Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (67 page)

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.
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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:

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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: