would help to explain the “manners of a rising people,” and in Passy wrote what would become another 10 percent of that work. His focus at the time was on the need to build a new American character, and most of the section he wrote in 1784 was devoted to an explanation of the famous self-improvement project
in which he sought to train himself in the thirteen virtues ranging from frugality and industry to temperance and humility.

  His Passy friends were especially thrilled by the tale of the slate booklet Franklin used to record his efforts at acquiring these virtues. Franklin, who still had not fully acquired all aspects of humility, proudly showed off the tablets to Cabanis, the young physician who lived with Madame Helvétius. “We touched this precious booklet,” Cabanis exulted in his journal. “We held it in our hands. Here was, in a way, the chronological story of Franklin’s soul!”61

  In his spare time, Franklin perfected one of his most famous and useful inventions: bifocal glasses. Writing to a friend in August 1784, he announced himself “happy in the invention of Double Spectacles, which, serving for distant objects as well as near ones, make my eyes as useful to me as ever they were.” A few months later, in response to a request for more information about “your invention,” Franklin provided details:

  The same convexity of glass through which a man sees clearest and best at the distance proper for reading is not the best for greater distances. I therefore had formerly two pair of spectacles, which I shifted occasionally, as in traveling I sometimes read, and often wanted to regard the prospects. Finding this change troublesome, and not always sufficiently ready, I had the glasses cut and half of each kind associated in the same circle. By this means, as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper glasses being always ready.62

  A portrait by Charles Willson Peale, done in 1785, shows him wearing his new spectacles.

  Because of his renown both as a scientist and a rationalist, Franklin was appointed by the king in 1784 to a commission to investigate the theories of Friedrich Anton Mesmer, whose advocacy of a new method of healing led to the new word “mesmerize.” (Another member of Franklin’s commission, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, would also have his name turned into a neologism during the French Revolution.) A flamboyant healer from Vienna, Mesmer believed that maladies were caused by the artificial disruption of a universal fluid emitted by heavenly bodies and they could be cured by the techniques of animal magnetism he had discovered. His treatment involved putting patients around huge oak tubs filled with glass and iron filings while a healer, carrying an iron wand, magnetized and mesmerized them. In a sign that the Enlightenment was losing its grip, Mesmerism became wildly popular in Paris, replacing ballooning as the fad of the moment, with adherents that included Lafayette, Temple Franklin, and Queen Marie-Antoinette.

  Many of the commission’s meetings were held in Passy, where Franklin himself, in the name of science, submitted to the treatments. In his diary, 14-year-old Benny recorded one session where Mesmer’s disciples, “after having magnetized many sick persons…are gone into the garden to magnetize some trees.” It was clear that the power of suggestion could produce some strange effects. The commissioners, however, decided that “our role was to keep cool, rational and open-minded.” So they blindfolded the patients, not letting them know whether or not they were being treated by Mesmer’s doctors. “We discovered we could influence them ourselves so that their answers were the same, whether they had been magnetized or not.” They concluded that Mesmer was a fraud and what was at work was, at they put it in their report, “the power of imagination.” An unpublished annex to the report did note that the treatment was powerful at sexually stimulating young women when “titillations delicieuses” were applied.

  Franklin wrote to Temple, who was no longer a disciple of Mesmer, that the report had roundly debunked the theories. “Some think it will put an end to Mesmerism,” he said, “but there is a wonderful deal of credulity in the world, and deceptions as absurd have supported themselves for ages.”63

  Finale

  One source of despair for Franklin was that, in negotiating treaties with other European nations, he had to work with John Adams again. He was worried, he told one friend, about “what will be the offspring of a coalition between my ignorance and his positiveness.” Adams’s brief period of mellowness had lasted for only a few months after the signing of the provisional peace with Britain, and he subsequently resumed his backbiting. Franklin was an “unintelligible politician,” Adams wrote Robert Livingston. “If this gentleman and the marble Mercury in the garden of Versailles were in nomination for an embassy, I would not hesitate to give my vote for the statue, upon the principle that it would do no harm.”

  So Franklin was thrilled when Thomas Jefferson, who had twice resisted congressional commissions to join Franklin and Adams as a minister in Paris, finally relented and arrived there in August 1784. Jefferson was everything that Adams was not: diplomatic and charming, partial to France, secure rather than jealous, a lover of women and social gaiety with no Puritan prudishness. He was also a philosopher, inventor, and scientist whose Enlightenment curiosity meshed perfectly with Franklin’s.

