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
Stephen Covey, the guru of the genre, referred to Franklin’s system in developing his bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and a national chain of stores now sell “FranklinCovey Organizers” and other paraphernalia featuring Franklin’s ideas. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the self-help shelves of bookstores were filled with titles such as Ben’s Book of Virtues: Ben Franklin’s Simple Weekly Plan for Success and Happiness; Ben Franklin’s 12 Rules of Management: The Founding Father of American Business Solves Your Toughest Problems; Benjamin Franklin’s the Art of Virtue: His Formula for Successful Living; The Ben Franklin Factor: Selling One to One; and Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: Principals for Successful Living from the Life of Benjamin Franklin.18
In the academic world, Franklin was the subject of generally favorable books as the three hundredth anniversary of his birth approached. In The First American, H. W. Brands of Texas A&M sympathetically described the evolution of Franklin’s character in a solid and balanced narrative biography. “To genius he joined a passion for virtue,” he concluded. In 2002, Edmund S. Morgan, the retired and revered Sterling Professor of History at Yale, wrote a wonderfully astute character analysis based on an exhaustive reading of Franklin’s papers. “We may discover,” Morgan declared, “a man with a wisdom about himself that comes only to the great of heart.”19
In the popular imagination, Franklin came to be viewed as a figure of fun, rather than as the serious thinker admired by Hume or the political manipulator resented by Adams. During an era that was at times trivial and untroubled, filled with sexual winks and unfettered entrepreneurship, Franklin was enlisted into the spirit. He became a jovial lecher dabbling in statecraft in such plays as 1776 and Ben Franklin in Paris, a sprightly old spokesman for everything from cookies to mutual funds, and a genial sage whose adages were designed to entertain rather than intimidate aspiring young workers.
“Today we know Benjamin Franklin mainly from an old advertising image: an elderly man in knickers, long coat, and spectacles, with a bald crown and long hair—a zealot foolishly determined to fly a kite during a thunderstorm,” the historian Alan Taylor has written. “He no longer arouses either controversy or adulation—merely laughter. We only dimly sense his importance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the paragon of, and the pattern for, American middle-class values.”20
To the social commentator David Brooks, this anodyne version of Franklin embodies both the entrepreneurial and moral tenor of America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He was the one historic figure from the American pantheon, Brooks wrote, “who would be instantly at home in an office park.”
He’d probably join the chorus of all those techno-enthusiasts who claim that the internet and bio-tech breakthroughs are going to transform life on earth wonderfully; he shared that passion for progress. At the same time, he’d be completely at home with the irony and gentle cynicism that is the prevailing conversational tone in tho
se buildings…
But then, Franklin would be at home in much of contemporary America. He’d share the values of the comfortably middle class; he was optimistic, genial, and kind, and his greatest flaw was his self-approving complacency. One can easily picture him traipsing through a shopping mall enchanted by the cheerful abundance and the clever marketing. At the same time, he’d admire all the effort young Americans put into civic activism, and the way older Americans put religion to good use through faith-based community organizations.
Franklin had been unfairly attacked over the years, Brooks concluded, by romantics whose real targets were capitalism and middle-class morality. “But now the main problem is excess Franklinism, and we’ve got to figure out how to bring to today’s America the tragic sense and the moral gravity that was so lacking in its Founding Yuppie.”21
The Ledger Book
This perceived lack of moral gravity and spiritual depth is the most serious charge against Franklin. In both his life and his writings, he sometimes displayed a lack of commitment, anguish, poetry, or soul. A sentence he wrote to his sister Jane in 1771 captured this complacency and dearth of passion: “Upon the whole, I am much disposed to like the world as I find it, and to doubt my own judgment as to what would mend it.”22
His religious beliefs, especially early in life, were largely a calculus of what credos would prove useful for people to believe, rather than an expression of sincere inner convictions. Deism was appealing, but he discovered it was not all that helpful, so he gave it a moral gloss and seldom troubled his soul with questions about grace, salvation, the divinity of Christ, or other profound issues that did not lend themselves to practical inquiry. He was at the other extreme from the anguished soul-searching Puritans. As he had no factual evidence about what was divinely inspired, he settled instead for the simple creed that the best way to serve God was doing good to others.
His moral beliefs were likewise plain and earthly, focused on practical ways to benefit others. He espoused the middle-class virtues of a shopkeeper, and he had little interest in proselytizing about higher ethical aspirations. He wrestled more with what he called “errata” than he did with sin.
As a scientist, he had a feel for the mechanical workings of the world but little appreciation for abstract theories or the sublime. He was a great experimenter and clever inventor, with an emphasis on things useful. But he had neither the temperament nor the training to be a profound conceptualizer.
In most of the endeavors of his soul and mind, his greatness sprang more from his practicality than from profundity or poetry. In science he was more an Edison than a Newton, in literature more a Twain than a Shakespeare, in philosophy more a Dr. Johnson than a Bishop Berkeley, and in politics more a Burke than a Locke.
In his personal life as well, there was likewise a lack of soulful commitment and deep passion. He frequented many antechambers, but few inner chambers. His love of travel reflected the spirit of a young runaway, one who had run from his family in Boston, from Deborah when he first thought of marrying, and from William just before his wedding. Throughout his life he had few emotional bonds tying him to any one place, and he seemed to glide through the world the way he glided through relationships.
