The Society for Useful Knowledge (31 page)

Nor would Franklin have been particularly distressed, as are some modern students of the period, by the general absence of significant theoretical breakthroughs on the part of Americans.
¹⁴
On the contrary, the great milestones of nineteenth-century America were overwhelmingly the products of fields that Franklin, Rush, Rittenhouse, Coxe, and their associates would have recognized and encouraged as natural outgrowths of the movement for useful knowledge—applied science, practical invention, mechanics, and engineering.

These included the steam locomotive, the typewriter, the sewing machine, the reaper, and the revolver, among other icons of America's accelerating industrialization. The Civil War, an incubator of terrible innovation, produced ironclad ships, more accurate naval artillery, mass production of uniforms and shoes, modern ammunition, and the machine gun.
¹⁵
And, just as Tench Coxe had predicted, all were products of the machine applied to the American landscape, with its rich natural resources and its enormous, sparsely populated expanses ripe for reinvention, reinterpretation, and redevelopment by the mechanic, the engineer, and the inventor. In the face of such rapid developments, the struggle between the Federalists and the Republicans over the place of industry in immediate postrevolutionary American life would soon seem little more than a quaint fairy tale from long ago.

Writing in the influential
North American Review
in 1831, Timothy Walker, a recent graduate of one of the country's leading universities, expressed the view of many among the new educated generation that American technology and industrialization had simply realized the latent promise of the movement for useful knowledge, present at least since the 1720s and Franklin's Leather Apron Club: “Where she [nature] denied us rivers, Mechanism has supplied them. Where she left our planet uncomfortably rough, Mechanism has applied the roller. Where her mountains have been found in the way, Mechanism has boldly leveled or cut through them.”
¹⁶

a
Jefferson's idea was to base the proposed new measure, the meter, on the length of a pendulum that would oscillate exactly one second in each direction, at a latitude of 45°. His Plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States was submitted to Congress July 13, 1790, but never implemented.

Benjamin Franklin placed the social element at the very center of his conception of useful knowledge, so I am particularly delighted to note that the knowledge production on these pages represents something of a cooperative effort. Like Franklin, I, too, benefited from the opportunity to try out my ideas on a diverse group of talented friends, associates, and colleagues.

Foremost, I want to thank Michelle Johnson for her steady hand as reader, adviser, and companion throughout this journey. Cecile Baril, Evelyn Lyons, and Bryce Johnson read early iterations of the manuscript and provided helpful comments along the way. Kevin Cross shared many pleasant hours over mussels and beer discussing theoretical and practical aspects of useful knowledge. Lewis Lapham contributed helpful leads and provided welcome enthusiasm for the project from the outset.

Also, I want to thank my longtime agent, Will Lippincott, for once again helping me realize the promise hidden in the original conception, as well as my editors at Bloomsbury Press, Peter Ginna and Pete Beatty, for the support, advice, and close reading of the manuscript needed to see this project through to fruition. Needless to say, the final results and any errors of omission or commission remain firmly my own doing.

Where possible I have relied on original sources in order to allow the leading figures in America's early movement for useful knowledge to tell their story, in their words.

Of invaluable help to this project has been the work of scholars at Yale University to collect and edit the papers of Benjamin Franklin. To date, forty volumes have been published, with more in progress. Franklin's correspondence, unless otherwise noted, is drawn from these volumes and indicated by date and recipient.

Below is a list of abbreviations, used in the notes that follow, from the most commonly cited works:

1
BF, “Information To Those Who Would Remove to America,” WBF, 9: 435–436.

2
BF to Mary Stevenson, November 1760.

3
BF to unknown recipient, June 14, 1883,
WBF
, 10: 126.

4
BF to John Lining, March 18, 1755.

5
George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796, available at
http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/farewell/transcript.html#p14
.
Last accessed November 29, 2012.

6
BF, “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America,”
PBF
, 2: 380–81.

7
Ibid., 2: 383.

8
James D. Watkinson, “Useful Knowledge? Concepts, Values, and Access in American Education, 1776–1840,”
History of Education Quarterly
30 (3): 351.

9
John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 4, 1776, in
The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762–1784
, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield and others (Boston: Northeastern University, 2002), 149.

10
Charter of Incorporation,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
, available at
http://www.amacad.org/about/charter.aspx
.
Last accessed March 27, 2012.

