Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (14 page)

The descriptions, such as the notably lenient one for chastity, were rather revealing. So too was the endeavor itself. It was also, in its passion for self-improvement through diligent resolve, enchantingly American.

Franklin’s focus was on traits that could help him succeed in this world, instead of ones that would exalt his soul for the hereafter. “Franklin celebrated a characteristically bourgeois set of virtues,” writes social theorist David Brooks. “These are not heroic virtues. They don’t fire the imagination or arouse the passions like the aristocratic love of honor. They are not particularly spiritual virtues. But they are practical and they are democratic.”

The set of virtues was also, as Edmund Morgan and others have pointed out, somewhat selfish. It did not include benevolence or charity, for example. But in fairness, we must remember that this was a young tradesman’s plan for self-improvement, not a full-blown statement of his morality. Benevolence was and would continue to be a motivating ideal for him, and charity, as Morgan notes, “was actually the guiding principle of Franklin’s life.” The fundamental tenet of his morality, he repeatedly declared, was “The most acceptable service to God is doing good to man.”
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Mastering all of these thirteen virtues at once was “a task of more difficulty than I had imagined,” Franklin recalled. The problem was that “while my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another.” So he decided to tackle them like a person who, “having a garden to weed, does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but works on one of the beds at a time.”

On the pages of a little notebook, he made a chart with seven red columns for the days of the week and thirteen rows labeled with his virtues. Infractions were marked with a black spot. The first week he focused on temperance, trying to keep that line clear while not worrying about the other lines. With that virtue strengthened, he could turn his attention to the next one, silence, hoping that the temperance line would stay clear as well. In the course of the year, he would complete the thirteen-week cycle four times.

“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined,” he dryly noted. In fact, his notebook became filled with holes as he erased the marks in order to reuse the pages. So he transferred his charts to ivory tablets that could be more easily wiped clean.

His greatest difficulty was with the virtue of order. He was a sloppy man, and he eventually decided that he was so busy and had such a good memory that he didn’t need to be too orderly. He likened himself to the hurried man who goes to have his ax polished but after a while loses patience and declares, “I think I like a speckled ax best.” In addition, as he recounted with amusement, he developed another convenient rationalization: “Something that pretended to be reason was every now and then suggesting to me that such extreme nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which if it were known would make me ridiculous; that a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated.”

Humility was also a problem. “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the
reality
of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the
appearance
of it,” he wrote, echoing what he had said about how he had acquired the appearance of industry by carting his own paper through the streets of Philadelphia. “There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride; disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself.” This battle against pride would challenge—and amuse—him for the rest of his life. “You will see it perhaps often in this history. For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I would probably be proud of my humility.”

Indeed, he would always indulge a bit of pride in discussing his moral perfection project. Fifty years later, as he flirted with the ladies of France, he would pull out the old ivory slates and show off his virtues, causing one French friend to exult at touching “this precious booklet.”
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This plan for pursuing virtue, combined with the religious outlook that he had simultaneously been formulating, laid the foundation for a lifelong creed. It was based on pragmatic humanism and a belief in a benevolent but distant deity who was best served by being benevolent to others. Franklin’s ideas never ripened into a profound moral or religious philosophy. He focused on understanding virtue rather than God’s grace, and he based his creed on rational utility rather than religious faith.

His outlook contained some vestiges of his Puritan upbringing, most notably an inclination toward frugality, lack of pretense, and a belief that God appreciates those who are industrious. But he detached these concepts from Puritan orthodoxy about the salvation of the elect and from other tenets that he did not consider useful in improving earthly conduct. His life shows, the Yale scholar A. Whitney Griswold has noted, “what Puritan habits detached from Puritan beliefs were capable of achieving.”

He was also far less inward-looking than Cotton Mather or other Puritans. Indeed, he poked fun at professions of faith that served little worldly purpose. As A. Owen Aldridge writes, “The Puritans were known for their constant introspection, fretting about sins, real or imaginary, and agonizing about the uncertainty of their salvation. Absolutely none of this soul-searching appears in Franklin. One can scrutinize his work from first page to last without finding a single note of spiritual anxiety.”
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Likewise, he had little use for the sentimental subjectivity of the Romantic era, with its emphasis on the emotional and inspirational, that began rising in Europe and then America during the later part of his life. As a result, he would be criticized by such Romantic exemplars as Keats, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Melville.
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Instead, he fit squarely into the tradition—indeed, was the first great American exemplar—of the Enlightenment and its Age of Reason. That movement, which rose in Europe in the late seventeenth century, was defined by an emphasis on reason and observable experience, a mistrust of religious orthodoxy and traditional authority, and an optimism about education and progress. To this mix, Franklin added elements of his own pragmatism. He was able (as novelist John Updike and historian Henry Steele Commager, among others, have noted) to appreciate the energies inherent in Puritanism and to liberate them from rigid dogma so they could flower in the freethinking atmosphere of the Enlightenment.
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In his writings about religion over the next five decades, Franklin rarely displayed much fervor. This is largely because he felt it was futile to wrestle with theological questions about which he had no empirical evidence and thus no rational basis for forming an opinion. Thunderbolts from heaven were, for him, something to be captured by a kite string and studied.

