Our Founding Yuppie

I’m on the crest of a hill on Research Boulevard in Rockville, Maryland, and it’s just like being on the steps of the Parthenon. Except I’m not looking out over temples and theaters that were the glories of ancient Greece. I’m looking out over the glories of twenty-first century America, which are contained in the ident-a-kit office parks spread over the exurban hillsides.

The one over there by Gude Drive is Celera Genomics, the company that is mapping the human genome system. Up and down Research Boulevard, and over on Corporate Boulevard, there are scads of similar biotech firms, like Human Genome Sciences, that will presumably be revolutionizing medicine over the next few decades. Some of the other nearby office parks house thriving tech firms. They all seem to have gone to the same consultants to get branded: Either they have compound names, like CyberStar or InterCell, or they’ve got three-initial names like ISG Solutions and SRA Technologies.

If the hill were a little higher, I could look across the Potomac to Virginia and see the more grandiose office parks by the Dulles Toll Road, where AOL has its headquarters. And in my mind’s eye I can see a nation of office parks: the ones along the Hudson built by IBM, the ones along Route 101 in Silicon Valley, the ones in Redmond that comprise the campus of Microsoft. In America, all of a sudden, the most dynamic individuals work in the most generic buildings: These office parks are mostly built on hillsides, and they’re all made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

Office park buildings are five- to eight-floor layer cakes of tinted glass and composite stone. They have labor-unintensive flower arrangements out front and dwarf-trees inside their deserted lobbies. There are take-out cafes near the atrium, FedEx drop-off boxes just off the main driveway, and rows and rows of open parking. Airport shuttle vans cruise by throughout the day, and there’s usually one of those suburban strip mall restaurants like Chi-Chi’s or Outback Steak House a short drive down the road.

Office parks are very quiet. There’s no street life except for the huddles of smokers by the front doors. All the action is inside, among the scientists, the techies, and the entrepreneurs. Office parks represent the marriage of science and commerce, and the withering away of just about everything else. And when you hang around them, you sometimes wonder, what is this office-park culture doing to the American character?

Throughout our history there have always been some who, in the Jeffersonian tradition, admired rural America as the backbone of the American character. And there have always been others who followed Alexander Hamilton instead, and saw cities as the dynamos of the nation. But what is the spirit of exurban office-park America? Who embodies the spirit of this America?

When you scan through the great figures who are supposed to represent the American spirit, almost all of them seem hopelessly out of place in office parks. We used to think America was a pioneer nation, but the people in the office parks haven’t thrown off the comforts of civilization to strike out on their own: This isn’t the realm of the Puritan, the Cowboy, or the Immigrant.

So too you can’t fit George Washington in an office park. He may have embodied the American spirit when we were a nation fighting great wars for freedom and democracy, but it is hard to see Cincinnatus getting excited about an IPO.

Nor is it easy to imagine Lincoln parking his Chevy Suburban in one of the oversized spaces and fiddling with his Palm Pilot on his way to the morning meeting. Lincoln was too grand and too political for an office-park nation. He may have embodied the spirit of America during the civil rights era, during the fight for equality, but this is not his milieu. The things essential to Lincoln — historical memory, government, reverence for America’s founding documents — are all missing here.

But there is one figure from the American pantheon who would be instantly at home in an office park, and that is Benjamin Franklin. Franklin lived much of his life at the intersection of science and commerce. He understood the process of getting rich from intellect, which is the chief occupation of the information age. He would have been wild about all the experiments going on inside these buildings. He’d probably join the chorus of all those techno-enthusiasts who claim that Internet and biotech breakthroughs are going to transform life on earth wonderfully; he shared that passion for progress.

At the same time he’d be completely at home with the irony and gentle cynicism that is the prevailing conversational tone in these buildings. He’d instantly understand how the technology of a medium transforms the content of what gets communicated. He’d appreciate how, in the information age, the distinction between high culture and low culture seems to be washing away, for throughout his own life he embraced high culture and low culture simultaneously. And not least of all, he’d admire the way these techno-missionaries are able to use their market advantages to rack up fantastic profits.

But then, Franklin would be at home in much of contemporary America. He’d share the values of the comfortably middle class; he was optimistic, genial, and kind, and his greatest flaw was his self-approving complacency. One can easily picture him traipsing through a shopping mall enchanted by the cheerful abundance and the clever marketing. At the same time, he’d admire all the effort young Americans put into civic activism, and the way older Americans put religion to good use through faith-based community organizations.

