The Society for Useful Knowledge (2 page)

In a letter to a young woman he was tutoring in science, Franklin wondered aloud, “What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some Use?”
²
Elsewhere, he pointedly directed a scientific colleague not to waste his time on theoretical matters but “employ your time rather in making Experiments than in making Hypotheses and forming imaginary Systems, which we are all too apt to please ourselves with till some Experiment comes, and unluckily destroys them.”
³
Faced with the riddle of the possible relationship between lightning and electricity that had so far stumped the finest minds in Europe, Franklin's response—one that would soon make him and his electric kite world famous—was disarmingly simple: “Let the experiment be made.”
⁴

Like many others in his day, Franklin was first drawn to the mysteries of electricity after attending a series of public demonstrations on the subject. In fact, he was so taken with the matter that he later purchased the lecturer's
experimental apparatus for his own use. Such demonstrations attracted broad audiences in colonial America, while accounts of new experiments and fresh discoveries were the regular stuff of newspapers and magazines. Typically, these traveling electrical shows involved a brief overview of the latest theories of electrical phenomena and demonstrated the collection of an electrical charge by rubbing a glass tube or rotating a glass sphere against a piece of soft leather, or perhaps a piece of wool or a lump of rosin.

But the high point undoubtedly consisted of demonstrations that allowed members of the audience to experience the effects of electricity for themselves, either directly from the generator, the so-called electrical machine, or from a charged Leyden jar that could store the electrical fire until it was required. Popular handbooks presented numerous electrical diversions to be tried at home. In one of the most popular parlor games, the Venus electrificata, an insulated woman was given an electrical charge and any young gallant brave enough to give her a kiss was in for a nasty shock.

This commitment to useful knowledge, backed by experimentation and bodily experience, served as something of a common touchstone among the revolutionary generation, even as wartime unity and shared enthusiasm for an independent America gave way to bitter differences over the future direction of the new nation. Although generally cast in terms of competing economic and foreign policies, the emerging dispute in fact encompassed the entire republican vision that had rallied many to the revolutionary cause in the first place.

Drawing on their understanding of examples from classical times and keen to avoid the English path of heavy industrialization, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their allies in the so-called Republican faction tended to view economic and political questions primarily in moral terms. America—in its ideal form, at least—should remain an agricultural nation, its rich and abundant lands able to absorb its remarkable population growth well into the future, without recourse to the development of industry and the accompanying dangers of social stratification and its associated ills. Untainted by luxuries and free of political or financial reliance on others, the new, virtuous citizen would be truly liberated to take full part in republican affairs. At the same time, America would freely export its agricultural surpluses to a hungry world but otherwise remain aloof from global affairs.

Alexander Hamilton and his fellow Federalists, for their part, had no time for throwbacks to an imagined republican utopia. They were intent on
cementing a strong, centralized government with the glue of Revolutionary War debt repayment, a banking and credit regime, an expansive reading of federal powers in the new Constitution, an aggressive foreign policy, and ambitious industrial development. Human nature, Hamilton argued, was not motivated or shaped by republican virtue so much as by the pursuit of luxury, which would in turn fuel activity across the entire economy and prevent idleness, impoverishment, and vice from infecting the land.

So powerful were these divisive passions that they drove immediate postwar politics and gave shape to many of America's enduring governmental institutions, laws, and practices. America's publishers and printers labored mightily just to keep pace with the proliferation of pamphlets, polemics, and position papers proffered on all sides. Much to the alarm of George Washington—living symbol of victory over the British and the republic's first president—the emergence of competing tendencies portended the establishment of permanent political parties, invariably to be led, he warned, by “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men [out] … to subvert the Power of the People.”
⁵

Despite their very real differences, however, the most prominent figures and factions were united by more than just armed resistance to British domination. They also shared a fundamental—and revolutionary—view of the world, one grounded in popular eighteenth-century ideals of experimental science and experiential knowledge and generally ill-disposed toward received wisdom, classical authority, and religious mystery.

The true herald of this new America was not Jefferson, with his vision of a self-contained republican idyll resting on the shoulders of the virtuous yeoman farmer. Nor was it his chief rival, Hamilton, with his unshakable faith in mercantilism, industrialization, and direct economic and political competition with the world at large. Rather, we must look to the figure of Benjamin Franklin, whose long and varied life dovetailed with the most significant events in eighteenth-century America.

By the dawn of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin had already spent most of his adult life in the pursuit of knowledge that might profit society, improve the moral and economic standing of its individual members, and, not least of all, redound to the benefit of Franklin himself. Crucially, he saw such endeavors as primarily a collective pursuit rather than as the preserve of the solitary scientific genius, secreted away in his laboratory or hunched over his
lonely workbench. Even his most famous contributions to science and technology—including the kite experiment that established the identity of lightning and electricity, the lightning rod, and the so-called Franklin stove—were the products of teamwork and the free exchange of information, ideas, and observations. For Franklin, true knowledge was both useful and social.

