The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

The turbulent legacy of America's most-maligned Founding Father

This is a short review of Gordon Wood’s excellent biography of the perception of Benjamin Franklin, not as a historical figure but as a spectacle throughout his life and far beyond.

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In his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin was:

• A self-made printer turned gentleman scientist who tamed lightning and was by far the most recognizable American leading up to the Revolution

• A diehard royalist and imperialist until 1774 who only returned to America in 1775

• A lover of the Old World who spent all but 4 years of a 27 year stretch that included the entire Revolutionary War abroad (in London/Paris), and who considered staying permanently in both London and Paris at various points in his life

• So skeptically received in the nation that he helped to found at the time of his death that he received only a few lukewarm eulogies to his name. Even relatively unknown (and now long forgotten) state governors in his day would have received a far more energetic farewell. The American Senate rejected a proposal to mourn him.

• So utterly beloved by the French who placed him alongside Voltaire as the two philosophers most critical to their Enlightenment. In stark contrast to America, the French National Assembly, amidst hundreds of eulogies from their finest aristocrats, passed its first ever official period of mourning for their American icon. In the late 18th century, it was the French that needed the image of Franklin as a frontier democrat and simple philosopher, not the Americans, who viewed him as a radical egalitarian, a French sympathizer, and a godless man in deeply religious times.

Only after Franklin’s death did the ascendant American middle class adopt him as their leader, and only thus did the beloved Founding Father we know today emerge. With Franklin as their inspiration, the craftsmen of the northern states eschewed genteel idleness for Old Richard’s frugality and thrift and industry, achieving such success in their cultural inversion that even the biographers of Washington, the archetypical aristocrat, were forced to rewrite the general’s story, portraying him as a hard-working farm manager who spent the entire day on horseback. The first American generation to be born after the Revolutionary War adopted and elevated Franklin, but not all of the disparate parts of him equally. Their Franklin — and the Franklin we know today — was Franklin the upwardly mobile printer, not Franklin the parvenu scientist who mastered lightning or Franklin the charming diplomat who singlehandedly maintained the French alliance during the Revolution (and whose impact on the war was second only to Washington).

Most biographies are explicitly premised upon neutrality - describing the man qua man - but are unintentionally reflections of the author’s own motivations and values, a mirror into the man’s constructed image. This biography is spectacular in its self-conscious emphasis on the evolution of Franklin the spectacle - as his many publicists molded him to be, not Franklin “the man,” as if there could be so stable a label for anyone, dead or alive.

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Reflecting on how Americans burned effigies of Franklin after the Stamp Act while he was living in London and considering staying there for the rest of his life, how just years later Parliament publicly lambasted Franklin at Whitehall, turning a lifelong servant of the Crown (in London petitioning to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony!) into an American Revolutionary in a single afternoon, how his portraits were so popular in France that a jealous Louis XVI had Franklin’s image painted on a toilet bowl, and how many Americans saw him as an adulterer, a godless atheist, and a radical democrat at the time of his passing despite all that he had done for his nascent country — reflecting on all of that is a stark reminder that one’s legacy and even image is hardly one’s own, especially in an age even more conspiratorial than the Revolutionary period. It is a man’s publicists, biographers, enemies, and friends that use and abuse the raw material of his life for their own purposes.