Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, VII

Mr. Poor Richard, why exactly were the almanacs important?

The interspersion of sententiae among the monthly tabulation of meteorological forecasts, religious and national holidays, moon cycles, and general notes on husbandry, was neither an innovation by Franklin nor a feature exclusive to his almanacs. The format of Franklin’s almanac—including adjoined poems, currency conversion charts, and lists of timelines and approximations of the earth’s age by various ancient civilizations (Greeks, Romans, Jews, et al.)—was already established in the style of contemporaneous almanacs (Leeds’ and John Jerman’s, for example, in Philadelphia, the latter of the two even printed by Franklin).

Franklin’s almanacs are instead distinct in that he improved the sententiae by making them wittier and in that he completely filled any available space in the monthly tables of the almanac with them. That he differed his almanac by filling “all the little Spaces that occur’d between the Remarkable Days in the Calendar, with Proverbial Sentences, chiefly such as inculcated Industry and Frugality,” is readily evident with the most cursory glance. The July, 1734, entry in Leeds’ almanac:


Compared to Franklin's entry for the same month and year:


Leeds’ almanac has six aphorisms, five on the right column and one more on the lower left, with eight blank spaces between the text, totaling 55 words of apothegmatic statement. Whereas Franklin’s July has seven aphorisms, four on the right column and three on the left, with three (possibly four) blank spaces between the text, totaling 94 words of apothegmatic statement (including the three rhyming lines at the bottom left appended to the weather prediction, which have an apothegmatic quality). Unlike Leeds’ organizational structure, where the sententiae stand strictly uninterrupted by other information, Franklin’s sententiae run over and are ran over by the weather predictions, the moon cycles, and the astrological configurations, at times jumbling together different lines of information to bizarre result.

From July 5 to July 20, for example, the sententiae, which are always italicized, often force the de-italicization of weather predictions (‘Thunder,’ ‘hot weath’), which are typically in italics to distinguish them from the notes on special days (‘Dog Days’), which are in standard type, but which become confused with the proper names in the sententiae (‘Bucephalus’, ‘Alexand.’, and ‘Chili’ below), which have to be put into standard type to be distinguished as proper names; creating odd semiological cross-threads such as, “or rain,/ Bucephalus the/ Horse of Alexand./ sultry hot/ hath as lasting fame/ as his Master.”

Franklin crams the sententiae into the daily tabulation of contingent predictions of weather and notation of holidays, despite the jumbling, as if to afford any given day a snippet of condensed, functional moralization. As Thompson’s signboard was reduced to the utile core of a name and image, or as the character of a person might be reduced to a simple image resulting from the impression a banging hammer might make in the mind of their creditors, the concise semantic construct, the utile apothegm—the simple, moralizing sentence—is inversely offered as the holistic substance of virtue for a day in a structure of daily regimentation.

Virtue, in effect, is being promoted to the public on a daily basis.

Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, VI.V

Mr. Poor Richard, Partridge?

Lemay is referring to Swift’s hoax in his Predictions for the Year 1708, in which Swift predicted (and later testified to) the death of shoemaker, quack astrologist and almanac maker, John Partridge. Partridge was tormented by the hoax—an undertaker coming to visit him and a tombstone carved—while he continued to aver that he was alive, only to suffer Swift’s rebuke that “they were sure no man alive ever to writ such damned stuff as this.”

Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, VI

Mr. Poor Richard, who, by the way, are you?

J.A. Leo Lemay concludes an analytic sketch of Poor Richard with a provocative question concerning Franklin’s relationship to the persona. Alluding to Poor Richard’s prediction and subsequent assertions of Titan Leeds’ death, Lemay asks:

“Was [Franklin] like the contemporary writer he most admired, Jonathan Swift, or was he instead really like the almanac maker Partridge?”

In other words, is Franklin the heedless provocateur or the well intentioned, if somewhat wacky, moralizing almanac maker?

