Patriot Act

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

By Gordon S. Wood

Penguin, 299 pp., illustrated, $25.95

Americans have long been fascinated with their Founding Fathers. Biographies of Washington and Jefferson abound. So, too, for Benjamin Franklin. Beginning in 1794, publishers have vied to bring out the most marketable of his voluminous texts, and writers have lined up to take on the challenge of interpreting this iconic figure. The task of interpretation has never been easy for, as Gordon S. Wood points out, "Father" Franklin was, in important ways, unlike his counterparts. Because of this, his identification with the Revolution and the Founding is slightly off kilter, not quite what the template demands. In addition, his enigmatic character, multiple literary personae, and brilliant sociability add complexity, not clarity, to the mix. And while he has, through popular identification with the American values of self-help, entrepreneurship, and common sense, been arguably the most widely revered of the Fathers, he has certainly been the most reviled as well.

With all that has been said of Franklin over the years, it is difficult to develop a fresh take. Yet this is what Wood offers us in "The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin." This is more study than biography -- a carefully thought out, well-written look at how Franklin became Americanized in ways that have mattered. In Wood's scheme, Franklin was "Colonialized" once and Americanized thrice. The Colonialized first phase was Franklin's early to middle life in Philadelphia, which Wood uses to depict a Franklin taking full advantage of an emerging middle-class environment yet being trapped in a world defined by upper- and lower-class polarities. Placing emphasis on the division of mid-18th-century Anglo-American society into commoners and gentlemen, the author argues that Franklin made a conscious decision to "pass" from the former to the latter. He facilitated this by seizing a political opportunity to move to London and there lived the life of an intellectually and politically engaged gentleman. In the course of his British residency he identified himself not only as a "Colonist" but also as a "Briton."

Wood, however, sees Franklin as a "Royalist" -- culturally predisposed to embrace an extended British Atlantic polity under monarchical authority, naively convinced that British ministers and Crown would see the foolishness of their policies and of continually misjudging Colonial opinion during the pre-Revolutionary spats. Not until he was publicly humiliated in early 1774 and subsequently seared by the venom of Parliamentary comment condemning the Colonies did Franklin depart for Philadelphia. His choice of the cause of independence was Franklin's first and most important Americanization -- one built on anger, disgust, a sense of personal grievance, and a passionate loyalty to the patriot cause.

A year and a half later, Franklin sailed the reverse way, this time to represent the new nation in France. French support was crucial, for "without [it] Independence might never have been won." Recognizing this, Franklin shouldered a huge load, and despite the machinations of the Lees of Virginia, and the narrowness of that "mischievous madman, John Adams," he kept his place and in doing so kept the French. He did so not only by the wiles he had learned in a long lifetime but also by studiously playing the American. As Wood puts it, "Because the French had . . . need of [a symbolic American] before the Americans did, they first began to create the images of Franklin that we today are familiar with -- the Poor Richard moralist, the symbol of rustic democracy, and the simple backwoods philosopher." Here was the second Americanization.

The third began shortly thereafter and remains open-ended. Immediately after Franklin's death he was celebrated by mechanics and tradesmen, middle-class Americans who found in his "writings a middling hero they could relate to." Asserting themselves against the tenacious remnants of gentlemanly privilege, spokesmen for the new social order built on self-help, innovation, enterprise, and imitative, practical skill found in Franklin a patron saint. He conveniently rooted the new world of emerging capitalism in the Colonial past and thereby made those values as legitimate as the new republic. Bound tightly to the sense of American nationhood, the Franklin persona of "bumptious capitalism . . . stays with us."

Overall this book is a perceptive study with some deft authorial touches. An example of this is Wood's skillful weaving of Franklin's "Autobiography" into his own narrative. Another is the way in which he frames Franklin's relationship with his spouse, Deborah Read.

Given his theme, however, one is left wishing that Wood had revealed a little more of the double edge of the sword of Americanization. One of the great ironies of the Revolution revolves around the symbolic Quaker Franklin played in France. It would be unthinkable to write a study of Washington or Adams without contextualizing them respectively in slave-heavy Virginia, or in Congregationalist Massachusetts. Yet Wood pays virtually no attention to the Quakerized dimensions of Pennsylvania society that influenced Franklin until "the French turned everything about Franklin into a sign of Quaker or republican simplicity." Nor does he note that as Franklin freely spent the goodwill associated with the Colonial Quaker heritage in the cause of the new republic, the republic fell on Quakers at home with persecutory zeal. What Europeans embraced as emblematic of America, America tried to emasculate. The real Americanization of Benjamin Franklin involves not merely what Americans chose of him to lionize but what they rejected as well. Dealing with some of those twists would have lengthened the story. But greater illumination of both the ambiguities of Franklin and the complexities of Americanization would have made a very worthwhile book even more so.

Alan Tully is professor of history and chair at the University of Texas at Austin.