This was quite a claim. Christians typically believed that the soul was immortal because it was insubstantial and therefore invulnerable to the decay that afflicted matter. Franklin did not go as far as his friend Joseph Priestley, who believed that the soul was actually material. Instead, his views resembled the ancient Christian tenet that human bodies would, at the end of the world, be resurrected and reunited with their souls. But Franklin’s statement about the continual transformation of matter reflected his private faith that material change (including decay) did not signify death as such but rather a transmigration of the soul to a new material condition. It was an unconventional idea, though altogether fitting for a deist and natural philosopher who wished to peer into the future.
AN ENDLESS SOURCE of fascination during his lifetime, Franklin was even more compelling immediately after death. His surviving contemporaries eulogized, monumentalized, criticized, misremembered, and—at least sometimes—mourned him. But his memory held very different meanings in the three nations where he had lived. His afterlives in France, Britain, and the United States reveal a great deal about the status of science in each country, as well as Franklin’s very different legacies in their political realms.
The French lamented the loudest. Franklin died nine months after Parisians had stormed the Bastille. During this early phase of the French Revolution, the reformers who had befriended Franklin believed they were creating a new society. It was the perfect moment to reclaim their American brother, a fellow enemy of tyrants and himself a Revolutionary figure of wisdom.10
On June 1 1, 1790, the Comte de Mirabeau officially announced to the National Assembly: “Franklin is dead . . . the genius who freed America and shed torrents of light upon Europe.” Mirabeau continued with a eulogy—“Antiquity would have raised altars to this mighty genius,” who had managed “to conquer both thunderbolts and tyrants.” Then he proposed a remarkable tribute, “that the National Assembly for three days wear mourning for Benjamin Franklin.” It was decreed. With this unprecedented honor for Franklin, a new French custom was invented: national mourning. Previously, court mourning had been reserved for aristocrats in line to the throne. By commemorating Franklin in this way, the French set aside hierarchies of birth and rank, as they were doing in many other Revolutionary activities. They celebrated a commoner solely for his remarkable accomplishments. The only objection seems to have come from someone who wanted confirmation that the long-lived and irrepressible Philadelphian was in fact dead.11
French commoners as well as counts mourned Franklin’s passing. The street criers who announced his death refused payment. At one Paris ceremony of 1790, as a printer delivered a eulogy on Franklin, others busily set type for its text. Once done, the text was printed and distributed to the onlookers. It was perhaps the perfect way to celebrate the life of a man of letters.12
The French also appreciated that Franklin’s life had held so many connections between science and public affairs. It was, appropriately, the Marquis de Condorcet, the mathematician and social reformer, who offered a November 1790 eulogy in which he compared Franklin to Pythagoras. Both had used “the laws of nature” to establish truth about the world and about humanity. But the American, unlike the ancient philosopher, had sought to “purify” rather than “subdue” nature—Franklin’s efforts were themselves natural. Condorcet also extolled Franklin’s electrical and political theories, which, he believed, exemplified the spirit of inquiry and progress that had characterized Franklin’s entire era. 13