His friendships with men often ended badly: his brother James, his friends John Collins and James Ralph, his printing partners Samuel Keimer and Hugh Meredith. He was a sociable man who liked clubs that offered enlightening conversations and activities, but the friendships he formed with his fellow men were more affable than intimate. He had a genial affection for his wife, but not enough love to prevent him from spending fifteen of the last seventeen years of their marriage an ocean away. His relationship with her was a practical one, as was the case with his London landlady, Margaret Stevenson. With his many women admirers, he preferred flirting rather than making serious commitments, and he retreated into playful detachment at any sign of danger. His most passionate relationship was with his son William, but that fire turned into ice. Only to his grandson Temple did he show unalloyed affection.
He could also, despite his professed belief in the virtue of sincerity, come across as conniving. He wrote his first hoax at 16 and the last on his deathbed; he misled his employer Samuel Keimer when scheming to start a newspaper; he perfected indirection as a conversational artifice; and he utilized the appearance of virtue as well as its reality. “In a place and a time that celebrated sincerity while practicing insincerity, Franklin seemed far too accomplished at the latter,” Taylor notes. “Owing to his smooth manner and shifting tactics, Franklin invited suspicions far beyond his actual intent to trick.”23
All of which has led some critics to dismiss even Franklin’s civic accomplishments as the mundane aspirations of a shallow soul. The apotheosis of such criticism is in Vernon Parrington’s famous Main Currents in American Thought:
A man who is less concerned with the golden pavements of the City of God than that the cobblestones on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia should be well and evenly laid, who troubles less to save his soul from burning hereafter than to protect his neighbors’ houses by organizing an efficient fire-company, who is less regardful of the light that never was on sea or land than of a new-model street lamp to light the steps of a belated wayfarer—such a man, obviously, does not reveal the full nature of human aspiration.24
It is Parrington’s haughty use of the word “obviously” that provides us with a good launching point for a defense of Franklin. “Obviously,” perhaps, to Parrington and others of rarefied sensibility whose contributions to society are not so mundane as a library, university, fire company, bifocals, stove, lightning rod, or, for that matter, democratic constitutions. Their disdain is in part a yearning for the loftier ideals that could sometimes seem lacking in Franklin’s soul. Yet it is also, in part, a snobbery about the earthly concerns and middle-class values that he appreciated.
So how are we, as Franklin the bookkeeper would have wished, to balance the ledger fairly? As he did in his own version of a moral calculus, we can list all the Pros on the other side and determine if, as I think is the case, they outweigh the Cons.
First we must rescue Franklin from the schoolbook caricature of a genial codger flying kites in the rain and spouting homespun maxims about a penny saved being a penny earned. We must also rescue him from the critics who would confuse him with the character he carefully crafted in his Autobiography.25
When Max Weber says that Franklin’s ethics are based only on the earning of more money, and when D.H. Lawrence reduces him to a man who pinched pennies and morals, they betray the lack of even a passing familiarity with the man who retired from business at 42, dedicated himself to civic and scientific endeavors, gave up much of his public salaries, eschewed getting patents on his inventions, and consistently argued that the accumulation of excess wealth and the idle indulgence in frivolous luxuries should not be socially sanctioned. Franklin did not view penny saving as an end in itself but as a path that permitted young tradesmen to be able to display higher virtues, community spirit, and citizenship. “It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright,” both he and Poor Richard proclaimed.26
To assess Franklin properly, we must view him, instead, in all his complexity. He was not a frivolous man, nor a shallow one, nor a simple one. There are many layers to peel back as he stands before us so coyly disguised, both to history and to himself, as a plain character unadorned by wigs and other pretensions.
Let’s begin with the surface layer, the Franklin who serves as a lightning rod for the Jovian bolts from those who disdain middle-class values. There is something to be said—and Franklin said it well and often—for the personal virtues of diligence, honesty, industry, and temperance, especially when they are viewed as a means toward a nobler and more benevolent end.
The same is true of the civic virtues Franklin both practiced and preached. His community improvement associations and other public endeavors helped to create a social order that promoted the common good. Few people have ev
er worked as hard, or done as much, to inculcate virtue and character in themselves and their communities.27
Were such efforts mundane, as Parrington and some others charge? Perhaps in part, but in his autobiography, after recounting his effort to pave Philadelphia’s streets, Franklin provided an eloquent defense against such aspersions:
Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding or relating; but when they consider that though dust blown into the eyes of a single person, or into a single shop on a windy day, is but of small importance, yet the great number of the instances in a populous city, and its frequent repetitions give it weight and consequence, perhaps they will not censure very severely those who bestow some attention to affairs of this seemingly low nature. Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.28
Likewise, although a religious faith based on fervor can be inspiring, there is also something admirable about a religious outlook based on humility and openness. Charles Angoff has charged that “his main contribution to the religious question was little more than a good-natured tolerance.” Well, perhaps so, but the concept of good-natured religious tolerance was in fact no small advance for civilization in the eighteenth century. It was one of the greatest contributions to arise out of the Enlightenment, more indispensable than that of the most profound theologians of the era.
In both his life and his writings, Franklin became a preeminent proponent of this creed of tolerance. He developed it with great humor in his tales and with an earnest depth in his life and letters. In a world that was then (as, alas, it still is now) bloodied by those who seek to impose theocracies, he helped to create a new type of nation that could draw strength from its religious pluralism. As Garry Wills argued in his book Under God, this “more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth.”29
Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein Page 128