Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (58 page)

The race was then on to produce the first
manned
flight, and it was won on November 21 by the Montgolfiers with their hot-air model. As a huge crowd cheered and countless women fainted, the balloon took off with two champagne-toting noblemen, who initially found themselves snared by some tree branches. “I was then in great pain for the men, thinking them in danger of being thrown out or burnt,” Franklin reported. But soon they were free and gliding their way over the Seine, and after twenty minutes they landed on the other side and popped their corks in triumph. Franklin was among the distinguished scientists who signed the official certification of the historic flight the following evening, when the Montgolfiers called on him at Passy.

The Montgolfiers believed that the lift was caused not just by hot air but also by smoke, so they instructed their “aeronauts” to ply the fire with wet straw and wool. Franklin, however, was more partial to Charles’s “inflammable air” model using hydrogen, and he helped to finance the first manned flight in such a balloon. It took place ten days later. As Franklin watched from his carriage parked near the Tuileries Gardens (his gout preventing him from joining the throng on the wet grass), Charles and a partner flew for more than two hours and landed safely twenty-seven miles away. Once again, Franklin provided a report to the Royal Society through Banks: “I had a pocket glass, with which I followed it until I lost sight, first of the men, then of the car, and when I last saw the balloon it appeared no bigger than a walnut.”

Ever since the days of his electricity experiments, Franklin believed that science should be pursued initially for pure fascination and curiosity, and then practical uses would eventually flow from what was discovered. At first, he was reluctant to guess what practical use might come of balloons, but he was convinced that experimenting with them would someday, as he told Banks, “pave the way to some discoveries in natural philosophy of which at present we have no conception.” There could be, he noted in another letter, “important consequences that no one can foresee.” More famous was his pithier expression of the same sentiment, made in response to a spectator who asked what use this new balloon thing could be. “What is the use,” he replied, “of a newborn baby?”
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Because the English saw no utility in ballooning and because they were a bit too proud to follow the French, they did not join in the excitement. “I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Ballomania [until] some experiment likely to prove beneficial either to society or science is proposed,” Banks wrote. Franklin scoffed at this attitude. “It does not seem to me a good reason to decline prosecuting a new experiment which apparently increases the power of man over matter until we can see to what use that power may be applied,” he replied. “When we have learned to manage it, we may hope some time or other to find uses for it, as men have done for magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.” By early the following year, he had come up with one possibility for a practical use: balloons might serve as a way to wage war, or even better, as a way to preserve peace. “Convincing sovereigns of the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect, since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions,” he wrote to his friend Jan Ingenhousz, the Dutch scientist and physician.

Mainly, however, Franklin contented himself with enjoying the craze and all the entertainments surrounding it. Exhibition flights of fanciful balloons, decorated and gilded in glorious patterns, became the rage in Paris that season, and they even influenced hats and hair-styles, fashions and dances. Temple Franklin and Benny Bache produced their own miniature models. And Franklin wrote one of his typical parodies, which, like many of his early ones, used the anonymous voice of a fictional woman. “If you want to fill your balloons with an element ten times lighter than inflammable air,” she wrote to one of the newspapers, “you can find a great quantity of it, and ready made, in the promises of lovers and of courtiers.”
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Even as he indulged in the frivolities of prerevolutionary Paris, Franklin focused much of his writing on his egalitarian, antielitist ideas for building a new American society based on middle-class virtues. His daughter, Sally, sent him newspaper clippings about the formation of a hereditary order of merit called the Society of the Cincinnati, which was headed by General Washington and open to distinguished officers of the American army who would pass the title down to their eldest sons. Franklin, replying at the beginning of 1784, ridiculed the concept. The Chinese were right, he said, to honor the parents of people who earned distinction, for they had some role in it. But honoring a worthy person’s descendants, who had nothing to do with achieving the merit, “is not only groundless and absurd but often hurtful to that posterity.” Any form of hereditary aristocracy or nobility was, he declared, “in direct opposition to the solemnly declared sense of their country.”

He also, in the letter, ridiculed the symbol of the new Cincinnati order, a bald eagle, which had also been selected as a national symbol. That provoked one of Franklin’s most famous riffs about America’s values and the question of a national bird:

Franklin heard so frequently from people who wanted to emigrate to America that in early 1784 he printed a pamphlet, in French and English, designed to encourage the more industrious of them while discouraging those who sought a life of upper-class leisure. His essay, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” is one of the clearest expressions of his belief that American society should be based on the virtues of the middle (or “mediocre,” as he sometimes called them, meaning it as a word of praise) classes, of which he still considered himself a part.

There were few people in America either as poor or as rich as those in Europe, he said. “It is rather a general happy mediocrity that prevails.” Instead of rich proprietors and struggling tenants, “most people cultivate their own lands” or follow some craft or trade. Franklin was particularly harsh on those who sought hereditary privilege or who had “no other quality to recommend him but his birth.” In America, he said, “people do not enquire of a stranger, What is he? but, What can he do?” Reflecting his own pride in discovering that he had hardworking forebears rather than aristocratic ones, he said that a true American “would think himself more obliged to a genealogist who could prove for him that his ancestors and relations for ten generations had been ploughmen, smiths, carpenters, turners, weavers, tanners or even shoemakers, and consequently that they were useful members of society, than if he could only prove that they were Gentlemen, doing nothing of value but living idly on the labor of others.”