The easiest answer is that he is exclusively neither but compositely both. Unlike Swift, who despised the commonalty of proverbs, Franklin saturated the available space in the almanacs with them. Yet, like Swift, he appreciated the possibility that personae afforded to question absolutes by blurring the distinction between appearance and reality.

Poor Richard could therefore simultaneously register on two frequencies: That of invested embodiment of republican virtue cultivation and that of socially divested satirist of humanity. The satire and humor, however, were invoked insofar as they too could serve as a “Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People:” “As Charms are nonsence, Nonsence is a Charm.”

The transmissibility of humorous language—and a central tenet in Franklin’s aesthetic system is the need for language to travel easily—validates its use. And the almanac in the colonial, eighteenth-century American Northeast had the broadest distribution of any print medium, as its clientele was largely rural at a time when upwards of 95% of the population was rural.

Although Franklin stopped directly producing the almanacs in 1758 (well before the revolution), maxims like “the King’s cheese is half wasted in parings: But no matter, ‘tis made of the people’s milk” already exhibit a sense of egalitarianism and distributive justice, which would become compartmental to his understanding of republican virtue.

With this sense underpinning his endeavor, the business model of the almanac—which matched Franklin’s aesthetic of broad communicability, saturated as it was with apothegmatic commentary—could inculcate a great number of colonial residents with those virtues, which he would later come to identify as essential to a functional Republic.

Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, V

Mr. Poor Richard, but how does the use of Industry and Frugality as symbols help Ben Franklin in promoting republican virtues?

Upon opening his stationary shop, Franklin begins to consider character as a communicative codification, which like credit can be positively or negatively developed. As a tradesman, he not only takes care to actually be industrious and frugal in his work, but additionally to appear so:

I dressed plainly; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion… and to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow.

He then claims that the esteem he gains, being perceived to be an industrious young man, increases the solicitation of his business. The rhetoric of his own image as semiological substance is remediated as an economic unit, which can be instrumental in furthering his business in life. Positive instrumentality of virtuous behavior is not sufficient; that instrumentality has to be communicated in a clear manner— a purchased newspaper to show that he is participating as a consumer in the commerce of the community and its conveyance through the streets on a workman’s tool to show that he is indeed at work in the production of the commerce of the community.

In his reading of The Education of Henry Adams, Hayden White posits a semiological substructure to narrative from which the author’s ideological discourse emanates. Adams’ deferring, equivocating narrative mode is itself a performance of the ideological discourse of representing a historical self which had become emptied of life and personalization. Franklin’s ideological discourse not only inheres itself in the semiological substructure, it knowingly exhibits this substructure as valuable representation of the ideology in action—a republic in performance.

Franklin recodes the language of the republic into a social semiology whereby visible activity, the public display of a represented self, becomes a kind of living text by which he is to be read and interpretively received. And the controlled constructing of a personal self folds into the central intent of telling one’s story—of writing an autobiography—where one chooses to include certain elements and exclude others to the benefit of presenting a particular representation of one’s history.

Franklin’s Autobiography is exactly that, a self-story sensitive to the reducibility of character to a core representation. And the moral ambiguity of communicating an ethical system by means of an apparent and perhaps fictitious core representation is not, according to Franklin, supposed to limit a moral ethos by the aesthetic criterion. There is no sense that he was merely pretending a republic. Rather, the mode of fictitious representation, which entrenches an aesthetic criterion by the protocol of its artistry, is meant to remediate aesthetic representation as another tool for promoting the virtues of a republic.

The Autobiography was, as I have noted, a work addressed to futurity, intended to promote in that futurity the values necessary for the perpetuation of a citizenry uncorrupted and in good governance. And the conceptualization of positive aesthetic representation as instrument in promoting—despite the patent dissimulation of its ‘author’—that necessary virtue system in the population of the immediate present is a process further represented in the Almanacs.

Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, IV

Mr. Poor Richard, but how does the use of Industry and Frugality as symbols help Ben Franklin?