As a result, he was a prophet of tolerance. Focusing on doctrinal disputes was divisive, he felt, and trying to ascertain divine certainties was beyond our mortal ken. Nor did he think that such endeavors were socially useful. The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him. Describing his moral improvement project in his autobiography, he wrote, “There was in it no mark of any of the distinguishing tenets of any particular sect. I had purposely avoided them; for, being fully persuaded of the utility and excellency of my method, and that it might be serviceable to people in all religions, and intending some time or other to publish it, I would not have any thing in it that should prejudice any one, of any sect, against it.”

This simplicity of Franklin’s creed meant that it was sneered at by sophisticates and disqualified from inclusion in the canon of profound philosophy. Albert Smyth, who compiled volumes of Franklin’s papers in the nineteenth century, proclaimed, “His philosophy never got beyond the homely maxims of worldly prudence.” But Franklin freely admitted that his religious and moral views were not based on profound analysis or metaphysical thinking. As he declared to a friend later in life, “The great uncertainty I found in metaphysical reasonings disgusted me, and I quitted that kind of reading and study for others more satisfactory.”

What he found more satisfactory—more than metaphysics or poetry or exalted romantic sentiments—was looking at things in a pragmatic and practical way. Did they have beneficial consequences? For him, there was a connection between civic virtue and religious virtue, between serving his fellow man and honoring God. He was un-ashamed by the simplicity of this creed, as he explained in a sweet letter to his wife. “God is very good to us,” he wrote. “Let us…show our sense of His goodness to us by continuing to do good to our fellow creatures.”
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Poor Richard’s Almanack,
which Franklin began publishing at the end of 1732, combined the two goals of his doing-well-by-doing-good philosophy: the making of money and the promotion of virtue. It became, in the course of its twenty-five-year run, America’s first great humor classic. The fictional Poor Richard Saunders and his nagging wife, Bridget (like their predecessors Silence Dogood, Anthony Afterwit, and Alice Addertongue), helped to define what would become a dominant tradition in American folk humor: the naïvely wicked wit and homespun wisdom of down-home characters who seem to be charmingly innocent but are sharply pointed about the pretensions of the elite and the follies of everyday life. Poor Richard and other such characters “appear as disarming plain folk, the better to convey wicked insights,” notes historian Alan Taylor. “A long line of humorists—from Davy Crockett and Mark Twain to Garrison Keillor—still rework the prototypes created by Franklin.”
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Almanacs were a sweet source of annual revenue for a printer, easily outselling even the Bible (because they had to be bought anew each year). Six were being published in Philadelphia at the time, two of which were printed by Franklin: Thomas Godfrey’s and John Jerman’s. But after falling out with Godfrey over his failed matchmaking and losing Jerman to his rival Andrew Bradford, Franklin found himself in the fall of 1732 with no almanac to help make his press profitable.

So he hastily assembled his own. In format and style, it was like other almanacs, most notably that of Titan Leeds, who was publishing, as his father had before him, Philadelphia’s most popular version. The name Poor Richard, a slight oxymoron pun, echoed that of
Poor Robin’s Almanack,
which had been published by Franklin’s brother James. And Richard Saunders happened to be the real name of a noted almanac writer in England in the late seventeenth century.
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Franklin, however, added his own distinctive flair. He used his pseudonym to permit himself some ironic distance, and he ginned up a running feud with his rival Titan Leeds by predicting and later fabricating his death. As his ad in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
immodestly promised:

Years later, Franklin would recall that he regarded his almanac as a “vehicle for conveying instruction among the common folk” and therefore filled it with proverbs that “inculcated industry and frugality as the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.” At the time, however, he also had another motive, about which he was quite forthright. The beauty of inventing a fictional author was that he could poke fun at himself by admitting, only half in jest, through the pen of Poor Richard, that money was his main motivation. “I might in this place attempt to gain thy favor by declaring that I write almanacks with no other view than that of the public good; but in this I should not be sincere,” Poor Richard began his first preface. “The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife…has threatened more than once to burn all my books and Rattling-Traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family.”
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Poor Richard went on to predict “the inexorable death” of his rival Titan Leeds, giving the exact day and hour. It was a prank borrowed from Jonathan Swift. Leeds fell into the trap, and in his own almanac for 1734 (written after the date of his predicted death) called Franklin a “conceited scribbler” who had “manifested himself a fool and a liar.” Franklin, with his own printing press, had the luxury of reading Leeds before he published his own 1734 edition. In it, Poor Richard responded that all of these defamatory protestations indicate that the real Leeds must indeed be dead and his new almanac a hoax by someone else. “Mr. Leeds was too well bred to use any man so indecently and scurrilously, and moreover his esteem and affection for me was extraordinary.”

In his almanac for 1735, Franklin again ridiculed his “deceased” rival’s sharp responses—“Titan Leeds when living would not have used me so!”—and also caught Leeds in a language mishap. Leeds had declared it was “untrue” that he had himself predicted that he would “survive until” the date in question. Franklin retorted that if it were untrue that he survived until then, he must therefore be “really defunct and dead.” “ ’Tis plain to everyone that reads his last two almanacks,” Poor Richard jibed, “no man living would or could write such stuff.”
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