The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood

When he and James Ralph had boarded their ship to sail to England in 1724, they “were forc’d to take up with a Berth in the Steerage,” since “none on board knowing us, [we] were considered as ordinary Persons.” But when Colonel John French, justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, later came on board, recognized the eighteen-year-old Franklin, and paid him “great Respect,” he was “more taken Notice of,” and he and Ralph were immediately invited “by the other Gentlemen to come into the Cabin.” 82
    Yet he knew that such socializing was often the consequence of gentry condescension. He knew too that no matter how successful and wealthy he had become, he still remained a laborer in the eyes of most of the gentry, and thus one of the common people or “meaner Sort” who had to work for a living as a printer. The gentry knew how to put a mere mechanic, no matter how wealthy or talented, in his place.
    In 1740 Franklin came up with the idea of starting a magazine in Philadelphia and offered the job of editing it to John Webbe, a lawyer he knew. But Webbe took the idea to Franklin’s competitor Andrew Bradford, who quickly brought out The American Magazine. (The next year in his Almanack, Poor Richard proclaimed: “If you would keep your Secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.”) A week later Franklin announced that he would publish his own periodical, The General Magazine. At the same time he told the world that he had originated the idea of a magazine and that Webbe had betrayed him. Webbe, the lawyer, using the usual gentry put-down of a mechanic, replied that Franklin had never been expected to participate in the magazine “in any other capacity than that of a meer Printer.” 83
    This was just the sort of sneer that would have made Franklin both angry and uncomfortable. He naturally preferred to call himself a member of the new emerging middling sort. But when confronted with the dichotomous social division favored by the gentry—“the BETTER SORT of People” set against “the meaner Sort”—he was willing to be lumped with those he considered to constitute the populace, which, he pointed out, “your Demosthenes’ and Ciceroes, your Sidneys and Trenchards never approached ... but with Reverence.” Writing in his newspaper in 1740 as Obadiah Plainman, Franklin let loose some of his resentment at those who used the expression “the BETTER SORT of People.” Such gentlemen, he said with a good deal of scorn, looked upon “the Rest of their Fellow Subjects in the same Government with Contempt, and consequently regard them as Mob and Rabble,” who constituted nothing more than “a stupid Herd, in whom the Light of Reason is extinguished.” In contrast to this arrogant “better Sort,” he said, he was but “a poor ordinary Mechanick of this City, obliged to work hard for the Maintenance of myself, my Wife, and several small Children.” 84 Yet, of course, he knew that in reality he was anything but “a poor ordinary Mechanick.” His genteel newspaper opponent Richard Peters, a former clergyman and secretary of the colony’s land office, knew that too. When pressed to defend his use of the “better Sort,” Peters declared that he could think of no better example of such persons than those who were members of the Library Company—to which Franklin, as Obadiah Plainman, had already admitted in the newspaper exchanges to belonging. If “poor ordinary Mechanicks” could be classed as members of “the better Sort,” the gentry’s dichotomous social categories were not working well at all. More so perhaps than anyone in colonial America, Franklin was living in two social worlds simultaneously. 85
    Franklin’s proposals for education vividly reveal the ambivalence he felt as someone caught between the better and meaner sorts. As early as 1743 he had drawn up plans for an academy in Philadelphia, but it was not until 1749 that he laid them out in a pamphlet, Proposals Relating to the