The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

Book Overview

"I cannot remember ever reading a work of history and biography that is quite so fluent, so perfectly composed and balanced . . ." --The New York Sun"Exceptionally rich perspective on one of the most... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159420019X
• ISBN13: 9781594200199
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Length: 299 Pages
• Weight: 1.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Deceptively Simple

You'd expect this book to get high marks, by virtue of the Author and his past credentials. What is remarkable is how compact and easy to comprehend it is, given that source and his prior accolades. The premise is simple. Franklin has been perceived to a mythological degree by those who see him as the historical icon of his age. Therefore, what is in order here is a piercing of that veil to show Franklin as a man, with the all too human qualities that are lost in the more popular contrived persona. Wood does just that in a manner that allows us to see Franklin with all the flaws and foibles that are otherwise missed. The success of this book is that rather than tearing away the legend of Franklin, there is an explanation as to how that persona grew and why it grew. We see Franklin as the man of his age who rose from obscurity to a self-made "gentleman" to a leading diplomat of his age revered in Europe to a degree unmatched in America until after his death. It's not necessarily designed to de-mystify Franklin. Franklin still comes off as the important figure he is. We see Franklin the inattentive husband, the doting and then injured father and the grandfather seemingly determined to atone for past sins. We see his interactions with other Founders, whom ironically attest to his complete translation to the Gentleman he aspires to be and subsequently takes the slings and arrows specifically reserved for that class by those who despise it and/or secretly covet for themselves. This book is well written enough that it will become indespensible to any true student of Franklin or colonial times, but it also reads easily enough that the typical high school student can read it with profit. Really, to dispel such mythology it has to be this way. Aiming for the upper eschelons only serves to keep this knowledge within its own little Ivory Tower cabal. Here it does the most good. You can't dispel such a myth without aiming at the foundation. This one is a keeper and worth buying for future reference.

Won't the Real Ben Franklin Please Stand Up?

As one who has always been passionate about early American history, I must confess that untill reading Dr. Wood's fine character study, I have not read any books devoted to Benjamin Franklin. Like many others, then, I came to this book imbued by the vision of Franklin that sees him first and foremost as the self-made business person that authored "Poor Richard's Almanac," and the "Autobiography." My vision of Franklin was of the champion of pulling onesself up by one's bootstraps, temperance, and frugality. Dr. Wood's intention with this book is not so much to dispel this vision - Franklin was indeed those things - as to augment it by filling in those lesser known bits of Franklin's life. While he was the self-made business man and champion of industry, he was also a man who, from there, forayed into the life of a gentleman of leisure and loved every minute of it. While he was a passionate American revolutionary, he was, before all that, a man who passionately believed in the British Empire and worked tirelessly to reconcile American and British inerests. While he was a man who was eventually loved by posterity as a true and exemplary American, he was, during his lifetime, just as often mistrusted and even scorned by fellow Americans. Dr. Wood, then, has written not so much a biography as a character study that works to explain (a) how Benjamin Franklin morphed into all of these multifarious roles, (b) how, remarkably, he was successful at all of them (well, all but one; you'll see!), and (c) how it wasn't untill after his death that Franklin's early life as a business-person was focused on almost to exclusion of all else, in essence, transforming his image to that of the quintessential American. Dr. Wood, in all of this, has created a thrilling and very educational book that 'gets into Franklin's head' as well as I imagine any book could. Throught it all, Dr. Wood remains somewhat neutral and defferential as to the character of Franklin, neither denouncing or overly praising him. Rather, he gives us the facts, tells the story, uses enough enthusiasm and warmth to convey the excitement that was Franklin's life, but never resorts to too much by way of polemic. Those expecting either a laudatory cheerleading or a denunciatory expose of Franklin will not find what they are looking for here. Those who simply want a good, robust and erudite, character studty will.