The quasi-moralistic, quasi-materialistic improvement tracts he’d write if he were alive today would put bestsellers like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to shame. He’d be moralistic according to his worldly fashion, but he wouldn’t get too hyped up about abstractions or transcendent values. Of all the Founding Fathers, it is easiest to imagine Franklin disapproving of Bill Clinton personally, but giving him high job approval ratings nonetheless.

In other words, if these office parks and the people in them do indeed set the tone for American life over the next century, then we’re going to have to regard Benjamin Franklin as the real father of our country.

This is not altogether easy to accept. Among the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin is the hardest to revere, even though he was arguably the most brilliant, the most accomplished, and the one who rendered the greatest service to mankind. Franklin’s reputation has been on a downward trajectory through much of recent American history. And in judging Franklin these days, we are largely judging ourselves.

Franklin’s reputation started high. People around him recognized that he was a giant. “America has sent us many things,” David Hume wrote to him, with evident sincerity, “But you are the first philosopher, and indeed, the first great man of letters, for whom we are beholden to her.”

And indeed for the first hundred years of America’s history, Franklin was seen as the fulfillment of the nation’s promise. Here was an enterprising boy who broke free from his indenture to his cruel brother, a Boston printer. He escaped by sea and made it to Philadelphia with only the clothes on his back and enough money for some rolls of bread. He set about improving himself. To better his morals, he made a list of thirteen practical virtues such as temperance (“Eat not to dullness. Drink not to elevation”), industry (“Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful”), moderation (“Avoid extremes. Forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve”), and chastity (“Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation”).

He made a little scorecard of his thirteen virtues, and he graded himself each day on how he had done. He didn’t believe in virtue for its own sake or in the “extreme” he found in his acquaintance and sparring partner Cotton Mather (which he called “foppery in morals”), but he believed that if he developed moral habits, then virtue would be rewarded and he would rise in the world and be recognized as a good man.

He did, and he was. Subsequent generations were dazzled by his ascent. Even if we limit ourselves to the twenty-year period following his marriage at age twenty-four in 1730, we see accomplishments that are almost superhuman. Most of his time was spent building up his printing company and his stationery store, but he found the energy for much else. In 1731 he conceived and organized the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first community library. He joined the freemasons and became grand master of the Pennsylvania Masons within three years. He acquired the struggling newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and, writing much of it himself, turned it into the leading paper of the province. He founded and wrote Poor Richard’s Almanac, pouring into it his own and borrowed maxims, which started as filler between the charts: “Hunger never saw bad bread. . . . Gifts burst rocks.” He began a crusade for paper currency, which he thought would stimulate trade (he ended up winning a contract to print some of Pennsylvania’s notes).

He founded Pennsylvania’s first fire company and raised enough money to buy a fire engine (he later recalled this as one of his proudest accomplishments). In 1737 he became the postmaster of Philadelphia, and still found time to become involved in the Great Awakening, championing some of the itinerant preachers while never becoming devout himself.

He served as clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, the commonwealth’s quasi-legislature. He started a general-interest periodical called Gentleman’s Magazine (a rare failure). He designed and built the Franklin stove, an ingenious heating device that could warm large rooms with less firewood than existing stoves. The Franklin stove was adopted across the northern hemisphere, but Franklin refused an offer to establish patent rights to the stove. In 1743, he founded and led the American Philosophical Society, which became the colonies’ leading intellectual body. He studied everything from the currents in the ocean to whether young women or old women made the best mistresses (his wry essay on this subject — arguing for old mistresses — scandalized nineteenth-century admirers).

He organized and became colonel of the Pennsylvania militia, establishing a lottery to purchase a battery of cannons for his troops. By 1746, he was deep into his experiments on electricity. His subsequent papers, which were read at the Royal Society in London, made him one of the most famous scientists of his day. Back home, he raised enough money to establish a school for the children of Philadelphia, which eventually turned into the University of Pennsylvania. He invented the lightning rod to save buildings from fire, another invention that was soon adopted across the globe. In 1748, he was elected to Philadelphia’s city council. The next year he became the justice of the peace (which he soon gave up, aware that he had no legal qualifications for the job). Only then, in 1751, did he join the Pennsylvania Assembly, setting up the career in politics and government that would dominate the second half of his life. And through all this time he churned out essays, poems, and inquiries at a rate that would kill a normal human being.