Condorcet spoke too soon. During the radical phase of the Revolution that began in 1791 and culminated in the violent Terror of 1793–1795, science and the learned academies were criticized as nests of elite privilege. Jean-Paul Marat, the experimenter who had begun a second career as a radical journalist, remembered too well that the Académie Royale des Sciences had dismissed his analyses of light and color (which Franklin had so studiously ignored). Marat made a point of attacking learned societies and academicians such as Lavoisier. In late 1792, the Revolutionary Legislative Assembly halted elections to fill vacant seats in learned societies. Academicians began to shun meetings, lest they appear too elitist. The Académie itself closed in 1793. Lavoisier was imprisoned under a general arrest of all farmers general, those who had administered and benefited from the Old Regime’s taxes. He was convicted and guillotined. An observer remarked, “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it.”14
The French academies recovered, and the monarchy was later restored. Yet even after the Terror, the French (and other Europeans) were less eager to apply scientific principles to human society. Condorcet’s science of humanity and Condorcet himself (who died in prison) were discredited. Natural science was no longer quite so central to public life. It instead occupied the academic sphere, in universities and learned societies. Franklin’s reputation survived all the troubles. A Frenchman remarked in 1864 that “even today Franklin exists as a demi-god.” And Paris still has a “rue Benjamin Franklin,” explained as honoring the “physicien et homme d’état” (physicist and statesman), science, and politics in that order, as they had appeared in Condorcet’s eulogy.15
One would look in vain for such a street in London. Franklin’s post-1775 politics rendered him a far more complicated figure in Britain than in France. (In 1976, the British did commemorate the bicentennial of the American Revolution—rather sporting of them—with a series of postage stamps, including one of Franklin.) To embrace him, Britons had to disconnect Franklin’s natural philosophy from his political career. Jonathan Odell, an American whose loyalty to Britain had made him a refugee during the American Revolution, praised Franklin as a philosopher—“Like Newton sublimely he soared . . . And the palm of philosophy gained”—and as someone who used science to improve the human lot:With a spark which he caught from the skies,
He displayed an unparalleled wonder;
And we saw with delight and surprise,
That his rod could secure us from thunder.
But Franklin had erred when he entered politics:To covet political fame
Was in him a degrading ambition;
The spark that from Lucifer came
Enkindled the blaze of sedition.16
Throughout Europe, the idea that men of science should enlist in public affairs was on the wane at the turn of the nineteenth century. If anything, genius was now thought to separate a person from the world. Consider William Wordsworth’s verses on Newton: “A mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” This romantic characterization, done circa 1805, after the shock, debate, and disillusionment over the French Revolution, would have puzzled anyone in Newton’s or Franklin’s era. But nineteenth-century poets, politicians, and philosophers tended to characterize genius as impractical, if not dangerous. The fantasy of a fiendish philosopher who could subject matter to his will—already evident during the American Revolution—persisted. Thus Mary Shelley’s creation, in 1818, of an electrically adept Dr. Frankenstein (Franklin-stein?) whose tragedy it was to master life and death. 17
Franklin’s afterlife in the United States was similarly fraught, although there was tremendous grief over his death. On April 21, 1790, 20,000 people formed a long procession to the Christ Church burial ground in Philadelphia. (Remarkably, this crowd was as big as the gathering that had watched Buffon’s burial in Paris, two years earlier.) The clergy led the procession. Mayor and governor were pallbearers; so was astronomer Rittenhouse. Fellows of the American Philosophical Society and printers mournfully trailed behind.18
One group of Philadelphians was notable for its absence: Freemasons. In Franklin’s European absence, American Masons had rediscovered their workers’ origins. Masonic lodges, including Franklin’s old lodge, now welcomed the craftworkers they had earlier rejected. Franklin the upstart leather apron had become, by the time of his death, too grand for the Masons, so they stayed away from his funeral. He might have appreciated the irony.
