The following is part of a series of posts on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American history.
In
June of 1757, the fifty one year-old Benjamin Franklin crossed the Atlantic
Ocean for the second time in his life to begin a new career as a lobbyist
representing the colony of Pennsylvania (as well as New Jersey, Georgia and
Massachusetts) in London. Before leaving America, the retired printer wrote a
valedictory essay, “The Way to Wealth.” Franklin had himself won wealth as a
publisher of almanacs, a commonly produced publication in colonial America, appealing
to printers because they were cheap, timely, and popular. Because he writes
with such disarming simplicity, it’s worth quoting his autobiography on his
experience in the business:
In 1732 I first published my Almanack, under the name of Richard Saunders; it was continued by me about twenty-five years, commonly called "Poor Richard's Almanac." I endeavored to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand that I reaped considerable profit from it, vending annually near ten thousand. And observing that it was generally read, scarce any neighborhood in the province being without it, I considered it as a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who brought scarcely any other books. I therefore filled all the little spaces that occurred between the remarkable days in the calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality as the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want to act always honestly as, to use here one of those proverbs, it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.
“The
Way to Wealth,” published in 1758, was in effect Poor Richard’s Greatest Hits. The essay was a string of classic
aphorisms like “There are no gains, without pains”; “little strokes fell great
oaks”; and “the eye of a master will do more work than both his hands.”
Actually, precisely because much of it
reads like a list, it’s easy to overlook the deceptive simplicity of “The Way
to Wealth,” which is in fact a document of marvelous complexity. Its framing
device is “the harangue of a wise old man to the people attending an Auction,”
to the narrator. Nevertheless, it begins on a note of self-congratulation. “I
have heard that nothing gives an author so great pleasure as to find his Works
respectfully quoted by other learned authors,” Saunders says, wryly noting that
his competitors have somehow managed to be “very sparing in their Applauses.”
Fortunately, however, he happened to pause near a merchant venue, where “a
plain clean old man” was dispensing the thrifty wit and wisdom of Poor Richard
to a crowd of listeners.
As Saunders narrates it, the ending of
the story is not entirely satisfactory – or, at any rate, expected. When the
old man, named Father Abraham, is finished with his disquisition, Saunders
notes “the people heard it, and approved the Doctrine, and immediately
practiced the contrary, just as if it had been a Sermon” (a little dig at
religious morality here). Still, he concludes, “The frequent Mention he made of
me must have tired anyone else, but my Vanity was wonderfully delighted with
it.” He acknowledges “that not a tenth Part of the Wisdom was my own which he
ascribed to me, but rather the Gleanings
I had made of the Sense of all Ages and Nations.” But he decides to benefit
himself from the wisdom he has purveyed to others: “I resolved to be the better
for the Echo of it; and though I had first determined to buy the stuff of a new
Coat, I went away resolved to wear my old one a little longer.” He signs off
“as ever, Thine to serve thee, RICHARD SAUNDERS.”
Let’s be clear about what’s happening
here: A fictive crowd is
responding to a fictive speaker quoting a fictive writer – more like a fictive
admitted plagiarist – who is moved to take his own advice, recorded in a piece
penned by a man named Benjamin Franklin. (To complicate matters still further,
there was an actual Richard Saunders who published almanacs in the seventeenth
century, who Franklin adopted as an alter ego.) We could call Franklin a
fiction writer, but that somehow doesn’t capture the elusive essence of a man
who was both real and recognizable – his personality leaps off the page here
and elsewhere centuries later – and who repeatedly over the course of his life
reinvented himself. You might say Franklin was the first self-remade man in
American history.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to
call him a self-made men. Franklin
has long been known, and lionized, as the patron saint of American capitalism,
a role he played to the hilt as a young man. The key word here is role; Franklin was acutely aware of the
difference between appearance and reality, and leveraged them for maximum
effect, as when he made a show of carting rolls of printing paper in a
wheelbarrow down the streets of Philadelphia, rather than having a hired hand
do it. [Isaacson 54] But Franklin’s sense of self-invention went well beyond
the world of commerce, evident in his decision to wear a fur cap as an American
diplomat in Paris, because he knew it pleased the French to think of him as the
embodiment of the frontiersman. [2] After 1759 his friends in the scientific
community knew him as “Dr. Franklin,” but his degree was an honorary one from
the University of St. Andrew in Scotland, and Franklin was always more of the
technological tinkerer than the pure scientist.
Don’t get me wrong: Franklin was truly a
remarkable man, one with an exceptionally wide range of skills, social ones
prominent among them. My point is that he seems eerily prescient in his
postmodern self-awareness, an aptitude he exploited to maximum effect over the
course of his lifetime and in the autobiography he addressed to a son from whom
he would be tragically estranged in the last fifteen years of his life
(Governor William Franklin of New Jersey sided with the Tories in the American
Revolution). No history of the self-made man could ever credibly been written
without featuring the sage of Philadelphia as the founding father of a national myth. To a great extent that’s
because he was the first great master of the modern media in American history.
But for all his elasticity, Franklin
finally and decisively embodies a specific version of the self-made man. He’s
neither a spiritual figure like Roger Williams – indeed, one of the more
notable aspects of Franklin’s career is the way in which he bent the precepts
of a Puritan childhood in the service of avowedly secular aims – nor a prophet
of the soil like Jefferson. For sure, he’s a vibrant archetype in the rise of
American capitalism. But it’s a particular kind
of capitalism: mercantile capitalism, as opposed to industrial capitalism or
finance capitalism. Franklin is the apogee of the entrepreneur on a human
scale, a hands-on exemplar of private enterprise –
– and, more to my point here, public enterprise. This is an aspect of
the self-made man that has been too easily overlooked. Even in the phase of his
life where he was most focused on making a living, Franklin was engaged in a
deeply social line of work: (“as ever, Thine to serve thee”). His gaze was
fixed on neither hearth nor heaven, but rather on the public square. He worked
hard to become rich, but that was a means to an end: making enough money to
retire (in his early forties) and focus full-time on the civic pursuits that
had been a big part of his life all along, among them science, philanthropy,
politics, and diplomacy. Yes: Franklin was a businessman. But that’s never all he was. His life marked the arrival
of the golden age of the self-made man, an era of expansion in terms of what
the concept meant and who could pursue this particular form of happiness.
Next: Franklin as city boy