This isn’t a bad record of accomplishment. And the first part of his rise, his pilgrim’s progress from boyhood to young printer, he later chronicled in his autobiography, which, for a long time, was considered the most influential book in American history. It defined the American striver and certainly helped found the American voice, with its mixture of homily and comedy, and the alternation among modesty, self-revealing candor, and only slightly abashed boasting. By the 1850s, Franklin’s Autobiography had been reprinted nearly 120 times.

Through the nineteenth century, most Americans embraced Franklin. They were coming to see that a republic like America depended on a people with republican virtues, and Franklin seemed like the ideal. “Franklin was the true type of the pure noble republican feeling of America,” the New York Times declared in 1856, “George Washington was but a noble British officer, made republican by circumstances. Franklin was a republican by birth, by labor, by instinct, and by thought.” It’s almost fair to say that a cult of Franklin developed; it became normal to praise him lavishly. The historian George Bancroft noted that “with placid tranquillity, Benjamin Franklin looked quietly and deeply into the secrets of nature.” The British philosopher and historian James Mackintosh labeled him “the American Socrates.” Edward Everett inaugurated a series of “Franklin Lectures.”

Franklin’s reputation peaked during the Gilded Age. For the great industrialists, he was the quintessential self-made man. “The maxims of ‘poor Richard’ exactly suited my sentiments. I read the book again and again, and wondered if I might not do something in the same line by similar means,” said Thomas Mellon, who had a statue of Franklin erected in his office building.

But during the nineteenth century there was also dissent by people who despised Franklin and the version of America he represented. Such writers as Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson tweaked, satirized, and sometimes condemned Franklin for his moral complacency, his self-satisfaction, and, most of all, his materialism. By the time his reputation had been fully appropriated by the industrialists of the Gilded Age, he aroused caustic fury: Mark Twain said that Franklin’s Autobiography “was of a vicious disposition” that would “inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages.”

The two most influential assaults on Franklin were still to come. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber portrayed Franklin as a squalid utilitarian who subverts everything to worldly success. “The summum bonum of this ethic,” Weber claimed, was “the earning of more and more money.” Normal people earned money so they could buy things, but for Franklin, Weber suggested, making money became the end in itself.

The other great blow came in the name of Art. D. H. Lawrence wrote a splenetic diatribe against Franklin:

Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He’ll rig him up for you, the pattern American. . . . Now if Mr. Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better. Benjamin did it for him in the eighteenth century. God is the supreme servant of men who want to get on, to produce. Providence. The Provider. The heavenly storekeeper. The everlasting Wanamaker.
 
Lawrence concludes:

But man has a soul, though you can’t locate it either in his heart or his stomach or his head. The wholeness of man is his soul, not merely that nice little comfortable bit which Benjamin marks out. . . . And now I, at least, know why I can’t stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be free without an illimitable background? And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed wire paddock and make me grow potatoes.

Franklin’s reputation has never recovered. In 1906, the New York Times reversed course and editorialized, “He seems to have been quite without definite ambition, his attitude toward life was mildly cynical, and by inclination he was a manager rather than leader of men.” Increasingly, writers began to emphasize and exaggerate his skirt-chasing. As Freud’s influence grew during the twentieth century, Franklin’s straightforward, sunny disposition came to seem naive, even pathetic.

By the middle of the twentieth century, even Franklin’s admirers treated him more as an entertaining character than as a man of genius and accomplishment. He was a sort of Will Rogers in knickers. He made shrewd observations. He smiled and gave knowing winks. The film in the Franklin museum in Philadelphia, made for the bicentennial in 1976, treats him as Poor Richard, the smiling old man with a gentle appreciation for the follies of human nature. Franklin’s relentless energy, his ambition, his creativity are ignored. Instead, he’s the sort of lovable character who might be corporate spokesman for Pepperidge Farm cookies.