America was creating a society, Franklin proclaimed, where a “mere man of Quality” who does not want to work would be “despised and disregarded,” while anyone who has a useful skill would be honored. All of this made for a better moral clime. “The almost general mediocrity of fortune that prevails in America, obliging its people to follow some business for subsistence, those vices that arise usually from idleness are in a great measure prevented,” he concluded. “Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of morals and virtue.” He purported to be describing the way America was, but he was also subtly prescribing what he wanted it to become. All in all, it was his best paean to the middle-class values he represented and helped to make integral to the new nation’s character.
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Franklin’s affection for the middle class and its virtues of hard work and frugality meant that his social theories tended to be a blend of conservatism (as we have seen, he was dubious of generous welfare laws that led to dependency among the poor) and populism (he was opposed to the privileges of inheritance and to wealth idly gained through ownership of large estates). In 1784, he expanded on these ideas by questioning the morality of excess personal luxuries.

“I have not,” he lamented to Benjamin Vaughan, “thought of a remedy for luxury.” On the one hand, the desire for luxury spurred people to work hard. He recalled how his wife had once given a fancy hat to a country girl, and soon all the other girls in the village were working hard spinning mittens in order to earn money to buy fancy hats. This appealed to his utilitarian sentiments: “Not only the girls were made happier by having fine caps, but the Philadelphians by the supply of warm mittens.” However, too much time spent seeking luxuries was wasteful and “a public evil.” So he suggested that America should impose heavy duties on the importation of frivolous fineries.
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His antipathy to excess wealth also led him to defend high taxes, especially on luxuries. A person had a “natural right” to all he earned that was necessary to support himself and his family, he wrote finance minister Robert Morris, “but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it.” Likewise, to Vaughan, he argued that cruel criminal laws had been wrought by those who sought to protect excess ownership of property. “Superfluous property is the creature of society,” he said. “Simple and mild laws were sufficient to guard the property that was merely necessary.”
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To some of his contemporaries, both rich and poor, Franklin’s social philosophy seemed an odd mix of conservative and radical beliefs. In fact, however, it formed a very coherent leather-apron outlook. Unlike many subsequent revolutions, the American was not a radical rebellion by an oppressed proletariat. Instead, it was led largely by propertied and shopkeeping citizens whose rather bourgeois rallying cry was “No taxation without representation.” Franklin’s blend of beliefs would become part of the outlook of much of America’s middle class: its faith in the virtues of hard work and frugality, its benevolent belief in voluntary associations to help others, its conservative opposition to handouts that led to laziness and dependency, and its slightly ambivalent resentment of unnecessary luxury, hereditary privileges, and an idle landowning leisure class.

The end of the war permitted the resumption of amiable correspondence with old friends in England, most notably his fellow printer William Strahan, to whom he had written the famous but unsent letter nine years earlier declaring “You are now my enemy.” By 1780, he had mellowed enough to draft a letter signed “Your formerly affectionate friend,” which he then changed to “Your long affectionate humble servant.” By 1784, he was signing himself “Most affectionately.”

Once again, they debated Franklin’s theories that top government officials should serve without pay and that England’s society and government were inherently corrupt. Now, however, the tone was bantering as Franklin suggested that the Americans, who “have some remains of affection” for the British, perhaps should help govern
them.
“If you have not sense and virtue enough left to govern yourselves,” he wrote, “dissolve your present old crazy constitution and send members to Congress.” Lest Strahan not realize he was joking, Franklin confessed, “You will say my advice smells of Madeira. You are right. This foolish letter is mere chitchat between ourselves over the second bottle.”
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Franklin also spent the early summer of 1784 adding more to his memoirs. He had written about 40 percent of what would become his famous
Autobiography
at Bishop Shipley’s in Twyford in 1771. Now he responded to a request from Vaughan, who said that Franklin’s story would help to explain the “manners of a rising people,” and in Passy wrote what would become another 10 percent of that work. His focus at the time was on the need to build a new American character, and most of the section he wrote in 1784 was devoted to an explanation of the famous self-improvement project in which he sought to train himself in the thirteen virtues ranging from frugality and industry to temperance and humility.

His Passy friends were especially thrilled by the tale of the slate booklet Franklin used to record his efforts at acquiring these virtues. Franklin, who still had not fully acquired all aspects of humility, proudly showed off the tablets to Cabanis, the young physician who lived with Madame Helvétius. “We touched this precious booklet,” Cabanis exulted in his journal. “We held it in our hands. Here was, in a way, the chronological story of Franklin’s soul!”
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In his spare time, Franklin perfected one of his most famous and useful inventions: bifocal glasses. Writing to a friend in August 1784, he announced himself “happy in the invention of Double Spectacles, which, serving for distant objects as well as near ones, make my eyes as useful to me as ever they were.” A few months later, in response to a request for more information about “your invention,” Franklin provided details: