Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

  On one side were those, like Edwards and the Mather family, who believed in an anointed elect and in salvation through God’s grace alone. They tended to have a religious fervor, a sense of social class and hierarchy, and an appreciation for exalted values over earthly ones. On the other side were the Franklins, those who believed in salvation through good works, whose religion was benevolent and tolerant, and who were unabashedly striving and upwardly mobile.

  Out of this grew many related divides in the American character, and Franklin represents one strand: the side of pragmatism versus romanticism, of practical benevolence versus moral crusading. He was on the side of religious tolerance rather than evangelical faith. The side of social mobility rather than an established elite. The side of middle-class virtues rather than more ethereal noble aspirations.

  During the three centuries since his birth, the changing assessments of Franklin have tended to reveal less about him than about the values of the people judging him and their attitudes toward a striving middle class. From an august historical stage filled with far less accessible founders, he turned to each new generation with a half-smile and spoke directly in whatever vernacular was in vogue, infuriating some and beguiling others. His reputation thus tended to reflect, or refract, the attitudes of each succeeding era.

  In the years right after his death, as personal antagonisms faded, reverence for him grew. Even William Smith, who had battled him in the legislature and on the board of the Academy, gave a respectful eulogy at a memorial service in 1791, in which he dismissed their “unhappy divisions and disputes” and focused instead on Franklin’s philanthropy and science. When his daughter afterward said she doubted he believed “one-tenth of what you said of old Ben lightning-rod,” he merely laughed heartily.2

  Franklin’s other occasional antagonist, John Adams, likewise mellowed. “Nothing in life has mortified or grieved me more than the necessity which compelled me to oppose him so often as I have,” he wrote in a remarkably anguished reassessment in 1811. His earlier harsh criticisms, Adams explained, were in some ways a testament to Franklin’s greatness: “Had he been an ordinary man, I should never have taken the trouble to expose the turpitude of his intrigues.” He even cast Franklin’s lack of religious commitment, which he had once derided as verging on atheism, in a more favorable light: “All sects considered him, and I believe justly, a friend to unlimited toleration.” At times, Adams charged, Franklin was hypocritical, a poor negotiator, and a misguided politician. But his essay also included some of the most nuanced words of appreciation written by any contemporary:

  Franklin had a great genius, original, sagacious and inventive, capable of discoveries in science no less than of improvement in the fine arts and the mechanical arts. He had a vast imagination…He had wit at will. He had a humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory and fable that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was a master of that infantile simplicity which the French call naiveté, which never fails to charm.3

  By this time, Franklin’s view of the central role of the middle class in American life had triumphed, despite the qualms of those who felt that this represented a trend toward vulgarization. “By absorbing the gentility of the aristocracy and the work of the working class, the middling sorts gained a powerful moral hegemony over the whole society,” historian Gordon Wood noted. He was describing America in the early 1800s, but he could also have been describing Franklin personally.

  Franklin’s reputation was further enhanced when his grandson Temple finally produced an edition of his papers in 1817. Adams wrote to Temple that his collection “seemed to make me live over again my life at Passy,” which could have been read ambiguously by those who knew of their bitter feuding at Passy had he not added: “There is scarce a scratch of his pen that is not worth preserving.” Francis, Lord Jeffrey, a founder of the Edinburgh Review, extolled Franklin’s writings for their “homely jocularity,” their attempt to “persuade the multitude to virtue,” and above all for their emphasis on the humanistic values that defined the Enlightenment. “This self-taught American is the most rational, perhaps, of all philosophers. He never loses sight of common sense in any of his speculations.”4

  This Age of Enlightenment, however, was being replaced in the early 1800s by a literary era that valued romanticism more than rationality. With the shift came a profound reversal, especially among those of presumed higher sensibilities, in attitudes toward Franklin. The romantics admired not reason and intellect but deep emotion, subjective sensibility, and imagination. They exalted the heroic and the mystical rather than tolerance and rationality. Their haughty criticisms decimated the reputations of Franklin, Voltaire, Swift, and other Enlightenment thinkers.5

  The great romantic poet John Keats was among the many who assaulted Franklin for his lowly sensibilities. He was, Keats wrote his brother in 1818, “full of mean and thrifty maxims” and a “not sublime man.” Keats’s friend and early publisher, the poet and editor Leigh Hunt, heaped scorn on Franklin’s “scoundrel maxims” and charged that he was “at the head of those who think that man lives by bread alone.” He had “few passions and no imagination,” Leigh’s indictment continued, and he encouraged mankind to a “love of wealth” that was stripped of “higher callings” or of “heart and soul.” Along these lines, Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish critic so in love with romantic heroism, scorned Franklin as “the father of all Yankees,” which was perhaps not as denigrating as Carlyle meant it to be.6

  American transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson, who shared the romantic poets’ allergic reaction to rationalism and materialism, also found Franklin too mundane for their rarefied tastes. The more earthy and middle-class backwoodsmen still revered Franklin’s Autobiography—it was the one book that Davy Crockett carried with him to his death at the Alamo—but a backwoodsman as refined as Thoreau had no place for it when heading off to Walden Pond. Indeed, the first chapter of his Walden journal, on economy, has tables and charts that subtly satirize those used by Franklin. Edgar Allen Poe, in his story “The Business Man,” likewise poked glancingly at Franklin and other “methodical” men in describing the rise and methods of his aptly named antihero Peter Proffit.

