The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (4 page)

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.

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.
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Certainly there were people in Philadelphia who never let him forget “his original obscurity,” and that he had sprung from “the meanest Circumstances.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.