Almost no one noticed the bicentenial of Franklin’s death in 1990. There were two news articles (one called “Our Founding Flirt”), and there were a couple academic conferences, where ambivalence seemed to be the order of the day. Literary critics are now more apt to study Franklin than are historians. The most stunning sign of his decline is that sixty-two years went by without a single major biography. Carl Van Doren’s study was published in 1938. It’s recognized as a masterwork, but the existence of masterworks about Lincoln seems to have deterred no one from writing another book about him. In Franklin’s case, the interest just wasn’t there.

But now, finally, the pond is coming to life. Time’s managing editor, Walter Isaacson, is working on a biography of Franklin. And we actually have a new Franklin biography in hand. Texas A&M professor H. W. Brands, who less than three years ago published a massive biography of Teddy Roosevelt, is out with The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. It is a fluid, clear, and nicely paced book. It is easy and enjoyable to read. But, unfortunately, it scarcely leaves a mark. Van Doren’s is actually more interesting and informative. Brands tells the story of Franklin, but he rarely steps back to judge him or even to generalize about his character. So marked is this book by a lack of reflection, it seems more the work of a news reporter than a historian.

Which is a grand abdication. For surely the most important task for anybody who writes about Franklin is to judge him. As we’ve seen, the man has aroused an amazing variety of emotions, from rapt admiration to furious condemnation. And it’s important to judge him now, because in wrestling with Franklin we are wrestling with a bigger question: How healthy is America? Are we slouching toward Gomorrah? Or are we experiencing a golden age of peace and prosperity, a recovery of morals and traditions? Franklin was, as the historian Carl Becker put it, “pungently American,” and never more so than today, when the Franklinian Man is the quintessential figure of the age.

One thing is certain. People who have fervent views of Franklin, whether for him or against him, are wrong.

When one reads Weber and Lawrence on Franklin, one is struck mostly by how silly they are. Weber and Lawrence both argue, for instance, that money was an end in itself for Franklin. But that’s absurd. Franklin was a successful merchant, but as soon as he made enough money to live on — not well but comfortably — he gave up his business, and for the remaining four decades of his life pursued science, diplomacy, and public service.

To describe him as a grubby utilitarian was simply to ignore the evidence. Rarely has any man spent more time thinking about virtue and improving his character. It’s true that his view of virtue and character was not an exalted one. His was a man-centered universe. “Vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden,” he wrote. “They are forbidden because they are hurtful.” “Serving God is doing good to man.” But judged by his works and habits, he was a great man. He was curious, disciplined, responsible, tolerant, patriotic, and on many occasions selfless.

And yet, one can’t help having anxieties about the state of his soul. He had good habits, but don’t his writings reveal a man who was a bit complacent? Relentlessly happy and optimistic, he showed no awareness of the tragic elements of life, of the existence of sin and evil. Jonathan Edwards, his contemporary and his great foil, argued that the virtues Franklin championed, such as prudence and honesty, were in fact forms of self-love — because they were concerned merely with worldly satisfaction.

“True happiness,” said Edwards, “consists in the worship and the service of God, in seeking the glory of God, which is the proper exercise of true virtue.” As others have noted, Franklin represented the Protestant ethic without the Protestantism. He was half the eternal debate between good works and faith. As Van Wyck Brooks noted, Edwards spoke to the “upper levels of the human mind” and Franklin “to its lower levels.”

Perhaps the best way to make sense of Franklin is to say he was great but insufficient. Measured by achievement, he was unsurpassed, but of course we measure a person not only by what he does, but by what he is. And his writings reveal a man who defended his country from every threat, except a creeping flatness of soul.

Nowadays when you walk amidst the office parks, you see a country that is great but insufficient too — great in its scientific accomplishments, in its tolerance and in its industriousness (America is now the hardest working nation on earth, having surpassed Japan). And yet insufficient because of its self-satisfaction and complacency.

Full of good cheer, today’s office-park Americans hurtle off into the technological future, chirping about their forthcoming ability to rewire human nature by manipulating the genetic code. You get the impression the next great evil will be perpetrated by genial, bland people, optimistically pushing their science while blithely unaware of the dark forests they are upending.

For so long, we’ve tried to defend Benjamin Franklin’s virtues from people like D. H. Lawrence and all those counterculturalists who waged Romantic assaults on capitalism, middle-class morality, and character. But now the main problem is excess Franklinism, and we’ve got to figure out how to bring to today’s America the tragic sense and the moral gravity that was so lacking in its Founding Yuppie.

David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.