The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood Page A

Education of Youth in Pensilvania. He originally wanted a school dedicated to teaching the English language and not Latin. The school, in other words, was mainly designed for young men with origins similar to his own— tradesmen and mechanics who wished to better themselves. But, as he recalled with some resentment in an unpublished tract written at the end of his life, this plan was foiled by a number of “Persons of Wealth and Learning, whose Subscriptions and Countenance we should need,” and who believed that the school “ought to include the learned Languages.” 86 With his original plan for an English academy transformed into a traditional Latin school favoring the sons of the gentry, Franklin had to create a separate English school that he hoped would fulfill his original intentions. “Youth would come out of this School,” he wrote in a piece published in 173-1, “fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except wherein Languages are required; and tho’ unacquainted with any antient or foreign Tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.” 87 Unfortunately, however, the gentry trustees who were in charge of both schools so discriminated against the English school in favor of the Latin school—paying the Latin head twice as much as the English head, for example, even though he taught fewer students—that the English school eventually dwindled into insignificance. At the end of his life, however, Franklin had some consolation to discover that things had changed. The executor of his estate told him that “public opinion" had now “undergone a revolution,” and was now “undoubtedly in favor of an English Education, in spite of the prejudices of the learned on this subject.” 88
    Franklin’s attempt to form a philosophical society revealed a similar tension between the different worlds of tradesmen and gentry. In 1743 he published A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America, in which he suggested the formation of a society composed of “Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies,” a kind of intercolonial version of his old Junto. This organization, to be called “The American Philosophical Society" would promote “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniences or Pleasures of life.” He got the society on its feet, but at the outset it was not as active as Franklin had hoped. “The Members of our Society are very idle Gentlemen,” he complained to the New York official and scientist Cadwallader Colden in 1745. “They will take no Pains.” 89 Apparently the ambitious middling sorts that had made up his Junto had had more energy and more intellectual curiosity than the gentry.
    Despite all his gentlemanly activities—his philanthropic ventures and his practical projects for self-education in the art of virtue— Franklin still saw himself as a printer and businessman and not a gentleman in these early Philadelphia years. But if he was not a gentleman, he was obviously not a commoner either. Instead, he had become the principal spokesman for the growing numbers of artisans, shopkeepers, and other middling sorts in Philadelphia who were his main supporters in all of his civic endeavors. He identified completely with these middling people: “Our Families and little Fortunes,” he said, were “as dear to us as any Great Man’s can be to him.” And he was not at all embarrassed to call himself publicly “an honest Tradesman.” 90
    “THE MOLATTO GENTLEMAN”
    Although he was constantly mingling with gentlemen, he did not yet think of turning himself into one; that is, he had not yet imagined himself having all the qualities that would allow him to retire from his business and shed his leather apron entirely. However wealthy an artisan he might become, and Franklin’s income was