|
|
|
Last Updated: Sep 8, 2008 - 8:47:54 AM |
"I’m tired of this dirty old city,” sang
country-music great Merle Haggard, probably referring to his hometown
of Bakersfield, California, southern anchor of the San Joaquin Valley:
Entirely too much work and never enough play.
And I’m tired of these dirty old sidewalks.
Think I’ll walk off my steady job today.
Turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montana . . .
Merle’s singing an old American tune here. From the Founders to Thoreau
to modern Farm Aid concerts, Americans have been of two minds about the
city and the country. For some, the city means progress, prosperity,
and the development of mind and culture, and the country means the
opposite. For others, the country means virtue, tradition, and freedom,
and the city means the opposite.
Benjamin Franklin was reported to have said, at the signing of the
Declaration of Independence, that his fellow Founders must “all hang
together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Hang
together the Founders did. But they didn’t do so forever, and, after
independence and a workable constitution, they soon divided (the vast
complexities duly noted) on the issue of city versus country. On the
one hand were the Federalist proponents of banks, commerce,
manufactures, and cities; on the other, the Democratic-Republican
proponents of Jefferson’s agrarian ideals.
Franklin didn’t live to see this division play out, but it’s my guess
that he would have sided with the city, albeit with subtle
reservations. Franklin is often referred to as “the first American.”
That’s true enough. But you might go further, and say that Franklin was
also America’s first city slicker.
Sure, Franklin often presented himself as a country mouse or a
small-town boy bewildered in the big city. In his Autobiography,
Franklin recounts his youthful flight from conservative Boston to more
metropolitan Philadelphia. Grubby from his journey and almost broke, he
cut a ridiculous figure as he walked into town in 1723. So disreputable
was his appearance that he feared people would take him for a runaway
apprentice (which, by the way, he was). Franklin describes how Sir
William Keith, the colonial governor of Pennsylvania, later tricked
him, “a poor ignorant boy,” into believing that letters of credit were
forthcoming to him in London for the purchase of printing equipment.
They weren’t, and in 1724 Franklin found himself high and dry in one of
the biggest cities in the world.
Later in his career, in 1755, Franklin proved his competence in the
countryside, leading a dangerous mission west of Philadelphia to build
forts to guard against Indian predations during the French and Indian
War. Still later, while serving as his country’s ambassador in Paris
during the American Revolution, he affected the dress and manner of a
simple Quaker: a dull coat and a fur cap atop stringy, unpowdered hair.
The French ate it up. Franklin was the ultimate American: an
unaffected, un-citified, and natural man. He even had some bad things
to say about cities, recognizing the appeal of Africans’ and American
Indians’ simpler lives.
But there’s no doubt that for Franklin, the good life meant life in the
city. Franklin made his way by means of book learning, wit, social
savvy, and ability to hobnob with the rich, famous, and powerful—all
assets valued in urban society. As he describes himself in the
Autobiography, the first of these took some hard work: he became at a
very young age as learned as it was possible to be in his time. By the
age of 16, and with the aid of only two years of formal education, he
had read more widely in the literature of Western culture, including
the thinkers of the Enlightenment, than most professors on a university
campus today. He also taught himself to write, first by imitating
favorite authors and the sophisticated style of the British Spectator,
and then by developing his own brilliant and often comic literary voice.
So when Franklin, at 17, ran out on his printing indentures (a serious
felony) and fled from Boston to Philadelphia, he was hardly the “poor
ignorant boy” he purported to be. In fact, Franklin’s vibrant pen was
what brought him to Keith’s attention—the governor had seen a letter
the young man had written to his brother-in-law and was impressed by
its elegant expression. Not long after, Franklin’s bookishness also
drew the attention of New York’s governor, William Burnet, who invited
him to spend a day at his house conversing about authors. As Franklin
writes with delicious irony: “This was the second Governor who had done
me the Honor to take Notice of me, which to a poor Boy like me was very
pleasing.”
