Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (9 page)

Franklin used the Junto as a launching pad for a variety of his public-service ideas. Early on, the group discussed whether Pennsylvania should increase its supply of paper currency, a proposal Franklin heartily favored because he thought it would benefit the economy and, of course, his own printing business. (Franklin and, by extension, the Junto were particularly fond of things that could help the public as well as themselves.) When the Junto moved into its own rented rooms, it created a library of books pooled from its members, which later formed the foundation for America’s first subscription library. Out of the Junto also came Franklin’s proposals for establishing a tax to pay for neighborhood constables, for creating a volunteer fire force, and for establishing the academy that later became the University of Pennsylvania.

Many of the rules and proposed queries for the Junto were similar to, though a bit less judgmental than, those that Cotton Mather had devised for his neighborhood benevolent societies a generation earlier in Boston. One of Mather’s, for example, was: “Is there any particular person whose disorderly behavior may be so scandalous and so notorious that we may do well to send unto the said person our charitable admonitions?” Daniel Defoe’s essay “Friendly Societies” and John Locke’s “Rules of a Society which Met Once a Week for the Improvement of Useful Knowledge,” both of which Franklin had read, also served as models.
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But, for the most part, with its earnest tenor and emphasis on self-improvement, the Junto was a product of Franklin’s own persona and part of his imprint on the American personality. It flourished with him at the helm for thirty years. Although it operated in relative secrecy, so many people sought to join that Franklin empowered each member to form his own spinoff club. Four or five affiliates flourished, and the Junto served as an extension and amplification of Franklin’s gregarious civic nature. Like Franklin himself, it was practical, industrious, inquiring, convivial, and middle-brow philosophical. It celebrated civic virtue, mutual benefits, the improvement of self and society, and the proposition that hardworking citizens could do well by doing good. It was, in short, Franklin writ public.

Frugal and industrious, with a network of Junto members to steer business his way, Franklin was doing modestly well as one of three printers in a town that would naturally have supported only two. But he had learned from his apprentice days in Boston that true success would come if he had not only a printing operation but also his own content and distribution network. His competitor Andrew Bradford published the town’s only newspaper, which was paltry but profitable, and that helped Bradford’s printing business by giving him clout with the merchants and politicians. He also was the postmaster, which gave him some control over what papers got distributed plus first access to news from afar.

Franklin decided to take Bradford on, and over the next decade he would succeed by building a media conglomerate that included production capacity (printing operations, franchised printers in other cities), products (a newspaper, magazine, almanac), content (his own writings, his alter ego Poor Richard’s, and those of his Junto), and distribution (eventually the whole of the colonial postal system).

First came the newspaper. Franklin decided to launch a competitor to Bradford’s
American Weekly Mercury,
but he made the mistake of confiding his plan to George Webb, a fellow member of the Junto who was an apprentice at Keimer’s print shop. Webb, to Franklin’s dismay, told Keimer, who immediately launched a slapdash newspaper of his own, to which he gave the unwieldly name
The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Sciences, and Pennsylvania Gazette.
Franklin realized that it would be difficult to launch a third paper right away, and he did not have the funds. So he came up with a plan to first crush Keimer’s paper by using the most powerful weapon at his disposal: the fact that he was the best writer in Philadelphia, and probably, at 23, the most amusing writer in all of America. (Carl Van Doren, a Franklin biographer and great literary critic of the 1930s, flatly declared of Franklin that in 1728, “he was the best writer in America.” The closest rival for that title at the time would probably be the preacher Jonathan Edwards, who was certainly more intense and literary, though far less felicitous and amusing.)

In a competitive bank shot, Franklin decided to write a series of anonymous letters and essays, along the lines of the Silence Dogood pieces of his youth, for Bradford’s
Mercury
to draw attention away from Keimer’s new paper. The goal was to enliven, at least until Keimer was beaten, Bradford’s dull paper, which in its ten years had never published any such features.

The first two pieces were attacks on poor Keimer, who was serializing entries from an encyclopedia. His initial installment included, innocently enough, an entry on abortion. Franklin pounced. Using the pen names “Martha Careful” and “Celia Shortface,” he wrote letters to Bradford’s paper feigning shock and indignation at Keimer’s offense. As Miss Careful threatened, “If he proceeds farther to expose the secrets of our sex in that audacious manner [women would] run the hazard of taking him by the beard in the next place we meet him.” Thus Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America, not because he had any strong feelings on the issue, but because he knew it would help sell newspapers.

The next week Franklin launched a series of classic essays signed “Busy-Body,” which Bradford published on his front page with a large byline. Franklin wrote at least four on his own and two others in part before turning the series over to fellow Junto member Joseph Breintnall. “By this means the attention of the public was fixed on that paper, and Keimer’s proposals, which we burlesqued and ridiculed, were disregarded.”
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The Busy-Body began by cleverly establishing the inadequacies of Bradford’s paper (“frequently very dull”) and declaring his intention to make it (at least temporarily) better. He would do so by being a scold and tattle, in the tradition of the character Isaac Bickerstaff that the English essayist Richard Steele had created, thus adding gossip columnist to the list of Franklin’s American firsts. He readily admitted that much of this was “nobody’s business,” but “out of zeal for the public good,” he volunteered “to take nobody’s business wholly into my own hands.” Some might find themselves offended, he warned. Yet, he pointed out what was, and is, the basic appeal of gossip: “As most people delight in censure when they themselves are not the objects of it, if any are offended at my publicly exposing their private vices, I promise they shall have the satisfaction, in a very little time, of seeing their good friends and neighbors in the same circumstances.”

