The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
by Gordon S. Wood

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
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Book Summary Information

Author: Gordon S. Wood
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-05-31
ISBN: 0143035282
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Book Reviews of The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

Book Review: Naïve confidence in the power of reason
Summary: 5 Stars

The foundingest of fathers was the only one among them who had made a name and a fortune before the revolution even started. He had done it on his own, without the benefit of the social uplift from a well planned marriage. He was the only one who had something to lose. He was a generation older than his peers. He could not seriously be expected to join the cause.
He was the one who wrote most about himself and managed to mystify the world to some extent. The Autobiography reached bestseller status and became the road to his posthumous sanctification. He designed his own image as the archetype of the self-made man, a middle class pioneer. His high skills in his business included high social intelligence and the ability to make use of `friends', of patrons. "He won his superiors over by allowing them to patronize him." He found the ideal vehicle for his skills in the Freemasons.
When he had become a gentleman and a famous scientist, he turned politician and was a good royalist and imperialist. When his mission to London, which was essentially a conciliatory one, failed, to some extent due to his own misjudgments of American and English moods, he finally became an American patriot by default. He was a conciliator by nature and had a naïve confidence in the power of reason, but after the crown and the British government had snubbed him, the revolution became a personal matter for him. Anyway, he was a convert and as such he had to show particular zeal to overcome some suspicions against him.
Then came the phase which enabled him to contribute most to the new United States: as a successful diplomat in France, he was able to secure France's support against Britain, without which the revolutionary war would probably have been lost. The odd thing is that many of his contemporaries did not understand his true achievement. He was attacked for being too close to France, and when the French revolution started, he was blamed for that too... Fact is that recognition and rewards during his final years were sadly lacking. Congress behaved miserly to him.
"The image of Franklin became a political football, to be kicked about and used and abused in the decade's turbulent politics."
The real "Americanization" of BF started in the later decades after his death, when the publication of his autobiography and other writings were used to turn him into an icon of national identity - to be sure, national identity in the sense of northern white males.

This is not an ordinary biography. It does not focus on providing a fully detailed picture of an extraordinary life, but it puts the man in the social context of the time. Thus we do not just follow Franklin's growth from poor commoner to gentleman status, but we learn about the social implications of his rise in society. We follow the other moves that Franklin made: to become a cog in the wheel of empire as a fervent and then disappointed royalist (and enemy of the Penn family), then to change direction towards colonial patriotism, to learn being a diplomat, and at last to become an American icon. The posthumous part of the story is possibly a little brief in this otherwise convincing and concise book.

Summary of The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

From the most respected chronicler of the early days of the Republic?and winner of both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes?comes a landmark work that rescues Benjamin Franklin from a mythology that has blinded generations of Americans to the man he really was and makes sense of aspects of his life and career that would have otherwise remained mysterious. In place of the genial polymath, self-improver, and quintessential American, Gordon S. Wood reveals a figure much more ambiguous and complex?and much more interesting. Charting the passage of Franklin?s life and reputation from relative popular indifference (his death, while the occasion for mass mourning in France, was widely ignored in America) to posthumous glory, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin sheds invaluable light on the emergence of our country?s idea of itself.

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