Young Franklin may have been left in the lurch in London, but that
didn’t keep him from finding employment—in Samuel Palmer’s printing
house—or from delighting in (and spending most of his money on) the
city’s urbanities, especially books and “plays and other places of
amusement.” Nor did it stop him from writing and printing a pamphlet
entitled A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,
which argued that virtue, vice, and free will are all illusions and
that, as a consequence, no particular providence exists—no God, that
is, who cares for individual human beings or punishes and rewards them
for their behavior. (Franklin would later burn most of the copies of
this scandalous tract, claiming it had “an ill tendency.”) The pamphlet
shocked Palmer, who nevertheless noted, like Keith, that Franklin was
“a young man of some ingenuity.” It eventually came to the attention of
surgeon and philosopher William Lyons, who introduced its author to a
club presided over by Bernard Mandeville of Fable of the Bees fame.
Through Lyons, Franklin also met the mathematician and writer Henry
Pemberton, who had edited the third edition of Isaac Newton’s
Principia. Pemberton promised to introduce Franklin to Newton, but that
connection, of which Franklin “was extremely desirous,” never worked
out.
Still, young Franklin understood the game of making connections, so
crucial to thriving in the city. When he had sailed from Philadelphia
to London, for instance, he had taken with him a small purse made of
asbestos. In a letter dated June 2, 1725, he wrote to the great
naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, offering it for sale. If Sloane had any
inclination to buy it, Franklin said, he could let him know “by a line
directed to me at the Golden Fan.” Franklin’s move paid off: he got to
meet the famous Sloane at his house in Bloomsbury, got to see Sloane’s
natural-history collection, and was paid handsomely for the purse,
which is now in the British Museum. (In the Autobiography, Franklin
immodestly omits his active role in making this connection, saying that
Sloane had somehow heard about the purse and spontaneously approached
him to buy it.)
Franklin energetically kept up the networking when he got back to
Philadelphia in 1726. Sometimes the connection was with someone older
and wealthy and powerful, such as the famous lawyer Andrew Hamilton,
speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Hamilton took a shine to Franklin
and steered important public printing jobs his way. Sometimes the
connections were with bright people his own age, such as Robert Grace,
“a young Gentleman of some Fortune, generous & witty, a lover of
Punning and his Friends,” and William Coleman, “who had the coolest
clearest Head, the best Heart, and the exactest Morals, of almost any
Man I ever met with.” Without a loan from Grace and Coleman, Franklin
would have missed the chance to buy the printing firm with which he
eventually made his fortune. On other occasions, the connection came
(again) through something Franklin wrote, as when his pamphlet favoring
paper money landed him the job of printing the dough after the assembly
signed on to the idea, or through a position, as when his appointment
as the assembly’s clerk led to yet more jobs printing public documents.
Franklin also exhibited psychological skills far beyond any mere
country bumpkin’s. Seeking a second term as clerk, for instance, he was
opposed by a rich and talented new assembly member who proposed a
different candidate for the post. Franklin won the job, but he didn’t
like the threat that the member would pose to his pocketbook in the
future. Rather than gaining the man’s favor by paying servile respect,
however, Franklin wrote a note asking to borrow “a certain very scarce
and curious book” that he knew the rich man owned. The man sent the
book immediately. Franklin read it and returned it a week later with
another note, this one “expressing strongly” his “sense of the favor.”
The assemblyman “ever afterwards manifested a readiness” to serve
Franklin and remained a lifelong friend. It was another instance,
Franklin believed, of the truth that “he that hath once done you a
Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you
yourself have obliged.” Now that’s city slick.
By the time Franklin was rich enough to retire from printing—in 1748,
at the age of 42—his political, philosophical, and scientific careers
were well under way. A decade later, he was Doctor Franklin, the second
most famous scientist in the world after Newton. He returned to London
in 1757 as an agent for the assembly and would spend all but eight of
his remaining 33 years either there or in Paris. He became a regular
figure in London’s club scene and ran with an intellectual set that
included such luminaries as Joseph Priestly, James Boswell, and David
Hume. His residence on Craven Street soon emerged as a center of
diplomacy, a gathering place for intellectuals, and a cutting-edge
scientific laboratory. (The house, adjacent to Charing Cross, has been
restored, and one can visit it today.) Franklin’s correspondence made
it clear that he loved London and relished the friends and
acquaintances that he could—and did—make there.