  To make matters even better, Jefferson was fully aware of the darkness that infected Adams. James Madison had written him to complain that Adams’s letters were “a display of his vanity, his prejudice against the French court and his venom against Dr. Franklin.” Jefferson replied, “He hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere?”

  Jefferson shared Franklin’s belief that idealism and realism should both play a role in foreign policy. “The best interest of nations, like men, was to follow the dictates of conscience,” he declared. And unlike Adams, he completely revered Franklin. “More respect and veneration attached to the character of Dr. Franklin in France than to that of any other person, foreign or native,” he wrote, and he proclaimed Franklin “the greatest man and ornament of the age.” When word spread, a few months later, that he was being tapped to replace Franklin, Jefferson gave his famed reply: “No one can replace him, Sir, I am only his successor.”64

  Jefferson dined often with Franklin, played chess with him, and listened to his lectures about the loyalty America owed France. His calming presence even helped Franklin and Adams get along better, and the three men who had worked together on the Declaration now worked together at Passy almost every day throughout September preparing for new European treaties and commercial pacts. There was, in fact, a lot that the three patriots could agree on. They shared a faith in free trade, open covenants, and the need to end the mercantilist system of repressive commercial arrangements and restrictive spheres of influence. As Adams, with uncharacteristic generosity, noted, “We proceeded with wonderful harmony, good humor and unanimity.”

  For both men and nations, it was a season of reconciliation. If Franklin could repair his relationship with Adams, there was even hope that he could do so with his son. “Dear and honored father,” William wrote from England that summer. “Ever since the termination of the unhappy contest between Great Britain and America, I have been anxious to write to you, and to endeavor to revive that affectionate intercourse and connection which, until the commencement of the late troubles, had been the pride and happiness of my life.”

  It was a noble, gracious, and plaintive gesture from a son who, through it all, had never said anything bad about his estranged father nor stopped loving him. But William was still a Franklin, and he could not bring himself to admit that he had been in the wrong, nor to apologize. “If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it. It is an error of judgment that the maturest reflection I am capable of cannot rectify; and I verily believe were the same circumstances to occur again tomorrow, my conduct would be exactly similar to what it was.” He offered to come to Paris if his father did not want to come to England so they could settle their issues with “a personal interview.”65

  Franklin’s response revealed his pain, but it also offered some hints of hope. He began by saying he was “glad to find that you desire to revive the affectionate intercourse,” and he even brought himself to add, “it will be agreeable to me.” Yet he immediately segued from love to anger:

  Indeed nothing has
ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen sensations as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause, wherein my good fame, fortune and life were all at stake. You conceived, you say, that your duty to your King and regard for your country required this. I ought not to blame you for differing in sentiment with me in public affairs. We are men, all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power; they are formed and governed much by circumstances, that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situation was such that few would have censured your remaining neuter, though there are natural duties which precede political ones [emphasis is Franklin’s].

  Then he caught himself. “This is a disagreeable subject,” he wrote. “I drop it.” It would not be convenient, he added, to “have you come here at the present.” Instead, Temple would be sent to London to act as an intermediary. “You may confide to your son the family affairs you wish to confer upon with me.” Then, a bit condescendingly, he added, “I trust you will prudently avoid introducing him to company that it may be improper for him to be seen with.” Temple may have been William’s son, but Franklin made it clear who controlled him.66

  At 24, Temple had little of his grandfather’s wisdom but possessed a lot more of the normal emotions that bind families, even estranged ones. He had long been hoping, he wrote a London friend, to return there to “embrace my father.” On his visit to England, he nevertheless was careful to show fealty to his grandfather, even asking for permission before accompanying his father on a trip to the seashore.

  After a few weeks, Franklin began to fear that Temple might be forsaking him for his father, and he chided him for not writing enough. “I have waited with impatience the arrival of every post. But not a word.” Among other things, Franklin complained, this was embarrassing him with those who kept asking whether he had heard from Temple: “Judge what I must feel, what they must think, and tell me what I am to think of such neglect.” Of all the members of his family, Temple alone could cause such jealousy and possessiveness.