The Many Faces of Benjamin Franklin
But Franklin, to add to his complexity, clearly sensed the limitations of his personality almost in the same way that he sensed the limitations of the abstract deism that he embraced after rejecting his father's Calvinism. In fact, he may have perceived a connection between his inner nature and his adopted creed. In any case, as Isaacson shows, Franklin knew that a highly cerebral acknowledgment of the distant, clockmaker God of deism was no more conducive to ethical behavior than were some of his own deepest instincts. So what did he do? He constructed a rigid--and now famous--system of behavioral self-accounting that would make him not only successful but also a better person. "I made a little Book in which I allotted a Page for each of the Virtues," he wrote in his autobiography. "I rul'd each Page with red Ink, so as to have seven Columns, marking each Column with a Letter for the Day." And for any of the 13 virtues he deemed himself insufficient on any given day--including temperance, industry, and humility--Franklin would ink in a "little black Spot."
One virtue not listed among the 13 that he sought to cultivate was charity, love of one's fellow man, the one that, in Morgan's words, was the "guiding principle" of Franklin's life. Morgan's explanation of this curious omission is typically subtle: "By exhibiting it conspicuously in his own life while making no pretension to it, he was perhaps affirming to himself the superiority of a `moral perfection' that had nothing to do with Christianity."
Franklin had to do good in order to feel that he was good. It was a demanding spiritual-ethical formula, even for the man who devised it--and it's one that has fared precariously in American culture. Believers in revealed religion, particularly born-again evangelicals, have objected that it emphasizes works at the expense of grace. They have a point. Franklin's ethic placed so great an emphasis on what the sociologist Max Weber called "worldly asceticism" that only the most strong willed and self-disciplined could successfully live by it. Yet in Franklin's case, the ethic not only sustained him but also helped him produce a prodigious quantity of good works. And it did so because Franklin liked people so much--people in general, that is, and people of all walks and all kinds--that serving them was a pleasure. Making this public wiser, healthier, and happier, whether through his newspaper (the Pennsylvania Gazette ) or his almanacs, was, for Franklin, at once pleasurable and profitable.
Public deeds. If service came almost naturally to Franklin, he hit upon another useful mechanism when he founded the Junto Club in 1727, a year before he opened his own print shop. A society of 12 leather-apron tradesmen, it served as an association for libation, conversation, debate, education, and mutual support. And eventually, through Franklin's subtle urgings (he always led indirectly, being a poor public speaker if a brilliant conversationalist), it and other clubs it spawned raised subscriptions for a library, a fire insurance company, a hospital, and all of those other worthy Philadelphia institutions (including what came to be the University of Pennsylvania) for which Franklin is credited.
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