(Re)constructing Franklin

In the last few years, a number of thorough revisionist biographies have been published, which take Revolutionary Period luminaries and political players as their subjects, meeting with both public and critical success. Take for example David McCullough's John Adams, Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers and Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, not to mention Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life: each of these works have contributed to the recent trend in American historical studies to reexamine the American Revolution and its key players from a contemporary historical perspective. Into this mix, Gordon Wood-noted historian of the American Revolution and Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution-has released his latest work The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.So, why do we need another biography of Franklin? Gordon Wood's answer: we don't. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin represents little effort on behalf of its author to attempt to provide or refashion a definitive portrait of Franklin's life from self-made printer to world-renown writer, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. Wood's study does not set out to present a new or profoundly nuanced interpretation of Benjamin Franklin the man, but rather dissects the many-layered and convoluted construction of Benjamin Franklin the American symbol, the character of the communal American cultural imagination. As Wood argues and carefully documents, Franklin's reputation-as canonized during the progressive times of the early 19th century and arguably extending to the present day-did not result from the mutual respect of and commendation from fellow members of the Revolutionary generation. Quite to the contrary, the Benjamin Franklin known to contemporary Americans-the industrious inventor, the master of the aphorism and clever turn of phrase, the self-made and quintessential "American" citizen-appears in Wood's work as a posthumous construction quite at odds with the Franklin so painstakingly working to protect his reputation after returning from his years abroad as a diplomat to both Great Britain and France. Wood, however, digs through the rhetoric of both Franklin's most venomous opponents and his most fervent and loyal supporters to uncover and unravel Franklin's precarious position during and after the Revolutionary War. In the course of doing so, Wood demonstrates that the "Americanization" of Benjamin Franklin owed more to his enduring international reputation, particularly in France, and to the popularity of his Autobiography, which necessarily put forward an image that Franklin himself would endorse. Though Wood does present a rather thorough account of Franklin's life and achievements before and leading up to the American Revolution, the strength of The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin rests in its depth and analysis of Franklin's participation in the formation of the young American nation. Benjamin Franklin, as his contempor

Gordon Wood recovers the historic Benjamin Franklin

"The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin" is not a traditional biography of the Founding Father's remarkable life but a more selective study of specific aspects of his life as they relate to his enduring popular image. Wood's purpose is to recover the historic Franklin who has been replaced my a series of images and representations over the past two hundred years as he came to be known as "the first American." The grand irony is that before he personified being "American" to all of Western civilization, Franklin was the most British of the colonists; Wood argues that Franklin's emotional commitment to the vision of a pan-British world was rivaled only by that of William Pitt the Elder. That is important for understanding how a man who would sign his name to the Declaration of Independence was, two decades earlier, beseeching the King of England to make Pennsylvania a Crown colony. It was not just because of antipathy for the Penn family, but because Franklin believed whole-heartedly in the beneficence of the British monarchy. However, when it became clear that he was not going to be considered truly British--and if Dr. Franklin could not be accorded that right then clearly no Colonial ever would--that Franklin embraced the idea of being something else. In that regard he was similar to George Washington, whose chief ambition was to be a serving British officer and who was treated with even greater disdain by those he aspired to be like.Wood makes his case by tracing Franklin's evolution through five key stages. We begin with his early ambition of "Becoming a Gentleman," which shows that Franklin raised above his humble beginnings and trade as a printer not only through his own enterprise but through the patronage of wealthy and influential men, challenging the purity of his rags to riches story. "Becoming a British Imperialist" covers how Franklin the gentleman had time to become the scientist who would be known throughout the Empire and the continent as Dr. Franklin. These first two chapters are the most interesting because they representing the early Franklin who has been obscured by the Franklin the Founding Father.That is the Franklin developed in the last three chapters. "Becoming a Patriot" begins with the Stamp Act and Franklin's reaction to it, tracing the series of events that forced him to the cause of revolution after a last attempt to save the Empire in which he believed. By the time Franklin returns to the United States and begins the stage of "Becoming a Diplomat," he has become too American in England and too English in America, so it is not surprising that it is the French for whom he becomes "the symbolic American." "Becoming an American," Woods final chapter, covers Franklin's return to America, and his death. What followed was not only his apotheosis, as the greatest American president never to be president to use one common phrase, but also the deification of Franklin as the self-made businessman. In the end Wood