The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

THE FOLKSY FOUNDER

Benjamin Franklin has a special place in the hearts and minds of Americans. He is, of course, one of the most preeminent of the Founders, those heroic men from the era of wigs and knee breeches. Men as diverse as Henry Cabot Lodge and Garry Wills have ranked him along with Washington as the greatest of the Founders.
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Of these heroic men of the eighteenth century, Franklin seems to have a unique appeal. He seems the most accessible, the most democratic, and the most folksy of the Founders. His many portraits suggest an affable genial old man with spectacles and a twinkle in his eye ready to tell us a humorous story. He seems to be the one we would most like to spend an evening with. Ordinary people can identify with him in ways they cannot with the other Founders. Stern and thin-lipped George Washington, especially as portrayed by Gilbert Stuart, is too august and awesome to be approachable. Although Thomas Jefferson has democratic credentials, he is much too aristocratic and reserved for most people to relate to; besides, he was a slaveholder who failed to free most of his slaves. John Adams seems human enough, but he is too cranky and idiosyncratic to be in any way the kind of American hero ordinary folk can get close to. James Madison is much too shy and intellectual, and Alexander Hamilton is much too arrogant and hot tempered: neither of them makes a congenial popular idol. No, of all these great men of the eighteenth century, it is Franklin who seems to have the most common touch and who seems to symbolize better than any other Founder the plain democracy of ordinary folk.

Indeed, perhaps no person in American history has taken on such emblematic and imaginative significance for Americans as has Franklin. We may not agree with his enemy John Adams that Franklin combined “practical cunning” with “theoretick Ignorance,” but we may well share Adams’s belief that he is “one of the most curious Characters in History.”
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Franklin has become, in the view of literary historian Perry Miller, one of the most “massively symbolic” figures in American history.
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Scholars today tend not to believe anymore in the notion of an American character, but if there is such a thing, then Franklin exemplifies it. In 1888 William Dean Howells called Franklin “the most modern, the most American, of his contemporaries,” and many other commentators have agreed.
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He seems to have embodied much of what most Americans have valued throughout their history. His “homely aphorisms and observations,” one historian has written, “have influenced more Americans than the learned wisdom of all the formal philosophers put together.”
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Although Franklin was naturally talented, declared one nineteenth-century admirer, he achieved his success by character and conduct that were “within the reach of every human being.” All of his teachings entered into the “everyday manners and affairs” of people; they “pointed out the causes which may promote good and ill fortune in ordinary life.” That was what made him such a democratic hero.
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Unlike the other great Founders, Franklin began as an artisan, a lowly printer who became the architect of his own fortune. He is the prototype of the self-made man, and his life is the classic American success story— the story of a man rising from the most obscure of origins to wealth and international preeminence. Franklin, the author of
The Way to Wealth,
has stood for American social mobility—the capacity of ordinary people to make it to the top through frugality and industry and to flourish. The unforgettable images of Franklin that he himself helped to create—the youth of seventeen with loaves of bread under his arms, the scientist flying a kite to capture lightning in a storm, the fervent moralist outlining his resolves that once followed will lead to success—have passed into American mythology and folklore. If any single figure could symbolize all of America, it was Franklin. Not surprisingly, he became for historian Frederick Jackson Turner and many subsequent biographers and panegyrists “the first great American.”
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He was the nation itself, declared the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1889, “the personification of an optimistic shrewdness, a large, healthy nature, as of a young people gathering its strength and feeling its broadening power.” He has represented everything Americans like about themselves—their levelheadedness, common sense, pragmatism, ingenuity, and get-up-and-go. Because of his inventions of the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, and other useful instruments, he has been identified with the happiness and prosperity of common people in the here and now. He was the one, as an 1833 history of the United States put it, “who has made our dwellings comfortable within, and protected them from the lightning of heaven.” He spoke to common people, to “that rank of people who have no opportunity for study,” as the Columbian Class Book declared in 1827. He was, as one admirer wrote in 1864, “a genuine product of American soil.”
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Millions of people have quoted and tried to live their lives by his Poor Richard sayings and proverbs, such as “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.”
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Those who wanted to know the way to wealth read Franklin. He has stood for industry, frugality, thrift, and every materialistic virtue that Americans have valued.

During the nineteenth century Franklin became not only an icon that ordinary people could emulate but also the most important mythical figure used to assimilate foreigners to American values. Franklin came to represent the America of innovation and enterprise, of moneymaking and getting ahead. He was everything that immigrants thought America was about. America, even into our own time, as one twenty-first-century immigrant put it, has remained “a land of opportunity, and one [where] if you worked hard you could get ahead.”
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No one has stood for that promise of getting ahead better than Franklin. Schools in the nineteenth century began using his
Autobiography
to teach moral lessons to students. Many people seemed to know his writings as well as they knew the Bible. It is not surprising that the book Davy Crockett had with him when he died at the Alamo was not the Bible but Franklin’s
Autobiography"
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DEBUNKING FRANKLIN

So overwhelming did Franklin’s image of the boy who worked hard and made it become in the nineteenth century that humorists like Mark Twain could scarcely avoid mocking it. Franklin’s example, said Twain in 1870, had become a burden for every American youngster. The great man, said Twain, had “early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages. His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever—boys who might otherwise have been happy ... With a malevolence which is without parallel in history,” wrote Twain, “he would work all day and then sit up nights and let on to be studying algebra by the light of the smouldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them.”
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As Twain’s sardonic humor suggests, Franklin has had many detractors. And most of them have been much more genuinely critical than Twain. Indeed, the criticism that Franklin has aroused over the past two centuries has been as extraordinary as the praise. Franklin may be the most folksy and popular figure among the Founding Fathers, yet at the same time he is also the one who has provoked the most derision.

Of course, from the beginning of professional history-writing at the end of the nineteenth century, historians have been busy trying to strip away the many myths and legends that have grown up around all the Founding Fathers in order to get at the human beings presumably hidden from view. Indeed, during modern times this sort of historical debunking of the Founders has become something of a cottage industry. But the criticism leveled at Franklin has been different. Historians did not have to rip away a mantle of godlike dignity and loftiness from Franklin, as they had to do with the other Founders, in order to recover the hidden human being; Franklin already seemed human enough. Indeed, it was his Poor Richard ordinariness that made him vulnerable to criticism. As William Dean Howells noted, Franklin came down to the end of the nineteenth century “with more reality than any of his contemporaries.” Although this “by no means hurt him in the popular regard,” it certainly did not help his reputation with many intellectuals.
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Precisely because of his massive identification with middling and materialistic America, he became the Founder whom many critics most liked to mock. As John Keats pointed out as early as 1818, there was nothing sublime about Franklin, or about Americans in general, for that matter.
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Like Franklin, Thomas Jefferson has often been identified with America, and thus he too has come in for some hard knocks, especially over the past generation, mostly for his hypocrisy, his ideological rigidity, and his unwillingness to free his slaves. But as intense as this criticism of Jefferson has been, it is not quite comparable to the ridicule and condemnation that Franklin has suffered over the past two centuries. Jefferson has never been accused of lacking elegance or of being a lackey of capitalism.

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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