The same proved true for Paris, where Franklin worked tirelessly to
persuade the French monarchy to bankrupt itself in support of a
republican revolution in America. Franklin took the city by storm: he
became rock-star famous and made groupies of the cream of Parisian
society. In 1779, he wrote to his daughter that his face was now as
well-known in Paris as the man in the moon’s, so common were the
medallions, pictures, and prints of his “phiz.” He was now something of
a god—“I-dol-ized,” he observed, not mentioning that some who doubted
his divinity painted that phiz on the inside of chamber pots. Among the
doubters was John Adams, who couldn’t stand Old Ben, in part because he
was too much at home in Paris. Franklin had no religion, Adams said
later to the French statesman François Barbé-Marbois, and “all the
atheists, deists, and libertines, as well as the philosophers and
ladies, are in his train—another Voltaire.”
As in London, Franklin relished the social and intellectual life of the
city, and enjoyed even more his saucy relationships with its young
ladies, such as Madame Brillon, and its older ones, such as Madame
Helvétius, widow of the famed philosophe, to whom he unsuccessfully
proposed. The ladies loved him, too. To see why, spend some time with
Anne-Rosalie Bocquet Filleul’s famous portrait of Franklin (which you
can do if you go to the traveling Franklin tercentenary exhibition—or
see above). It captures the attractiveness that he must have exuded to
the beautiful and intelligent women around him. He’s sexy, he’s got
gorgeous blue eyes, there’s just the hint of an ironic smile, and he’s
in dishabille.
Indeed, Franklin preferred his life in the big cities abroad to life
back home in Philadelphia with his plodding wife, Deborah, who died in
1774 while Franklin was in London. In one revealing bagatelle sent to
Madame Helvétius, Franklin suggested marriage to the elegant and witty
widow by way of a joke at his late wife’s expense—describing her as up
in heaven and teamed up romantically with none other than the dead
philosophe. But nobody’s perfect, and city gents as slick and gifted as
Franklin sometimes do prefer downtown to down home.
Before concluding that Franklin was just a super-gifted social
butterfly, though, remember that the reform work he did for the cities
he lived in was as important as any in the century. Franklin didn’t
just like the big city; he also cared for it. Much of his work was
cultural: in Philadelphia, he started an intellectual society, the
Junto; set up the first lending library; and—famously until this
day—was the driving force for the foundation of the University of
Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society. And in Paris,
Franklin printed and circulated American state constitutions for the
sake of political enlightenment. He also lent his shoulder to the wheel
of medical progress, allowing a royal commission to use his Passy
residence for the blind experiments that disproved the theory of animal
magnetism and so proved its inventor and proponent, Franz Mesmer, to
whom huge sums were paid by rich patients, a quack. In a letter to the
physician La Sablière de la Condamine, Franklin ascribed Mesmer’s
success to “there being so many disorders which cure themselves and
such a disposition in mankind to deceive themselves and one another on
these occasions.” Which wasn’t to say that such quackery might not have
its uses, Franklin said, for in every rich city there are a lot of
hypochondriacs. If they stopped gulping medicines for the sake of being
cured by the doctor’s finger or an iron rod, “they may possibly find
good effects though they mistake the cause.”
But Franklin also labored to reduce the two greatest dangers of city
life at the time: fire and disease. In 1736, he wrote and published an
article on the common causes of fires, and he organized Philadelphia’s
first volunteer fire department. (This was long before his monumental
invention of the lightning rod—the better to prevent fires in the first
place.) And in 1751, he saw a plan through the Pennsylvania Assembly—by
way of some legislative shenanigans and the invention of the matching
grant—to build the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. In an essay
supporting the project, Franklin extolled economies of scale, pointing
out the concentration of talent and the medical innovation that attend
the big-city hospital. (I’d bet that the best place to get sick is
still in or near a big city, not in rural or small-town America.)