19
For different reasons, politicians were also reluctant to express sorrow over Franklin’s passing. Congress, prompted by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for a month. The members of the lower house did so, but the senators refused. Thomas Jefferson suggested that members of the executive branch should wear mourning; George Washington declined. Franklin had, after all, died neither in office nor on the battlefield—if mere celebrity prompted national mourning, where would things end? And when official statements of condolence arrived from France, no one in the brand-new federal government knew quite what to do. Should they be answered? Somehow, the messages were ignored. Finally, members of Congress arranged for a formal eulogy. Almost a year after Franklin’s death, William Smith—the vice president of the American Philosophical Society and one of his political enemies—read before both houses of Congress an assessment of Franklin that was an uninspired list of his life’s events.20
John Adams made a good case for forgetting Franklin. During Franklin’s last weeks, Adams had complained that “the history of our revolution will be one continued lye from one end to the other.” People would assume “that Dr Franklins electrical Rod smote the earth, and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrised him with his rod—and thenceforward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and War.” True, Adams was still envious of Franklin, but he had a point: many people, including ordinary ones, had fought and won the war. Why should Franklin be the supernatural hero of the story? The Revolutionaries had founded the Republic, after all, to vindicate the rights of ordinary people.21
The price of that Revolutionary goal was suspicion of elites, including intellectual elites. Franklin had never doubted that ordinary people could read, think, and argue with the best of them. And he had, through his own powerful example, demonstrated that those who worked with their hands could also use their heads. But after his death, Americans would grow increasingly critical of the men who did most of the reading of books and arguing of ideas. That was one thing, but they would also begin to reject the books and ideas themselves. Just as Freemasons were now celebrating their stone-workers’ heritage, so Americans generally extolled practical knowledge over book learning. When Jefferson seemed destined for the presidency, his opponents attacked his learned status. In 1793, one South Carolinian remarked that “the great WASHINGTON was, thank God, no philosopher.” In contrast to a man of action, such as Washington, a philosopher such as Jefferson had “timidity, whimsicalness . . . a proneness to predicate all his measures on certain abstract theories.”22
The distrust of philosophy, theory, and learning left its mark on antebellum America. Well past the moment of the nation’s founding, state-sponsored learning, which was the standard in western Europe, remained unusual in the United States. Universities, learned societies, and interested individuals (not least Jefferson) kept natural philosophy simmering at a low level. Occasional American publications drew attention from Europeans. But citizens of the new nation still depended on overseas talent for scientific stimulus. In cultural terms, they remained colonial subjects of Europe.23
To celebrate Franklin, Americans had to make less, not more, of his gift for science. So in their statements of praise for their electrical founder, nineteenth-century Americans demoted science from his leading characteristic to, at best, one item on a long list of achievements. Americans were far less interested in the cosmopolitan character that Franklin had worked so hard to develop. Instead, they celebrated how Franklin was typically American, meaning intelligent, hardworking, politically shrewd—civic responsibility had become his primary virtue. One entrepreneur made a point of reinventing Franklin along these lines. Mason Locke Weems, the “Parson” Weems who would craft Washington’s posthumous image (cherry tree, axe, “cannot tell a lie”), did the same for Franklin. Weems peddled extracts from Franklin’s The Way to Wealth and Autobiography and constructed Franklin, first and foremost, as a patriot.24
The Weemsian image stuck. Subsequently, historians and national propagandists presented this version of Franklin to immigrants, working people, young men on the make. His life was a series of civic deeds that led up to his starring role as a founder of the United States. By 1906, the 200th anniversary of Franklin’s birth, Philadelphia’s Masonic Lodge described its former brother as “the distinguished statesman, scientist, diplomat and Mason.” He was “not a man of letters but a man of affairs.”25
Science began to fall out of the picture, quite literally. A stream of nineteenth-century images, including commemorative medals and state or federal coins and bills, presented Franklin as equally statesman and scientist. In the second half of the nineteenth century, both the federal government and state banks issued bills that presented Franklin with his electric kite. He became indelibly associated with the kite and lightning rod, but people were beginning to forget what those inventions signified. In their famous engraving of 1876, Currier and Ives proposed that the kite “identified lightning with electricity” and helped develop the lightning rod, which protected humanity from lightning. The kite and lightning rod were symbols of a clever, civic-minded American practicality. Franklin’s serious investigation of electricity as a form of matter slipped away.26
And then science vanished altogether from many images of Franklin. Should you have one handy, look at a $100 bill. One side bears Franklin’s head, a portrait based on Siffrèd Duplessis’s 1778 oil painting. The other side bears an image of Independence Hall, Pennsylvania’s old State House. Not a lightning rod or kite is in sight—nor is there any hint that this was the site of Franklin’s earliest experiments with electricity. First issued in the 1910s, the bill was intended to honor Franklin as a Founder. It perhaps unintentionally honors his early commitment to the circulation of money. But it ignores entirely his interest in all other kinds of circulation, natural and social.27
Not even famous Founding Fathers can control their legacies. The present-day images of Franklin hardly resemble the historical character. In his own time, he enjoyed—even exploited—a society in which the sciences were still at the center of things, including public affairs. He and his contemporaries worried over how politics might affect science, even as they were not above using the political context to promote science or the reverse. They defined matter in ways that made sense to them, in terms of particles, fluids, and forces. Never mind that these ideas no longer have the life they once did—neither does Franklin. Under a plain marble slab, he rests beside his wife.
