The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (40 page)

Prior to the early nineteenth century, social mobility generally had not been something to be proud of, as indicated by the pejorative terms— “upstarts,” “arrivistes,” “parvenus”—used to disparage those participants unable to hide the lowliness of their origins. But now mobile individuals began boasting of their humble beginnings. They had made it, they said, on their own, without family influence, without patronage, and without having gone to Harvard or Princeton or any college at all. A man was now praised for having “no relations or friends, but what his money made for him”; he was “the architect of his own fortune.”
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Sensitive to the charge of vanity, Franklin in his
Autobiography
had played down the suggestion that he was the architect of his own fortune. He had written simply that he had “emerged from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World.” His grandson Temple, however, in his edition of Franklin’s
Memoirs,
first published in 1817-1818, wanted to emphasize the great man’s self-made character. So his edition read: “From the poverty and obscurity in which I was born,... I have raised myself to a state of affluence and some degree of celebrity in the world.”
“Raised myself"!
That was quite a difference. As Temple’s edition of the
Autobiography
was regarded as the standard text for the next half century, it was not surprising that Franklin should have emerged for businessmen everywhere as the perfect model of the self-made man.
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By the early nineteenth century many of these successful businessmen no longer felt the need, as Franklin had, to shed their leather aprons in order to acquire respectability. They were proud of being self-made men, and sometimes they even flaunted their lowly origins. Philadelphia manufacturer Patrick Lyon (1779-1829) began his career as a humble blacksmith and had actually been falsely imprisoned in the Walnut Street jail for three months for bank robbery. But after being released from prison and winning a civil compensation suit, he eventually became a successful businessman who in 1826, like Franklin three quarters of a century earlier, wanted his portrait painted. But unlike Franklin, who had wanted to display the ruffled silk of his new status as a gentleman, Lyon told the artist, John Neagle, that he had no desire to be “represented in the picture as a gentleman.” He wanted to be painted as he once was, “at work at my anvil, with my sleeves rolled up and a leather apron on,” with the Walnut Street Gaol in the background.

Pat Lyon at the Forge
was an immediate popular success. When hung in the academies of New York and Philadelphia, Lyon’s portrait, “looking

Pat Lyon at the Forge,
by John Neagle, 1826

delightfully cheek by jowl” with the conventional genteel portraits, instantly reminded people, as one reviewer pointed out, “of the equality of mankind in everything but mind.”
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The difference between Lyon’s portrait in 1826 and that of Franklin in 1748 (see page 58) is a measure of how radically the American Revolution had changed American society and culture. Aristotle must have turned in his grave—thousands of years of aristocratic contempt for trading and working for money shattered in just a few decades.
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In the generation following the Revolution thousands upon thousands of young men responded to the many appeals to make their own way in the world and took advantage of the multitudes of commercial opportunities opening up, especially in the northern states of America. Indeed, this first generation to come of age after the Revolution may have been the most important single cohort in American history. For not only did this generation create American capitalism but it also created a powerful conception of American identity—the America of enterprising, innovative, and equality-loving people—a conception so powerful in fact that it has lasted even into our own time.”
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Many of these northern entrepreneurs—and nearly all of them were from the North—sought to imitate Franklin not only by making money and prospering but also by setting down in hundreds upon hundreds of memoirs the stories of their struggles and their achievements. Some of the memoirists were explicit in invoking Franklin’s life as their model, but others simply portrayed events in ways that were remarkably similar to Franklin’s depictions in his
Autobiography.
When John Ball, the tenth of ten children, found that his older brother, like Franklin’s older brother, “claimed the right to direct the work [on their Vermont farm] in a way that to me was not always satisfactory,” he became “determined to leave home” just as Franklin had. Ball eventually became a state legislator in Michigan and the architect of the state’s public school system. In his memoir Chauncey Jerome described his arrival in New Haven in 1812 as a nineteen-year-old: “I wandered about the streets early one morning with a bundle of clothes and some bread and cheese in my hands.” He recalled scarcely imagining then that he would become a prosperous clockmaker in the city, “or that I should ever be its Mayor.” It was as if these successful men had to have begun their lives just as Franklin had, even to the point of duplicating his particular experiences.
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THE MYTH OF AMERICAN NATIONHOOD

The men who wrote these memoirs were successful businessmen who were proud of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. And cumulatively the stories they told, along with the numerous editions of Franklin’s
Autobiography,
had an inordinate influence on America’s understanding of itself. Out of these repeated messages of striving and success not only did ordinary northern white men acquire a heightened appreciation of their work and their worth; they were also able to construct an enduring sense of American nationhood—a sense of America as the land of enterprise and opportunity, as the place where anybody who works hard can make it, as the nation of free and scrambling moneymaking individuals pursuing happiness. This myth of American identity created during the several decades following the Revolution became so powerful that succeeding generations were scarcely able to question it.
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Among the peoples of the world only Americans of the early republic, as their great observer Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, celebrated work as “the necessary, natural, and honest condition of all men.” What most astonished Tocqueville was that Americans thought not only that work itself was “honorable,” but that “work specifically to gain money” was “honorable.” By contrast, European society not only possessed proportionally fewer middling people than America, but was still dominated by aristocrats who scorned working for profit. When they served the state, said Tocqueville, these European aristocrats claimed to do so without interested motives. “Their salary is a detail to which sometimes they give a little thought and to which they pretend to give none.” But in democratic America serving the public without salary, as Washington and Franklin had, was no longer possible. “As the desire for prosperity is universal, fortunes are middling and ephemeral, and everyone needs to increase his resources or create fresh ones for his children,” said Tocqueville; “all see quite clearly that it is profit which, if not wholly then at least partially, prompts them to work.”

