The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read Online Free PDF Page A

convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature” he concluded, “since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” 37
    None of the Founders was more conscious of the difference between appearance and reality than Franklin. Not only did he continually comment on that difference, but he was never averse to maintaining it. If one could not actually be industrious and humble, he said, at least one could appear to be so.
    Although he wrote against disguise and dissimulation and asked, “Who was ever cunning enough to conceal his being so?” we nevertheless know that he was the master of camouflage and concealment. “We shall resolve to be what we would seem,” he declared, yet at the same time he seems to have delighted in hiding his innermost thoughts and motives. “Let all Men know thee,” Poor Richard said, “but no man know thee thoroughly: Men freely ford that see the shallows.” 38
    While sometimes bowing to the emerging romantic cult of sincerity, he remained firmly rooted in the traditional eighteenth-century world of restraining one’s inner desires and feelings in order to be civil and get along. He never thought that his characteristic behavior—his artful posing, his role playing, his many masks, his refusal to reveal his inner self— was anything other than what the cultivated and sociable eighteenth century admired. He was a thoroughly social being, enmeshed in society and civic-minded by necessity. Not for him the disastrous assertions of antisocial autonomy and the outspoken sincerity of Molière’s character Alceste in Le Misanthrope. Like many others of his day, Franklin preferred the sensible and prudent behavior of Alceste’s friend Philinte, who knew that the path of good sense was to adapt to the pressures and contradictions of society. 39 Unlike, say, John Adams, Franklin never wore his heart on his sleeve; he kept most of his intentions and feelings to himself. He was a master at keeping his own counsel. As Poor Richard said, “Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead.” 40
    Franklin is so many-sided, he seems everything to everyone, but no image has been more powerful than that of the self-improving businessman. This modern image of Franklin began to predominate with the emergence of America’s democratic capitalism in the early republic; and, like Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of that rambunctious democratic America, Franklin’s personification of its values has had a remarkable staying power. Just as we continue to read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for its insights into the democratic character of our society in our own time nearly two centuries later, so too do we continue to honor Franklin as the Founder who best exemplifies our present-day democratic capitalist society. As the symbol of an American land of opportunity where one works hard to get ahead, Franklin continues to have great meaning, especially among recent immigrants.
    But to recover the historic Franklin we must shed these modern images and symbols of Franklin and return to that very different, distant world of the eighteenth century. Only then can we go on to understand how the symbolic Franklin was created.

ONE
    BECOMING A GENTLEMAN

    BOSTON BEGINNINGS
    Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706 (January 6, 1705, in the old-style calendar), of very humble origins, origins that always struck Franklin himself as unusually poor. Franklin’s father, Josiah, was a nonconformist from Northamptonshire who as a young man had immigrated to the New World and had become a candle and soap maker, one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts. Josiah fathered a total of seventeen children, ten, including Benjamin, by his second wife, Abiah Folger, from Nantucket. Franklin was number fifteen of these seventeen and the youngest son.
    In a hierarchical age that favored the firstborn son, Franklin was, as he ruefully recounted in his Autobiography, “the youngest Son