Keimer responded with a fusty admonition that the Busy-Body series might initially raise for readers of Bradford’s paper the “expectation that they would now have some entertainment for their money,” but they would soon feel “a secret grief to see the reputation of their neighbors blasted.” When the Busy-Body merrily continued to publish his barbs, the excitable Keimer became more shrill. He responded with limp doggerel: “You hinted at me in your paper. Which now has made me draw my rapier. With scornful eye, I see your hate. And pity your unhappy fate.” He paired this with a convoluted tale called “Hue and Cry after the Busy-Body,” portraying Franklin and Breintnall as a two-headed monster, with Franklin described as “every Ape’s epitome…as threadbare as his great coat, and skull as thick as his shoe soles.”
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Keimer thus became one of Franklin’s first outspoken foes. The betrayal, the press war, the dueling essays would all be repeated a decade later when Franklin and Bradford each decided to start magazines.

Sadly for those who enjoy titillation, the Busy-Body essays in fact failed to deliver much gossip. Instead, they tended to be clever tales with thinly disguised real-life counterparts (in one instance, a reader took the effort to publish a key to whom each character referred). Franklin employed what is now a standard disingenuous disclaimer: “If any bad characters happen to be drawn in the course of these papers, they mean no particular person.”

The final Busy-Body that was mainly written by Franklin made fun of treasure seekers who used divining rods and dug up the woods looking for buried pirate loot. “Men otherwise of very good sense have been drawn into this practice through an overweening desire of sudden wealth,” he wrote, “while the rational and almost certain methods of acquiring riches by industry and frugality are neglected.” The fable, an attack on the get-rich-quick schemes of the time, went on to preach Franklin’s favorite theme: slow and steady diligence is the true way to wealth. He ended by quoting what his imaginary friend Agricola said on giving his son a parcel of land: “I assure thee I have found a considerable quantity of gold by digging there; thee mayst do the same. But thee must carefully observe this, Never to dig more than plow deep.”

The essay had a second half that advocated more paper currency for Pennsylvania. Franklin wrote most of it, with a small section written by Breintnall. Franklin implied that those who opposed more paper currency were trying to protect their own financial interests, though he of course had his own financial interest in the approval of more printing work. He also launched the first of what would be many attacks on the province’s Proprietors, the Penn family, and their appointed governor, by implying that they were trying to make the bulk of Pennsylvania’s residents “their tenants and vassals.” This ending was deleted in most editions of Bradford’s newspaper, perhaps because Bradford was allied with the Penn family and their party.
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Another reason for pulling back the snide section on paper currency was that Franklin had produced a far more thoughtful essay on the subject, which he discussed in the Junto and published as a pamphlet the following week. “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency” was Franklin’s first serious analysis of public policy, and it holds up a lot better than his metaphysical musings on religion. Money was a concept he had a solid feel for, unlike theological abstractions.

Franklin argued that the lack of enough currency caused interest rates to rise, kept wages low, and increased dependence on imports. Creditors and big landowners opposed an increase in currency for selfish reasons, he charged, but “those who are lovers of trade and delight to see manufactures encouraged will be for having a large addition to our currency.” Franklin’s key insight was that hard currency, such as silver and gold, was not the true measure of a nation’s wealth: “The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess.”

The essay was very popular, except among the wealthy, and it helped to persuade the legislature to adopt the proposed increase in paper currency. Although Bradford got the first commission to print some of the money, Franklin was given the next round of work. In the spirit of what Poor Richard would call “doing well by doing good,” Franklin was not averse to mingling his private interests with his public ones. His friends in the legislature, “who considered I had been of some service, thought it fit to reward me by employing me in printing the money—a very profitable job and a great help to me. This was another advantage gained by my being able to write.”
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Franklin’s scheme to put Keimer out of business, which was aided by the quirky printer’s own incompetence and inability to ignore barbs, soon succeeded. He fell into debt, was briefly imprisoned, fled to Barbados, and as he was leaving sold his newspaper to Franklin. Jettisoning the serialized encyclopedia and part of the paper’s unwieldy name, Franklin became the proud publisher of
The Pennsylvania Gazette
in October 1729. In his first letter to his readers, he announced that “there are many who have long desired to see a good newspaper in Pennsylvania,” thus taking a poke at both Keimer and Bradford.
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There are many types of newspaper editors. Some are crusading ideologues who are blessed with strong opinions, partisan passions, or a desire to challenge authority. Benjamin’s brother James was in this category. Some are the opposite: they like power and their proximity to it, and are comfortable with the established order and feel vested in it. Franklin’s Philadelphia competitor Andrew Bradford was such.

And then there are those who are charmed and amused by the world and delight in charming and amusing others. They tend to be skeptical of both orthodoxies and heresies, and they are earnest in their desire to seek truth and promote public betterment (as well as sell papers). There fits Franklin. He was graced—and afflicted—with the trait so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift and Addison once too often, of wanting to participate in the world while also remaining a detached observer. As a journalist he could step out of a scene, even one that passionately engaged him, and comment on it, or on himself, with a droll irony. The depths of his beliefs were often concealed by his knack for engaging in a knowing wink.

Like most other newspapers of the time, Franklin’s
Pennsylvania Gazette
was filled not only with short news items and reports on public events, but also with amusing essays and letters from readers. What made his paper a delight was its wealth of this type of correspondence, much of it written under pseudonyms by Franklin himself. This gimmick of writing as if from a reader gave Franklin more leeway to poke fun at rivals, revel in gossip, circumvent his personal pledge to speak ill of no one, and test-drive his evolving philosophies.