The Society for Useful Knowledge (4 page)

In Philadelphia, the enigmatic Samuel Keimer, a transplanted English dissident and master printer who once employed the young Ben Franklin in his atelier, introduced his readers to useful knowledge in a bid to dispel “Ignorance and Superstition” and promote “the public Good.” Keimer, a free spirit and on-again, off-again Quaker, announced that the publication of his forthcoming newspaper would offer subscribers “the richest Mine of useful Knowledge (of the Kind) ever discovered” in America.
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Such ideas were particularly welcome in Pennsylvania, where the Quaker sensibilities of William Penn and his associates predominated among the early elite. Quakerism developed amid the religious turmoil of seventeenth-century England, part of a broad response to the authoritarian and corrupt ways of the established Church of England. Central to Quakerism is the belief that God is directly accessible by all, without outside mediation. The intellectual attitudes of Philadelphia's Quaker community—in particular the prohibition on ornamental knowledge, the rejection of an effete clerical class, and support for the empirical study of nature—left its citizens sympathetic to attacks on both the classical canon of European learning and English social convention. In their eyes, the works of the ancient Greeks and those of the medieval Scholastic philosophers had usurped the rightful place of scripture in the imagination of the learned.

It was far better, reasoned the Quakers and other like-minded sectaries, to arm Americans with the practical information they required to make their proper way through the world and to equip them to read the holy book on their own. “Languages are not to be despised or neglected, but things are still to be preferred,” declared William Penn.
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In this same spirit, Franklin announced seventy-five years later, “And for one I confess that if I could find in any Italian Travels a Receipt [recipe] for making Parmesan Cheese, it would give me more Satisfaction than a Transcript of any Inscription from any old Stone whatever.”
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Philadelphia proved a congenial home to Franklin, who sprang from a long line of independent artisans. There, he found a ready supply of like-minded tradesmen, craftsmen, and “mechanics” eager to engage in civic and political life, to discuss books and philosophical ideas, and to pursue the latest in practical learning. Contemporary English usage defined the mechanic as a practitioner of those “Arts wherein the Hand and Body are more concerned than the Mind,” and the term—used at times to convey the sense of “base” or
“pitiful”—carried with it residual class prejudice.
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However, Franklin pointed out in his advice to would-be immigrants, things were very different in the New World.

The shortage of skilled labor in colonial America, the accompanying high wages, and the lack of restrictive regulations, meant that many a master craftsman or mechanic could aspire to become an independent entrepreneur, with considerable economic security, social standing, and political influence. Even the journeyman, noted Franklin, could hope to save enough funds to buy land and become an independent farmer, or to go into other business for himself. “Hence it is that Artisans generally live better and more easily in America than in Europe, and such as are good Economists make a comfortable Provision for Age, & for their Children. Such may therefore remove with Advantage to America.”
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Franklin earlier based one of his most important economic tracts, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.,” on the notion that America's plentiful supply of cheap land would keep labor scarce, encourage rapid population growth, and otherwise shape colonial society in profound ways. He went on to predict with remarkable accuracy that the American population would double every twenty-five years and surpass that of Great Britain within a century.
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These conditions created ample room for the rise of an independent American artisan class, something lacking at the time in Europe. With its emphasis on real-world problem solving over mathematical precision and on experience over tradition, the movement for useful knowledge in time helped elevate the skills and values of the mechanic to an American social and intellectual ideal. The conflict with Great Britain, in which mechanics' associations often took a leading role, only accelerated these advances.

To Franklin, a printer by trade and a lifelong admirer of skilled craftsmanship, the mechanic's vocation held particular meaning, for his was a self-regulating world, a wholly rational system of cause and effect, of physical laws. “The Husbandman is in honor there, & even the Mechanic, because their
Employments are useful,” Franklin informed his foreign readers in “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America.” “The People have a Saying, that God Almighty is himself a Mechanic, the greatest in the Universe; and he is respected and admired more for the Variety, Ingenuity and Utility of his Handiworks, than for the Antiquity of his Family.”
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Amid the company of Revolutionary War figures, Benjamin Franklin stands out—for the range of his experience, the scope of his talents and interests, and the brute tenacity with which he pursued his interlocking goals of self-improvement, social betterment, and, once fully roused, independence from the mother country he had venerated. Franklin's place today as an American icon, reinforced by his comforting portrait on the hundred dollar bill, on postage stamps, in advertising, and on T-shirts, is arguably second to none.

Despite the familiarity that attends such ubiquity, he has long posed something of a literary and historical puzzle. His storied career, his rich symbolic meaning, and his voluminous writings together offer an embarrassment of riches for the reader, the historian, the researcher, or the critic. This has impelled many to parse Franklin into ever more narrow, and thus more manageable, tranches. A quick troll through any major library collection reveals the extent to which these many “Franklins”—scientist, diplomat, aphorist, patriot, humorist, educator, lover, and so on—have taken up permanent residence in the American consciousness.
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Compounding the challenge of locating the “real” Franklin is the looming presence of his unfinished memoir, written in four distinct stages over the course of two decades and never edited or harmonized by its author into a coherent whole.
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The extant document has conflicting aims. At different times it presents private moral lessons directed at Franklin's family, his own bid for moral perfection, and his significant part in the intellectual life, civic affairs, and politics of the day.

