The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  BECOMING THE SELF-MADE BUSINESSMAN

  It was this image of the hardworking and bookish Franklin that captivated most middling folk. Everywhere village publicists encouraged ordinary people to read all the books within their reach, as Franklin had. Almanac-maker Robert Thomas of Sterling, Massachusetts, thought that winter was a good time for farmers to catch up on their reading. “The life of Dr. Franklin,” he said, “I would recommend for the amusement of winter evenings.”94 Northern working people found in Franklin a means of both releasing their resentments and fulfilling their aspirations. In Boston and Philadelphia hundreds of artisans from dozens of different crafts took advantage of Franklin’s bequest to better themselves.95 They sponsored Franklin Lectures, issued numerous broadsides containing Franklin’s “Maxims and Precepts for Conduct in Life and the Just Attainment of Success in Business,” and published and republished account after account of Franklin’s life.96 It was not Franklin the scientist and diplomat they emulated but the young man who through industry and frugality had risen from obscurity to fame and fortune. “Who can tell,” asked the president of the Mechanics Society of New York in 1820 of an audience of young artisans, “how many Franklins may be among you?”97

  Between 1794 and 1828, twenty-two editions of Franklin’s Autobiography were published. After 1798 editors began adding the Poor Richard essays, and especially The Way to Wealth, to editions of the Autobiography. Since it was young men who needed the inspiration of Franklin, writers and editors began aiming their works specifically at young readers.

  Parson Weems, who had made so much money with his fanciful life of Washington in 1800, was bound to do something with Franklin. He began by publishing extracts from Franklin’s The Way to Wealth and his Autobiography. And then in 1818 he created his own fictitious life of Franklin, which may have become more popular in the early nineteenth century than Franklin’s actual Autobiography. Weems was eager to use Franklin as a moral example for wayward youth.

  O you time-wasting, brain-starving young men, who can never be at ease unless you have a cigar or a plug of tobacco in your mouths, go on with your puffing and champing—go on with your filthy smoking, and your still more filthy spitting, keeping the cleanly house-wives in constant terror for their nicely waxed floors, and their shining carpets—go on I say; but remember, it was not in this way that our little Ben became the GREAT DR. FRANKLIN.98

  Franklin’s life, wrote Weems, had essential lessons for the young. Sometimes, he said, young men were laughed at for their “oddities”— their poverty, their awkwardness, or their habit of reading. “Yet if, like Franklin, they will but stick to the main chance, i.e. BUSINESS AND EDUCATION, they will assuredly, like him, overcome at last, and render themselves the admiration of those who once despised them.”

  But it was not enough that Weems’s Franklin was a model of entrepreneurial ambition and hard work. Since Weems was writing for ordinary people, and ordinary people in the early republic were deeply religious, he had to turn Franklin into a “true” Christian who “not only had religion, but had it in an eminent degree.” Although Franklin might have neglected religion when he was young and did not attend church very often, he was, said Weems, always sincerely devoted to the teachings of Christ. Indeed, all his “extraordinary benevolence and useful life were imbibed, even unconsciously from the Gospel.” According to Weems, Franklin gained comfort during his final illness by gazing at a picture of Christ on the cross. If Franklin was to be a hero to middling nineteenth-century Americans, he had to become a good Christian.99

  Since Franklin’s life, whether in bits and pieces of the Autobiography or in versions like that of Weems, was available everywhere, it could not help but inspire the dreams of countless individuals in the early republic. Indeed, some ambitious men actually attributed their rise to reading Franklin. In 1811 sixteen-year-old James Harper left his father’s farm on Long Island for New York City after reading Franklin’s life. Eventually he founded one of the most successful publishing firms in the country and became mayor of New York. When he had his portrait painted, he had the artist insert a profile of Franklin in it.

  The experience of Thomas Mellon, the founder of the great banking fortune, was similar. In 1828 fourteen-year-old Mellon had thought he would remain a farmer like his father on their modest farm outside of Pittsburgh. But reading Franklin’s Autobiography and Poor Richard’s sayings became “the turning point” of his life. “For so poor and friendless a boy to be able to become a merchant or a professional man had before seemed an impossibility; but here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame.” He “wondered if I might do something in the same line by similar means.” He read Franklin’s words over and over and began to apply himself in school as he never had before. When Mellon finally founded his bank, he placed Franklin’s statue in front of it as a tribute to his inspiration. Near the end of his life he bought a thousand copies of Franklin’s Autobiography and distributed them to young men who came seeking his advice. Franklin had come to epitomize the new and radical notion of the “self-made man.”100

  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.”101

  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.102

  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.”103 The difference between Lyon’s portrait in 1826 and that of Franklin in 1748 (see p
age 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.104

  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.”105

  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.106

  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.107

  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”110

  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.”111 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.112 In 1788 he par
ticipated 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.”113

  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.

  Adams, Diary and Autobiography Lyman H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961)