The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

Gordon Wood's The Americanization Of Benjamin Franklin

More than 200 years after he lived, Benjamin Franklin remains an enigmatic figure. He has been revered as a patriot and one of the country's beloved founding fathers. He has also been seen as a self-serving elitist. He is seen as a man of contradictions, an American and simultaneously a man of the world. Who then, is the real Ben Franklin?

In his book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, historian Gordon Woods attempts to answer this question in way that sets him apart from other biographies. Other books regarding the elusive founding father have studied Franklin's legacy and have evaluated his work via the standards of the succeeding generations. Wood, on the other hand, rightly evaluates Franklin based on a historical perspective. In The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, the founding father is evaluated as a product of his own time.

Through Woods' approach, the reader is transported to Franklin's time. We are forced to evaluate Franklin not from the perspective of hindsight, but within the context of the 18th century. We are forced to consider the founding father before Franklin came to be appropriated by the different artisans and craftsmen of the 19th century, after the publication of Franklin's Autobiography. In essence, Woods' approach goes beyond the familiar rags to riches emphasis that many other biographies take when telling the story of Ben Franklin.

For this approach alone, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin is a worthwhile read.

This is a book that takes a truly different approach to telling Franklin's life story. In the process, the reader is also immersed into 18th century history, as seen through the eyes of Franklin. The result is a book that not only looks at one man's life, but at the historical evolution of our concept of "American."

The reader who is truly new to 18th century American history will appreciate Wood's graceful retelling of Franklin's early years. Like other Franklin biographies, Woods makes the dichotomy between Franklin's earlier life as an independent printer and his later transformation as a gentleman and public servant. Woods also shows the reader how the man seen as the consummate patriot spent the most time living outside the United States, in comparison to other founding fathers. The man dined with kings, and was eve an ardent monarchist who seriously considered living in England and later, France. All these anecdotes are used to bolster Woods' argument that Franklin was "the least American and the most European of the nation's early leaders" (9).

Woods is therefore able to build an argument for his case that the founding father was more European than his fellow-patriots. The author presents Franklin as a man a bit out of step with his own time. In fact, Woods points out, Franklin was accused of being oblivious to the concerns of American radicals, given the former printer's propensity to defend George III.

Thus, while many historians emphasize the rags to riches story as the definitive factor in Franklin's life, Woods makes a strong argument early on that Franklin's defining factor is his journey to the radical cause. By the 1770s, the man who defended monarchy was exposed to the concept of republicanism, an ideal that he witnessed in France. Franklin therefore took great steps to advance the cause of republicanism during the second Continental Congress, and was now an ardent supporter of American independence.

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, however, does not shy away from chronicling the founding father's less admirable characteristics. Franklin's constantly being out of sync with his colleagues is seen once again in Franklin's inability to understand that the next logical progress of his republicanism was liberal democracy. Thus, as the oldest member of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was unable to anticipate and comprehend the factionalism that was beginning to dominate the American political climate. On the contrary, Franklin even made the wrong political call by viewing liberalism as dangerous and unruly, a political system that would never work in the newly-formed republic.

Other biographers minimized the said failing by emphasizing how Franklin made decisions based on principles. Woods, however, presents evidence that Franklin could also be motivated by emotional motives, such as revenge. For example, according to Woods, Franklin's opposition to the two-house legislature in Massachusetts was motivated in part to his personal distaste for John Adams, who was a key supporter of the measure. Also, while Franklin later made a genuine commitment to abolishing slavery, his early support for an antislavery memorial in the federal Congress was also calculated to embarrass southern slaveholders Richard Henry Lee and Ralph Izard, both of whom Franklin considered his personal enemies.

These anecdotes aid in Woods' objective to present Franklin not as a founding father visionary, but as a product of his time. The stories also serve to remind the reader that Franklin -- painted a patriot, a founding father and the consummate America (among other labels) -- was also first and foremost, a human being.

In a book of many strengths, there are still some minor points of contention. Woods' characterization of Franklin's wife Deborah is jarring, especially when considered in relation to his objective of locating the subject within the proper historican framework. Woods characterizes Debora Read quite harshly, implying several times that Franklin married "down." He finds the Read family "anything but rich and distinguished," and denigrates Deborah as "loud and lowly and scarcely literate" (27-33).

Woods even adds that Read stayed home instead of accompanying her husband to Europe, to avoid embarrassing him in front of refined society.