  Franklin appears by name in Herman Melville’s semihistorical 1855 novel Israel Potter. In the narrative he comes across as a shallow spouter of maxims. But Melville, addressing the reader directly, apologized and noted that Franklin was not quite as one-dimensional as the book portrays him. “Seeking here to depict him in his less exalted habitudes, the narrator feels more as if he were playing with one of the sage’s worsted hose than reverentially handling the honored hat which once oracularly sat on his brow.” Melville’s own judgment on Franklin was that for better or worse, he was very versatile. “Having carefully weighed the world, Franklin could act any part in it.” He lists the dozens of pursuits in which Franklin excelled, and then he adds, in the quintessential romantic critique, “Franklin was everything but a poet.” (Franklin would have agreed. He wrote that he “approved [of] amusing one’s self with poetry now and then, so far as to improve one’s language, but no further.”)7

  Emerson provided a similar mixed assessment. “Franklin was one of the most sensible men that ever lived,” he wrote his aunt, and was “more useful, more moral and more pure” than Socrates. But he went on to lament, “Franklin’s man is a frugal, inoffensive, thrifty citizen, but savors of nothing heroic.” Nathaniel Hawthorne has one of his young characters complain that Franklin’s maxims “are all about getting money or saving it,” in response to which Hawthorne himself observes that there is some virtue in the sayings but that they “teach men but a small portion of their duties.”8

  Along with the rise of romanticism came a growing disdain, among those for whom “bourgeois” would become a term of contempt, for Franklin’s beloved
urban middle class and its shopkeeping values. It was a snobbery that would come to be shared by very disparate groups: proletarians and aristocrats, radical workers and leisured landowners, Marxists and elitists, intellectuals and anti-intellectuals. Flaubert declared that hatred of the bourgeoisie “is the beginning of all virtue,” which was precisely the opposite of what Franklin had preached.9

  But with the publication of fuller editions of his papers, Franklin’s reputation began to revive. After the Civil War, the growth of industry and the onset of the Gilded Age made the times ripe for the glorification of his ideas, and for the next three decades he was the most popular subject of American biography. The 130 novels by Horatio Alger, which would eventually sell twenty million copies, made tales of virtuous boys who rose from rags to riches popular again. Franklin’s reputation was also elevated by the emergence of that distinctly American philosophy known as pragmatism, which holds, as Franklin had, that the truth of any proposition, whether it be a scientific or moral or theological or social one, is based on how well it correlates with experimental results and produces a practical outcome.

  Mark Twain, a literary heir who cloaked his humor in the same homespun cloth, had a wonderful time poking friendly fun at Franklin, who “prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages…boys who might otherwise have been happy.” But Twain was actually a grudging admirer, and even more so were the great capitalists who took Franklin’s maxims seriously.10

  The industrialist Thomas Mellon, who erected a statue of Franklin in his bank’s headquarters, declared that Franklin had inspired him to leave his family’s farm near Pittsburgh and go into business. “I regard the reading of Franklin’s Autobiography as the turning point of my life,” he wrote. “Here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame…The maxims of ‘poor Richard’ exactly suited my sentiments. I read the book again and again, and wondered if I might not do something in the same line by similar means.” Andrew Carnegie was similarly stimulated. Not only did Franklin’s success story provide him guidance in business, it also inspired his philanthropy, especially his devotion to the creation of public libraries.11

  Franklin was praised as “the first great American” by the definitive historian of that period, Frederick Jackson Turner. “His life is the story of American common-sense in its highest form,” he wrote in 1887, “applied to business, to politics, to science, to diplomacy, to religion, to philanthropy.” He also was championed by the period’s most influential editor, William Dean Howells of Harper’s magazine. “He was a very great man,” Howells wrote in 1888, “and the objects to which he dedicated himself with an unfailing mixture of motive were such as concerned the immediate comfort of men and the advancement of knowledge.” Despite the fact that he was “cynically incredulous of ideals and beliefs sacred to most of us,” he was “instrumental in promoting the moral and material welfare of the race.”12

  The pendulum again swung against Franklin in the 1920s, as Gilded Age individualism fell out of intellectual favor. Max Weber famously dissected America’s middle-class work ethic from a quasi-Marxist perspective in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which quoted Franklin (and Poor Richard) extensively as a prime example of the “philosophy of avarice.” “All Franklin’s moral attitudes,” wrote Weber, “are colored with utilitarianism,” and he accused Franklin of believing only in “the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous engagement of life.”

  The literary critic Van Wyck Brooks distinguished between America’s highbrow and lowbrow cultures, and he placed Franklin as the founder of the latter. He exemplified, Brooks said, a “catchpenny opportunism” and a “two-dimensional wisdom.” The poet William Carlos Williams added that he was “our wise prophet of chicanery.” And in his novel Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis belittled bourgeois values and civic boosterism. In a barb aimed at Franklin’s oft-stated creed, Lewis wrote: “If you had asked Babbitt what his religion was, he would have answered in sonorous Boosters’ Club rhetoric, ‘My religion is to serve my fellow men, to honor my brother as myself, and to do my bit to make life happier for one and all.’ ”13

  The most vicious and amusing—and in most ways, misguided—attack on Franklin came in 1923 from the English critic and novelist D. H. Lawrence. His essay is, at times, a stream-of-consciousness rant that assaults Franklin for the unromantic and bourgeois nature of the virtues reflected in his Autobiography:

  Doctor Franklin. Snuff-colored little man! Immortal soul and all! The immortal soul part was a sort of cheap insurance policy. Benjamin had no concern, really, with the immortal soul. He was too busy with social man…I do not like him.

  I can remember, when I was a little boy, my father used to buy a scrubby yearly almanac with the sun and moon and stars on the cover. And it used to prophesy bloodshed and famine. But also crammed in corners it had little anecdotes and humorisms, with a moral tag. And I used to have my little priggish laugh at the woman who counted her chickens before they were hatched and so forth, and I was convinced that honesty was the best policy, also a little priggishly. The author of these bits was Poor Richard, and Poor Richard was Benjamin Franklin, writing in Philadelphia well over a hundred years before. And probably I haven’t got over those Poor Richard tags yet. I rankle still with them. They are thorns in young flesh.

  Because, although I still believe that honesty is the best policy, I dislike policy altogether; though it is just as well not to count your chickens before they are hatched, it’s still more hateful to count them with gloating when they are hatched. It has taken me many years and countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up…

  Which brings us right back to our question, what’s wrong with Benjamin, that we can’t stand him?…I am a moral animal. And I’m going to remain such. I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me…And now I, at least, know why I can’t stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom.

  As part of the essay, Lawrence rewrote Franklin’s thirteen virtues to make them more to his romantic liking. Instead of Franklin’s definition of industry (“Be always employed in something useful”) Lawrence substituted “Serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind.” Instead of Franklin’s definition of justice (“Wrong none by doing injuries”), Lawrence proclaimed, “The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle.”

  It is a bracing essay, but it should be noted that Lawrence, in addition to having an odd and self-indulgent definition of justice, aimed his assault not on the real-life Franklin but on the character he created in Poor Richard and in the Autobiography. In addition, Lawrence got a few facts wrong, among them attributing to Franklin the maxim “Honesty is the best policy,” which sounds like him but actually is from Cervantes, just as the one about not counting unhatched chickens is from Aesop.14

  Lawrence’s approach was echoed in a more substantive, if less dramatic, attack on Franklin’s bourgeois Babbittry by Charles Angoff in his Literary History of the American People, published in 1931. Carlyle’s description of Franklin as the father of all the Yankees was, Angoff declared, a “libel against the tribe” that had produced fine writers such as Hawthorne and Thoreau. “It would be more accurate to call Franklin the father of all the Kiwanians,” Angoff sneered, and he was brutal about what he saw as the “low order” of Franklin’s thinking:

  Franklin represented the least praiseworthy qualities of the inhabitants of the new world: miserliness, fanatical practicality, and lack of interest in what are usually known as spiritual things. Babbittry was not a new thing in America, but he made a religion of it, and by his tremendous success with it grafted it upon the American people so securely that the national genius is still suffering from it…Not a word about
nobility, not a word about honor, not a word about grandeur of soul, not a word about charity of mind!…He had a cheap and shabby soul, and the upper levels of the mind were far beyond his reach.15

  The Great Depression of the 1930s reminded people that the virtues of industry and frugality, of helping others and making sure that the community held together, did not deserve to be dismissed as trivial and mundane. Franklin’s reputation again made a comeback. The pragmatist philosopher Herbert Schneider, in his book The Puritan Mind, pointed out that the previous attacks had mainly been on Poor Richard’s preachings rather than on how Franklin really lived his life, which did not focus on the pursuit of wealth for its own sake.

  Carl Van Doren, Schneider’s colleague at Columbia, in 1938 fleshed out this point in his glorious literary biography of Franklin. “He moved through this world in a humorous mastery of it,” Van Doren concluded. And the great historian of science, I. Bernard Cohen, began his lifelong work of showing that Franklin’s scientific achievements placed him in the pantheon with Newton. Franklin’s experiments, he wrote in 1941, “afforded a basis for the explanation for all the known phenomena of electricity.”16

  Franklin also became the patron saint of the self-help movement. Dale Carnegie studied the Autobiography when writing How to Win Friends and Influence People, which, after its publication in 1937, helped launch a craze that persists to this day for books featuring simple rules and secrets about how to succeed in business and in life. As E. Digby Baltzell, a sociologist of America’s elite, has noted, Franklin’s Autobiography was “the first and greatest manual of careerist Babbittry ever written.”17