11
A. Hunter Dupree, “The National Pattern of American Learned Societies, 1769–1863,” in
The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic
, ed. Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn C. Brown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 22–23.

12
Meyer Reinhold, “The Quest for ‘Useful Knowledge' in Eighteenth-Century America,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
119 (2): 121.

13
Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., “As Others Saw Us: Notes on the Reputation of the American Philosophical Society,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
116 (3): 271. Sydney Forman, “The United States Military Philosophical Society, 1802–1813:
Scientia in Bello Pax,” William and Mary Quarterly
, Third Series 2 (3): 273–74.

14
Quoted in Reinhold, 119.

15
Roland Van Zandt,
The Metaphysical Foundations of American History
(The Hague: Mouton, 1959), 43–50.

16
Thomas Jefferson to Angelica Church, February 17, 1788,
PTJ
, 12: 601.

17
Van Zandt, 44.

18
Alexander Garden to John Ellis, November 19, 1764, quoted in Lee Alan Dugatkin,
Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3.

19
William Darlington, “Progress of Botany in North America,”
MJB
, 17–18.

20
Jefferson fashioned the original in 1781 as written responses to questions about America submitted by a French diplomat. An expanded text was first published in Paris in 1785, and later in America.

21
Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
[1787] (Boston: Lilly and Wait, 1832), 68–69.

22
William Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647
, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison. (New York: Random House), 1952, 62, cited in Leo Marx,
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41.

23
Alan Heimart, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,”
New England Quarterly
26 (3): 361–62.

24
John Winthrop,
Life and Letters of John Winthrop
, ed. Robert C. Winthrop (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 43, quoted in Heimart, 362.

25
L. Marx, 43–44. See also Perry Miller,
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 393–96.

26
Richard Foster Jones,
Ancients and Moderns: A Study in the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England
(St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1961), 272.

27
Quoted in Reinhold, 110.

28
William Penn,
Passages from the Life and Writings of William Penn
, ed. Thomas Pym Cope (Philadelphia: Friends' Bookstore, 1882), 259.

29
Hugh Jones,
The Present State of Virginia
[1724], ed. Richard L. Morton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 44.

30
Pennsylvania Gazette
, December 24, 1728. Cited in C. Lennart Carlson, “Samuel Keimer: A Study in the Transit of English Culture to Colonial Pennsylvania,”
PMHB
61 (4): 357–86.

31
William Penn,
Fruits of Solitude
[1695] (Philadelphia: Longstreth, 1877), 7.

32
BF to John Bartram, July 9, 1769.

33
Carl Bridenbaugh,
The Colonial Craftsman
(New York: Dover, 1990), 155.

34
BF, “To Those Who Would Remove to America,”
WBF
, 9: 442.

35
Ibid.

36
Leonard W. Labaree and others, “Introduction,”
ABF
, 22–24.

37
Ibid., 18.

38
Carla Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory,”
New England Quarterly
72 (3): 420.

39
Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism
, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), 9–26.

40
Carl Van Doren,
Benjamin Franklin
(New York: Viking Press, 1938), v.

41
Ibid., 782.

42
Herman Melville,
Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile
(New York: G. P. Putnam, 1844), 81. A useful study of the Franklin image in American letters through the 1890s can be found in Mulford, 415–43. For more recent examples, see Peter Bastian, “‘Let's Do Lunch': Benjamin Franklin and the American Character,”
Australasian Journal of American Studies
24(1): 82–88.

43
Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” in
Sketches New and Old
(Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1901), 211–15.

44
D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature
[1924] (London: Penguin, 1971), 19, 16–17.

45
Carl Becker, “Benjamin Franklin,”
Dictionary of American Biography
(New York: Scribner's, 1931).

46
Thomas Jefferson to David Rittenhouse, July 19, 1778,
PTJ
, 2: 203.

47
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August 1, 1816,
The Works of John Adams
, ed. Charles F. Adams (Boston: Little Brown, 1856), 10: 223.

1
BF, “Journal of Occurrences in My Voyage to Philadelphia on Board the Berkshire,”
PBF
, 1: 73.

2
Ibid., 1: 72.

3
Ibid., 1: 79.

4
Alfred Owen Aldridge,
Benjamin Franklin: Philosopher & Man
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965), 376.

5
BF, “Journal of Occurrences,”
PBF
, 1: 86–87.

6
Ibid., 1: 94.

7
Ibid., 1: 94.

8
ABF
, 54–55.