But he wanted to see the way we live now. If we could rouse him from his rest, we could take him on a whirlwind tour of the developments in science and technology that came after his death. Is this wise? Remember what Franklin said: “I have sometimes almost wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence.” He asked for it.
MANY of Franklin’s biographers play this almost irresistible game—they imagine him living in our age. Franklin involved himself in so many activities that seem modern to us. How eager Silence Dogood would have been to blog “her” advice, or the Pennsylvania postmaster to check his e-mail. How delighted the master electrician would have been to see Paris, the City of Lights, electrically illuminated at night; how entranced the inventor of the glass armonica would have been to hear the Theremin or Moog synthesizer, and how intrigued the Gulf Stream investigator would have been to examine infrared images of the Atlantic Ocean. To imagine Franklin doing these things is to make him one of us.
In part, we enjoy these fantasies because we like to imagine that we, the true moderns, have perfected his work. Franklin embarked on many projects that we (or our recent ancestors) then completed. He advocated inoculation against smallpox; twentieth-century doctors and health workers managed, through a global effort at vaccination, to eradicate naturally occurring smallpox. He recommended that Parisians, during the summer, go to bed earlier, which would give them more daylight hours and therefore reduce the expense of buying candles; we now credit him with the idea of day
light saving time.28
Scientists have likewise claimed their continuity with Franklin. At the turn of the nineteenth century, when J. J. Thomson described the electron, some enthusiasts announced it as ultimate vindication of Franklin’s idea that electricity existed in particles. Others have pointed out that Franklin’s experiment, using oil to still waves, could have determined the size of a molecule. (Measure the amount of oil, measure the amount of water it covers; use the ratio between them to determine the “depth” of the thin film, meaning the diameter of a molecule). Scientists have lamented that Franklin himself failed to follow through. Oceanographers who study the Gulf Stream hail the 1768 Franklin and Folger chart as the first, if partial, representation of a clockwise system of circulation in the North Atlantic.29
This rather self-congratulatory game permits us to judge Franklin by our own standards of achievement. We like to think he would admire us for building on his and other eighteenth-century accomplishments. If he liked the Leyden jar, he would marvel that we, surrounded by electric lights and electronic devices, are permanently bathed in electrical emissions. If he thought the Atlantic postal system speeded communication, he would adore the telegraph and Internet.
But we distort Franklin’s work in science when we see it as a flawed or incomplete version of our own. He held many ideas we no longer accept. It is an insult to him and to his contemporaries to diminish their theories of particulate matter with such terms as wrong or, even more patronizingly, headed in the right direction.
If Franklin could have what he wanted, a deathless view of the future, he surely would have been delighted and dismayed in equal measure. We delude ourselves when we imagine that the march of years is invariably a march of progress. So let us consider the things that would have upset Franklin and also the things that might upset us if we thought about how he would have assessed them. That version of Franklin’s imagined afterlife would give a truer sense of the significance of modern science. Science would become, after Franklin’s death, highly specialized, very expensive, and non-Newtonian. It would first lose its place in public life, then regain it. Let us take Franklin through these developments and see how and when they might have challenged his ideas of science and of nature, starting with the people and ideas that he almost encountered.
The First Scientific American Page 42