His quest for useful knowledge and self-improvement flourished within the precincts of the study circle and subscription library, amid the mysteries of the local Masonic lodge, and inside the collegiality of the coffee klatsch, the tavern gathering, and the drinking club. He created his own secret society, primarily of fellow artisans and craftsmen out to better themselves and their position within the hierarchical bounds of prerevolutionary society. And he eagerly adopted the eighteenth-century vogue for the exchange of learned correspondence and left behind an impressive archive of letters, in an array of European languages, with many of the leading scientists of his day.
^b

Over the decades, Franklin relied on these types of social networks to help forge what was in effect an American movement for useful knowledge. His overlapping colonial circles encompassed such figures as John Bartram, the cantankerous Quaker farmer and stonemason who ranged far and wide, from the pine barrens of New Jersey to the swamps of the Carolinas, on botanizing expeditions; Cadwallader Colden, a New York doctor and amateur scientist who boldly set out to challenge the world-famous Isaac Newton; the mathematical prodigy, watchmaker, and self-taught astronomer David Rittenhouse, who shared Franklin's zeal for Pennsylvania politics and American independence; the physician Benjamin Rush, surgeon general to the Continental Army, professor of medicine, and tireless campaigner on behalf of useful knowledge in American schools and colleges; and the fallen patrician-turned-apostle of American mechanization, Tench Coxe.

Fired by the potential for collective study and the exchange of information, many of these same men rallied around Franklin's long-running efforts to create America's first national institution, the American Philosophical Society, dedicated to the furtherance of useful knowledge. Over time, the association would also attract such prominent political figures as Washington, Hamilton,
Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and John Marshall, as well as a number of foreign heroes of the revolutionary struggle: the Marquis de Lafayette, Friedrich von Steuben, and Tadeusz Kosciusko.

Thomas Jefferson later served as the Society's president for eighteen years—a post, say friends, that he greatly preferred to that of president of the United States. Jefferson was no mere dabbler in scientific subjects. He immersed himself in the study of fossilized mammoths, found across North America, and he even turned one area of the new White House into a “bone room” to hold his collection. He outfitted his Virginia residence, the stately Monticello, with technological innovations of his own contrivance, used the latest in mathematical principles to design a more efficient plow, and personally prepared scientific instructions for the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Coast.

Initial inspiration for an American philosophical society almost certainly came from John Bartram, but it was Franklin, by now a successful newspaper publisher and astute publicist, who seized the moment. It was high time, he proclaimed in 1743, that “Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies” came together in a philosophical society in order to improve the collective lot of humankind. Grandly titled a “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America,” Franklin's manifesto mandated that this new association—the first to draw membership from across the disparate colonies—be peopled, at a minimum, by a “Physician, a Botanist, a Mathematician, a Chemist, a Mechanician, a Geographer, and a general Natural Philosopher,” or all-around scientist, as well as three administrative officers.
⁶

The Philosophical Society was to be hosted in Franklin's adopted hometown of Philadelphia, then the largest urban center in North America and convenient midpoint of England's colonial territories. Distant members were encouraged to correspond with the Society and with one another through the regular exchange of letters, commentaries, and learned papers. Franklin offered his own services as the new association's secretary, placing himself at the very hub of colonial scientific exchange, at least until “they shall be provided with one more capable.”
⁷

After a few false starts and long stretches of outright inactivity, which Franklin blamed on the lassitude of others, the philosophical society gradually began to take root. Philadelphia steadily established itself as America's leading center of scientific inquiry and practical learning, a development that spurred
other communities to form societies of their own. In the decades after 1776, nearly one hundred useful knowledge associations were founded across the former colonies, accompanied by a proliferation of journals, newspapers, and books aimed at disseminating the latest technological and scientific breakthroughs to the general public.
⁸

Among the earliest and most durable was Boston's American Academy of Arts and Sciences, formed in 1780 by John Adams and other local leaders, in a deliberate challenge to Philadelphia's intellectual preeminence. Adams had witnessed the American Philosophical Society firsthand during his tenure at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and he returned to his native New England determined that Boston, its largest city, deserved no less.

“In several Particulars they have more Wit than We,” Adams admitted in a wartime letter to his wife and confidante, Abigail. “They have Societies, the Philosophical Society particularly, which excites a scientific Emulation, and propagates their Fame. If ever I get through this Scene of Politics and War, I shall spend the Remainder of my days in endeavoring to instruct my Countrymen in the Art of making the most of their Abilities and Virtues.”
⁹
According to its charter of 1780, the mission of the American Academy was “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”
¹⁰
Adams later served as head of the Academy, a position that overlapped with his term as America's second president.

Other useful knowledge societies of varying tenure and importance sprouted up as well. Most were local or regional in scope and intimate enough to allow for regular gatherings of the membership for lectures, to hear reports, and to discuss matters of mutual interest. This reflected the strong Enlightenment preference for scientific study and intellectual debate as personal, face-to-face experience, while at the same time providing a broad cross-section of local society with direct access to useful knowledge.
¹¹

The Society for the Promotion of Arts, Agriculture, and Economy in the Province of New York, in North America was patterned after the successful Royal Society of Arts, which used prizes and grants to promote new technologies and agricultural innovation. The movement also took hold in Washington, the new national capital; Trenton, New Jersey; Albany, New York; Alexandria, Virginia; and as far south as Carolina and Mississippi and as far west as Kentucky.
¹²
More specialized knowledge associations, devoted to
manufactures, improvements in agriculture, the study of natural history—even a Military Philosophical Society, founded at West Point by a grand-nephew of Franklin—appeared as well.
¹³

From Rhode Island to Charleston, South Carolina, subscription libraries, driven by the same practical imperative that fueled the useful knowledge societies, opened their doors to eager readers. Many were inspired by Franklin's own Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731. The charter of the Juliana Library Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania—one of several libraries outside the provincial capital—proclaimed that the “Promotion of useful Knowledge is an Undertaking truly virtuous and Praiseworthy, and such as flows from the generous Breast alone.”
¹⁴
Like its counterparts to the north and south, Lancaster's reading public eschewed the works of the classical authorities and Christian divines, the traditional province of the university collections, and gave precedence to books on agriculture, mathematics, mechanics, and other useful topics.