With everyone working for pay, everyone became alike. Even “servants do not feel degraded because they work,” Tocqueville wrote, “for everyone around them is working. There is nothing humiliating about the idea of receiving a salary, for the President of the United States works for a salary.” And Franklin, the Founder who wanted all members of the federal executive to serve without pay, nevertheless now became the special hero of all these middling men who prized the fact that everyone worked for a living.
¹⁰⁸

Of course, as Tocqueville explained, the “Americans” he described were those “who live in the parts of the country where there is no slavery. It is they alone who provide a complete picture of a democratic society.”
¹⁰⁹
It was the northern working people of 1830 who created America’s dominant sense of nationhood, not the cavalier South.

At the time of the Revolution in 1776, Virginia had thought itself to be the undisputed leader of the nation, with good reason. It was by far the most populous state, with a population of well over 600,000 people, 40 percent of whom were black slaves. It was over twice the size of its nearest competitor, Pennsylvania. It supplied much of the Revolutionary leadership and dominated the Constitutional Convention with its Virginia plan. In 1776 it had the strongest claim to the bulk of the western territory comprising most of the present-day Midwest. It is not surprising that four of the first five presidents and the longest-serving chief justice of the United States should have been Virginians. But by 1830 Virginia’s day in the sun had passed, its population outstripped by both New York and Pennsylvania. Its economy had become largely engaged in the export of slaves to the burgeoning regions of the Deep South.

Virginia and the South always claimed that they had remained closer to the eighteenth-century beginnings of the nation, and they were right. It was the North that had changed and changed dramatically. Because northern Americans came to celebrate work so emphatically—with Franklin as their most representative figure—the leisured slaveholding aristocracy of Virginia and the rest of the South became a bewildered and beleaguered minority out of touch with the enterprise and egalitarianism that had come to dominate the country. As long as work had been held in contempt, as it had for millennia, slavery could never have been wholeheartedly condemned. But to a society that came to honor work as fully as the North did, a leisured aristocracy and the institution of slavery that supported it had to become abominations.

This dynamic, democratic, and enterprising world that Tocqueville described created the modern image of Franklin as the bourgeois moralist obsessed with the making of money and getting ahead. Although this image was the one that D. H. Lawrence and other imaginative writers have so much scorned, Franklin might not have been unhappy to learn that this powerful entrepreneurial symbol would be the way most people in the world would come to know him.

In some ways his career had come full circle. Near the end of his life he glimpsed that some people were coming to see him once again as the tradesman printer who had made it, and he seemed to welcome this view of himself. After seeing his grandson Temple rebuffed by Congress, he decided that his other grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache (called Benny by Franklin), would not suffer the same fate. He told his son-in-law, Benny’s father, that he was “determined to give him a Trade [as a printer] that he may have something to depend on, and not to be oblig’d to ask Favours or Offices of any body”
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As he had always done when he wanted to boost himself in moments of lagging self-esteem, he took pride in the fact that he had been a successful tradesman and printer who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. In fact, he liked to startle French aristocrats by showing them how he could set type, and he bragged about his decision to leave money to two American cities for the encouragement of “young beginners in business.”
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In 1786 he backed the Philadelphia journeymen printers in their strike over wage cuts, and the journeymen responded by drinking toasts in celebration of his eighty-first birthday.
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In 1788 he participated in the founding of the Franklin Society in Philadelphia, an organization designed to support printers with credit and insurance. The year before his death, he lamented that he was “too old to follow printing again my self, but loving the business,” he had thrown all his energies into training his grandson in the trade. He now looked forward to his
Autobiography’s
being read by future generations, realizing that the early parts of it would have the most significance for young readers—“as exemplifying strongly the Effects of prudent and imprudent Conduct in the Commencement of a life of business.”
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It is the image of the hardworking self-made businessman that has most endured. Franklin was one of the greatest of the Founders; indeed, his crucial diplomacy in the Revolution makes him second only to Washington in importance. But that importance is not what we most remember about Franklin. It is instead the symbolic Franklin of the bumptious capitalism of the early republic—the man who personifies the American dream—who stays with us. And as long as America is seen as the land of opportunity, where you can get ahead if you work hard, this image of Franklin will likely be the one that continues to dominate American culture.

NOTES

The following abbreviations are used in the notes.