Franklin, Benjamin

1706–1790

Statesman, Inventor, and Founding Father

In a career spanning the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin succeeded at nearly everything he did, leaving an indelible mark on American history, politics, and intellectual life. In his Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1789, one of the most widely studied texts of the American eighteenth century, Franklin portrayed himself as a consummate stylist of the eighteenth-century masculine self. Born the son of a soapmaker and regarded as a founding father of the nation upon his death, he helped created the idea of the self-made American man through his activities as a printer, entrepreneur, inventor, moralist, revolutionary, and writer.

Franklin began his career as an apprentice to his brother, James, the printer of the New England Courant. During this apprenticeship, Franklin took up the common eighteenth-century practice of writing under pseudonyms—including, most famously, Mrs. Silence Dogood. Anonymity allowed Franklin to pass judgment on moral and social matters (including those traditionally considered to be a woman's domain) and gave him the freedom to express his opinions in a culture prone to censure opinionists. It also bolstered the authority of his opinions by preventing his enemies from discrediting him. At a time when self-interest was thought to conflict with public-mindedness, Franklin furthered his personal agenda by representing himself, as he puts it in the Autobiography, as a “publick-spirited Gentleman” motivated by a desire to improve civic life. Both genuine and simulated, Franklin's civic spirit was a form of masculine virtue grounded in contemporary republican social and political theory, which defined true virtue as the subordination of self-interest to the needs of the public sphere.

Franklin associated masculinity with business activity (motivated by virtue rather than by profit), public renown, and the improvement of society. He parlayed his civic spirit into business opportunities by proposing the creation of a circulating library and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as by securing the publication rights to the laws and business of the Pennsylvania Legislature. Through such internationally celebrated inventions as the Franklin stove and his scientific studies of electricity, Franklin contributed to a mythology of American male inventiveness.

For Franklin, masculinity was achieved and expressed through self-control. The Autobiography recounts Franklin's plan to discipline himself by adhering to thirteen virtues (temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility) that he believed would lead to ideal manhood and moral perfection. Such moral self-regulation reflected an Enlightenment understanding of manliness and a well-ordered life in which the male controlled his baser instincts for the betterment of himself and, by extension, society. While some historians have suggested that the private Franklin valued sexual prowess and a luxurious lifestyle, his public persona emphasized self-control as the basis of manliness.

Franklin has long been a celebrated figure in America's Revolutionary history and mythology. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, he has become in historical memory one of the most prominent of the founding fathers, based in part on his importance to the nation's efforts to render its revolution legitimate by investing its Revolutionary leaders with manly heroism and patriarchal authority. Given Franklin's lifelong struggle against what he perceived as tyrannical patriarchy—a struggle central to American Revolutionary ideology—it is somewhat ironic that he has been elevated to father figure status by a nation in search of authoritative masculine icons.

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