The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (9 page)

Freemasonry more than fulfilled Franklin’s Enlightenment dreams of establishing a party for virtue, and he became an enthusiastic and hardworking member of the fraternity. Two years after he joined St. John’s Lodge in Philadelphia, he drafted its bylaws and became its warden. A year later, in 1734, he printed the
Constitutions of the Free-Masons,
the first Masonic book in America. A month later he became master of St. John’s Lodge. Eventually he became the grand master of all the lodges in the colony of Pennsylvania. No organization could have been more congenial to Franklin, and although he seldom mentioned the organization in his correspondence, he remained a Mason throughout his life. Not only was Masonry dedicated to the promotion of virtue throughout the world, but this Enlightenment fraternity gave Franklin contacts and connections that helped him in his business.

CIVIC AFFAIRS

Franklin, as he said in his
Autobiography,
“always thought that one Man of tolerable Abilities may work great Changes, and Accomplish great Affairs among Mankind, if he first forms a good Plan and ... makes the Execution of that same Plan his sole Study and Business.”
⁷⁷
To the young Franklin it made no difference whether this man of tolerable abilities was an artisan or not. He had set out from the beginning to demonstrate that middling sorts of craftsmen, tradesmen, and shopkeepers like himself could fulfill this Enlightenment hope in Philadelphia.

In 1731 Franklin and the other members of the Junto organized a subscription lending library, the Library Company, which would enable subscribers to have access to many more books than they otherwise would. Although he was the originator of the library, he soon came to realize that people were suspicious of a mere printer soliciting money and objected to his raising his reputation above that of his neighbors. Consequently, he decided to remain in the background and pass off his library as “a Scheme of a
Number of Friends.
” By his willingness to deny himself credit, his “Affair went on more smoothly," a lesson he applied when he came to promote subsequent ventures. As he later said, with some excusable exaggeration, the Library Company became “the Mother of all the North American Subscription Libraries now so numerous.... These Libraries had improv’d the general Conversation of the Americans, [and] made the common Tradesmen & Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries.”
⁷⁸

This was just one part of his civic activity. In 1729 he wrote a pamphlet promoting the printing of paper money, which was a boon for “every industrious Tradesman” and all those who bought and sold goods. (It was also a boon to those printers like Franklin who received government contracts to print the paper money.) With a sufficient supply of paper currency, wrote Franklin, “Business will be carried on more freely, and Trade be universally enlivened by it.” Although he tried to assure gentlemen-creditors and others who lived on fixed incomes that they should not fear such paper currency, he knew that these leisured gentlemen were not the real source of prosperity in the society. It was the
“Labouring and Handicrafts Men"
who were
“the chief Strength and Support of a People.”
⁷⁹

But Franklin was not just interested in creating wealth in the community. No civic project was too large or too small for his interest. Because of the ever present danger of fire, he advised people on how to carry hot coals from one room to another, how to keep chimneys safe, how to organize fire companies for the city, and how to insure themselves against the damages of fire. He worked hard to promote inoculation against smallpox in the face of strong opposition, taking the position of the Mathers, which his brother James’s paper had opposed in 1721.
⁸⁰
To make the city streets safe he proposed organized night watchmen to be supported by taxes. To earn support for a hospital to be open free of charge to the poor of the city he concocted the idea of matching grants and persuaded the Pennsylvania General Assembly to put up £2000 if the same amount could be raised privately. To deal with smoky chimneys and poor indoor heating he invented his Pennsylvania stove. Almost single-handedly he made life notably more comfortable for his fellow citizens and helped to create a civic society for the middling inhabitants of Philadelphia. Individually, these were small matters perhaps, but they were all designed to add to the sum of human happiness—which after all was what the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was all about. “Human Felicity,” Franklin noted, “is produc’d not so much by great Pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.”
⁸¹