In the assessment of its modern editors,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
is “not notably accurate.” It glosses over some of Franklin's most important political and commercial missteps, frequently disguises his motives, and ignores
serious shortcomings in his personal relationships, most importantly with his wife, Deborah, and estranged son, William.
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Omissions, inaccuracies, and all, Franklin's autobiography furnished invaluable raw material for the popular, hagiographical accounts that began to appear shortly after his death, establishing the now-familiar outlines of a man who embodied the reassuring virtues of hard work, frugality, religious faith, social responsibility, and scientific curiosity, all wrapped up in an inspirational tale of rags to riches.
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Parson Weems, the traveling book salesman who bequeathed us the apocryphal morality play of George Washington and the cherry tree, mined Franklin's memoir in 1818 to produce an enduring portrait of the Philadelphia printer as self-made man, beginning with the
Life of Benjamin Franklin: With Many Choice Anecdotes and Admirable Sayings of This Great Man, Never Before Published by Any of His Biographers
. Other authors followed suit.

Even serious investigators have succumbed to the undeniable charms of Franklin's own story. Max Weber, one of the architects of modern social thought, relied solely on an early German translation of the
Autobiography
to cast Franklin as the exemplar of the Protestant “spirit” of capitalism.
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Carl Van Doren, prize-winning author of an early scholarly biography of Franklin, called the autobiography a “masterpiece of memory and honesty.”
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However, Van Doren seems to have recognized the wide gulf that often separates the artist from his creation; he hints at one point that Franklin the man has nonetheless remained elusive, not so much a single, identifiable personality as a “harmonious human multitude.”
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The early popularizations also set the stage for an anti-Franklin backlash. For Herman Melville, Franklin's undoubted accomplishments had come at the unacceptable cost to his soul. “Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of his land. Franklin was everything but a poet,” Melville wrote in his satirical novel
Israel Potter
.
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Mark Twain lamented Franklin's ill effects on generations of young boys, whose fathers were certain to hold up the mythical figure as a salutary example of just how far they could go in life with sufficient hard work and self-denial.
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D. H. Lawrence, the British novelist and critic, famously skewered him as that “middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-colored Doctor Franklin” out “to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom” and tuck it away neatly “into his kitchen garden scheme of things.”
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Still, there is a fruitful path through these many Franklins, one that sets him firmly within the intellectual, social, and political context of his times. The
eighteenth century was, in many ways, the Age of Franklin. Not only did his extraordinary life intersect with the great political, social, and intellectual developments of the times, including the birth of the American republic, but his relentless push to expand the reach of news and ideas helped fuel the rapid acceleration of intellectual life across the former colonies and America's rise as a technological and industrial power in its own right.

In this regard, Franklin was both harbinger and mouthpiece for the aspirations of an emerging middle class, educated and increasingly autonomous, and for the nation it would one day come to define. In the words of the eminent historian Carl L. Becker, “He accepted without question and expressed without effort all the characteristic ideas and prepossessions of the century—its aversion to ‘superstition' and ‘enthusiasms' and mystery; … its preoccupation with the world that is evident to the senses; its profound faith in common sense, in the efficacy of Reason for the solution of human problems and the advancement of human welfare.”
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For Franklin and many of the other Founding Fathers, the natural order to which they aspired was captured by the mechanical representation of the planets contained in a wondrous planetarium, or “orrery,” crafted in the late 1760s by Rittenhouse, the self-taught astronomer. Here was a complete working model of the universe, its uniform motion humming along, untended, under a watchful system of checks and balances.

“The amazing mechanical representation of the solar system which you conceived and executed, has never been surpassed by any but the world of which it is a copy,” wrote Jefferson in a letter to the inventor.
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Like his comrades, Jefferson saw the Rittenhouse orrery as a product of natural American genius, untouched and untroubled by traditional learning.

In this same spirit, the Founding Fathers came to recognize that anything that interfered with the harmonious workings of American society and the pursuit of happiness by the individuals in it—such as the overreaching actions of the British Crown against its colonies—had to be swept aside. While the useful knowledge societies played no direct role in this revolutionary enterprise, they gave practical expression to the widespread ideas and attitudes that informed first the colonial rebellion and then the creation of a new nation and a new society. One need only glance at the interests, experience, and attitudes among the signatories to the Declaration of Independence and the Founding
Fathers—Franklin, Jefferson, Rush, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and Charles Carroll among them—to recognize how deeply such notions went to the heart of the American Revolution.

In a letter to Adams in 1816, Jefferson summed up the prevailing sentiments of the revolutionary generation: “We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can.”
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With the final political break with Great Britain, America was now free to shake off the inept meddling of priests and kings and to realize the implicit dream of a natural order—one of harmony and reason—that had been perverted by an imperfect Europe.

Of course, the immediate exigencies of nationhood that followed the successful Revolutionary War left the citizens of this new nation facing an uncertain future. Bereft of many of the institutions of Old Europe, lacking in capital and manpower, without great libraries or universities, and cut off from traditional markets by lingering British hostility and the threat of naval blockade, the new “Free and Independent States” had little recourse but self-reliance and practical study. Franklin's society for useful knowledge, and his many imitators, collaborators, and successors among the “Virtuosi and ingenious Men” of the former colonies, pointed the way to the American future.

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I have endeavored to preserve Franklin's preferred orthography in quotations from his works and those of his contemporaries. I have, however, generally adopted modern forms of spelling in place of the more informal usage of the period. Where necessary, punctuation has also been updated.