Another urban inconvenience: Philadelphia was dark at night. The
problem, Franklin figured out, was that the city’s ill-designed
streetlamps, supplied from England, became useless in a single evening
from accumulated soot and broke too easily when cleaned—as had to be
done daily. Franklin designed a new lamp with better ventilation and
removable panes of glass that made for easy cleaning and easy
replacement. Philadelphia nights grew brighter. And the city could be
dangerous at night as well, so Franklin proposed a reform, eventually
effected, of its inefficient and corrupt constabulary.
And then there were the dirty old sidewalks that sent Merle Haggard
packing off to the middle of Montana. Not long before he left
Philadelphia for London in 1757, Franklin, “by talking and writing on
the subject,” was able to improve the paving in Jersey Market—the other
streets in the city still being unpaved, quagmires in the wet and dusty
in the dry—only to find that both shoes and wheels, muddied as they
were from getting to the market, would soon cover the new paving with
“mire” dropped by horses. So he spurred a collective effort to pay for
cleaning the market. The episode led to a bill, eventually successful,
that Franklin introduced in the assembly for paving all the city’s
streets.
Sophisticated London’s streets weren’t all that tidy, either. In the
Autobiography, Franklin relates a proposal for cleaning them that he
sent to his friend John Fothergill. The proposal was ingenious: clean
the streets each morning before the shops open (the objection to daily
cleaning was that the dust would fly into houses and shops), use
special sleds that drain water from the sludge, and, whenever possible,
use a central gutter for collecting the filth rather than gutters on
the side of the street. With a single gutter, Franklin argued, the
runoff from the rain creates a current twice as strong as a side
gutter’s and sufficient to wash away the accumulated muck.
Franklin observes that some people may think these matters trifling.
While it’s true, he says, that dust blown into a single shop or an eye
isn’t a very big deal, “yet the great Number of instances in a populous
City, and its frequent Repetitions give it Weight & Consequence.”
It’s not right, then, “to censure very severely those who bestow some
of Attention to Affairs of this seemingly low Nature.” It’s clear that
Franklin would have agreed with Rudy Giuliani about New York’s
once-broken windows.
Franklin and Giuliani have another thing in common. In 1764, during
Franklin’s two-year return from London, Philadelphia was menaced by a
violent lower-class mob, furious at what they viewed as neglect of
their defense against Indian predations. Defying proclamations by John
Penn—the governor and a political enemy of Franklin’s—the mob went on a
murderous rampage against peaceful and defenseless Indians and then
threatened to march on Philadelphia to kill the Indians under
protection in the city.
Response to the affair divided along class lines: the Quaker and
Anglican parties (including Franklin) backed the Indians, while the
Presbyterians, Lutherans, and urban and border-dwelling poor took the
mob’s side. Facing an imminent disaster, the panicked governor lost his
head and ran for help to Franklin, who took over the whole
affair—rallying public opinion in the city, forging an armed force to
confront the mob, and joining the delegation that persuaded the rabble
not to move on the city. Had Franklin been in New York City on
September 11, 2001, it’s easy to imagine him calming, guiding, and
comforting his fellow citizens.
America the Beautiful” has lots to say about our spacious skies, waves
of grain, and purple mountains, but just one ridiculous thing about our
cities: that their alabaster gleam is undimmed by human tears. The
reference here is to the White City of the 1892–93 Chicago World’s
Fair. No tears? The Windy City’s mayor, Carter Harrison, was
assassinated a few days before the fair closed, America’s first lunatic
serial killer was on the loose in Chicago, and the White City itself
burned in 1894, most likely at an arsonist’s hands. The song’s urban
optimism, then, seems just as blind as Merle Haggard’s urban pessimism.
Or so Ben Franklin—who loved the metropolis, warts and all—would surely
believe.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
Top of Page
|
|
|
|