FRANKLIN’S AWKWARD MIDDLING STATUS

With all his success Franklin found himself caught between two worlds, between that of aspiring artisans and tradesmen and that of wealthy gentlemen, with whom he mingled constantly. Because he came to believe that “common Tradesmen and Farmers” in America were “as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries,” he thought commoners in America often expected to pass as gentlemen more easily than elsewhere. He had discovered earlier in his life that an ordinary person with the right sponsorship could be admitted to the society of gentlemen. When he and James Ralph had boarded their ship to sail to England in 1724, they “were forc’d to take up with a Berth in the Steerage,” since “none on board knowing us, [we] were considered as ordinary Persons.” But when Colonel John French, justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, later came on board, recognized the eighteen-year-old Franklin, and paid him “great Respect,” he was “more taken Notice of,” and he and Ralph were immediately invited “by the other Gentlemen to come into the Cabin.”
⁸²

Yet he knew that such socializing was often the consequence of gentry condescension. He knew too that no matter how successful and wealthy he had become, he still remained a laborer in the eyes of most of the gentry, and thus one of the common people or “meaner Sort” who had to work for a living as a printer. The gentry knew how to put a mere mechanic, no matter how wealthy or talented, in his place.

In 1740 Franklin came up with the idea of starting a magazine in Philadelphia and offered the job of editing it to John Webbe, a lawyer he knew. But Webbe took the idea to Franklin’s competitor Andrew Bradford, who quickly brought out
The American Magazine.
(The next year in his
Almanack,
Poor Richard proclaimed: “If you would keep your Secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.”) A week later Franklin announced that he would publish his own periodical,
The General Magazine.
At the same time he told the world that he had originated the idea of a magazine and that Webbe had betrayed him. Webbe, the lawyer, using the usual gentry put-down of a mechanic, replied that Franklin had never been expected to participate in the magazine “in any other capacity than that of a
meer
Printer.”
⁸³

This was just the sort of sneer that would have made Franklin both angry and uncomfortable. He naturally preferred to call himself a member of the new emerging middling sort. But when confronted with the dichotomous social division favored by the gentry—“the BETTER SORT of People” set against “the meaner Sort”—he was willing to be lumped with those he considered to constitute the populace, which, he pointed out, “your Demosthenes’ and Ciceroes, your Sidneys and Trenchards never approached ... but with Reverence.” Writing in his newspaper in 1740 as Obadiah Plainman, Franklin let loose some of his resentment at those who used the expression “the BETTER SORT of People.” Such gentlemen, he said with a good deal of scorn, looked upon “the Rest of their Fellow Subjects in the same Government with Contempt, and consequently regard them as Mob and Rabble,” who constituted nothing more than “a stupid Herd, in whom the Light of Reason is extinguished.” In contrast to this arrogant “better Sort,” he said, he was but “a poor ordinary Mechanick of this City, obliged to work hard for the Maintenance of myself, my Wife, and several small Children.”
⁸⁴
Yet, of course, he knew that in reality he was anything but “a poor ordinary Mechanick.” His genteel newspaper opponent Richard Peters, a former clergyman and secretary of the colony’s land office, knew that too. When pressed to defend his use of the “better Sort,” Peters declared that he could think of no better example of such persons than those who were members of the Library Company—to which Franklin, as Obadiah Plainman, had already admitted in the newspaper exchanges to belonging. If “poor ordinary Mechanicks” could be classed as members of “the better Sort,” the gentry’s dichotomous social categories were not working well at all. More so perhaps than anyone in colonial America, Franklin was living in two social worlds simultaneously.
⁸⁵

Franklin’s proposals for education vividly reveal the ambivalence he felt as someone caught between the better and meaner sorts. As early as 1743 he had drawn up plans for an academy in Philadelphia, but it was not until 1749 that he laid them out in a pamphlet,
Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania.
He originally wanted a school dedicated to teaching the English language and not Latin. The school, in other words, was mainly designed for young men with origins similar to his own— tradesmen and mechanics who wished to better themselves. But, as he recalled with some resentment in an unpublished tract written at the end of his life, this plan was foiled by a number of “Persons of Wealth and Learning, whose Subscriptions and Countenance we should need,” and who believed that the school “ought to include the learned Languages.”
⁸⁶
With his original plan for an English academy transformed into a traditional Latin school favoring the sons of the gentry, Franklin had to create a separate English school that he hoped would fulfill his original intentions. “Youth would come out of this School,” he wrote in a piece published in 173-1, “fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except wherein Languages are required; and tho’ unacquainted with any antient or foreign Tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.”
⁸⁷
Unfortunately, however, the gentry trustees who were in charge of both schools so discriminated against the English school in favor of the Latin school—paying the Latin head twice as much as the English head, for example, even though he taught fewer students—that the English school eventually dwindled into insignificance. At the end of his life, however, Franklin had some consolation to discover that things had changed. The executor of his estate told him that
“public opinion"
had now “undergone a revolution,” and was now “undoubtedly in favor of an English Education, in spite of the prejudices of the learned on this subject.”
⁸⁸

Franklin’s attempt to form a philosophical society revealed a similar tension between the different worlds of tradesmen and gentry. In 1743 he published
A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America,
in which he suggested the formation of a society composed of “Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies,” a kind of intercolonial version of his old Junto. This organization, to be called
“The American Philosophical Society"
would promote “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniences or Pleasures of life.” He got the society on its feet, but at the outset it was not as active as Franklin had hoped. “The Members of our Society are very idle Gentlemen,” he complained to the New York official and scientist Cadwallader Colden in 1745. “They will take no Pains.”
⁸⁹
Apparently the ambitious middling sorts that had made up his Junto had had more energy and more intellectual curiosity than the gentry.

Despite all his gentlemanly activities—his philanthropic ventures and his practical projects for self-education in the art of virtue— Franklin still saw himself as a printer and businessman and not a gentleman in these early Philadelphia years. But if he was not a gentleman, he was obviously not a commoner either. Instead, he had become the principal spokesman for the growing numbers of artisans, shopkeepers, and other middling sorts in Philadelphia who were his main supporters in all of his civic endeavors. He identified completely with these middling people: “Our Families and little Fortunes,” he said, were “as dear to us as any Great Man’s can be to him.” And he was not at all embarrassed to call himself publicly “an honest Tradesman.”
⁹⁰

“THE MOLATTO GENTLEMAN”

Although he was constantly mingling with gentlemen, he did not yet think of turning himself into one; that is, he had not yet imagined himself having all the qualities that would allow him to retire from his business and shed his leather apron entirely. However wealthy an artisan he might become, and Franklin’s income was growing rapidly, this young printer well knew that entering into the status of a gentleman was not a simple matter, and he was not at all sure that he even wanted to try.

There were many people, he wrote in an anonymous newspaper piece in 1733, who, “by their Industry or good Fortune, from mean Beginnings find themselves in Circumstances a little more easy.” Many of these people were immediately seized by “an Ambition... to become
Gentlefolks."
But it was “no easy Thing for a Clown or a Labourer, on a sudden to hit in all respects, the natural and easy Manner of those who have been genteely educated: And ’tis the Curse of
Imitation,
that it almost always either under-does or over-does.”

Franklin’s newspaper persona—“an ordinary Mechanick” who prays that “I may always have the Grace to know my self and my Station”— went on to describe the problems faced by the newly wealthy artisan trying to pass as a gentleman. “The
true Gentleman,
who is well known to be such, can take a Walk, or drink a Glass, and converse freely, if there be occasion, with honest Men of any Degree below him, without degrading or fearing to degrade himself in the least.” In other words, a true gentleman, confident of his status, could condescend with ease. The parvenu was not able to act in this easy manner. Whenever Franklin’s persona witnessed such a person acting “mighty cautious” in company with those who appear to be his inferiors, he knew that that person was “some
new Gentleman,
or rather
half Gentleman,
or
Mungrel,
an unnatural Compound of Earth and
Brass
like the Feet of
Nebuchadnezzar’s
Image.”