Thomas Jefferson recounted a moment in which Franklin presented the propriety of his aesthetic system in parallel to the semiology of the Republic’s founding. Noticing Jefferson’s annoyance at having some expressions in his Declaration of Independence mangled or removed by the editing body of the first Continental Congress, Franklin told him of an incident, which taught him to avoid drafting papers to be reviewed by a public body:

"When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice Hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself, his first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,’ with the figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he shewed it to thought the word ‘Hatter’ tautologous, because followed by the words ‘makes hats’ which shew he was a Hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word ‘makes’ might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. If good and to their mind, they would buy by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words ‘for ready money’ were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchases expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, ‘John Thompson sells hats.’ ‘Sells hats says his next friend? Why nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word? It was stricken out, and ‘hats’ followed it,—the rather as there was one painted on the board. So his inscription was reduced ultimately to ‘John Thompson’ with the figure of a hat subjoined."

The immediate purpose of the anecdote seems to have been to console Jefferson for the depredations enacted upon his draft by the members of the Congress. But the narrative of the anecdote is structured in such a way that the figures standing in for the members of Congress—the editing body of John Thompson’s signboard—are not represented as vituperative or irrational. Each friend’s censure is conjoined to an appropriate reason and, as the various elements of the signboard are struck out according to their reasons, the rationale of reduction seems increasingly self-evident. When the sign is finally reduced to ‘John Thompson’ with a figure of hat, there is no sense that Thompson regrets his friends’ reductionism. The passage indeed suggests that all other elements to the sign were either peripheral or tautological to the communicative nugget of a name and an image, and that that nugget alone was sufficient to the sign’s communicative purpose.

The communicative rationale of the sign’s aesthetic ethos judges propriety according the most evidentiary elements of a given expression. The most evidentiary, the clearest expression, is encoded as most functional kind of communication, and therefore as most proper.

The reduction of a semiological construct to the most evidentiary elements is reorganized in The Advice to a Young Tradesman as Franklin reduces the credit of a man to the image that the man’s creditors might receive of him, remarking that the ever extraordinarily perceptive creditor will hear the “Sound of [one’s] Hammer at Five in the Morning or Nine at Night” and be lenient about one’s debt, but will see one at the billiard table or one’s wife with better clothes the creditor’s wife and will send for his money the next day. The received interpretation of the most evidentiary image of one’s character constitutes the rubric by which one’s credit is determined. The cultivation of evidentiary image acquires an economic importance.

It is with similar stress upon the instrumentation of the most evidential aspects of his public image—literally a semiology of his self in order to create a positive social value—that Franklin’s self’s story, the Autobiography, repeatedly concerns itself with reputation and self-representation.

Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, III

Mr. Poor Richard, why are industry and frugality so goddamn important to this bloke?

The last Almanac prepared by Franklin and published for the year 1758 is the source for his most widely reprinted writings (more than even the Autobiography), variously printed as “preliminary Address prefixed to the “Pennsylvania Almanack for 1758,” “Father Abraham’s Speech,” “Way to Wealth,” “La Science du Bonhomme Richard,” et al. It introduces a new persona, Father Abraham, whose messianic invective against improper taxation, laziness, and profligacy quotes extensively, if not entirely, from Poor Richard’s maxims.

Franklin leaves the business of almanacs with an almanac saturated, page after page (the sermon was printed alongside the twelve months), with a rhetorical constellation of Franklin’s collected aphorisms of virtuous commercialism. And the core message, as the Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One—again addressed to futurity (a young tradesman)—boils it down, “depends chiefly on two Words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY.”

One might conceptualize the argumentation behind centralizing these two words as core virtues by following their semantic content along a plausible meaning. We can take industry to denote production increased in time and frugality to denote preservation of resources over time. The former contracts time, in that more gets done in less time, while the latter expands time, in that less lasts for longer periods. Both, in their own way (one as a management of output, the other as a management of input), are controls of time. Time, we might conclude, becomes an ethical construct in the frame of a virtue system, which determines merit and demerit according to one’s use of time. We have concluded a general theme from a few contents in the text and could presume that the passage is operating according to principles of republican virtue, but the semantic layout of the passage is only half its argumentation.

Franklin breaks the code so effortlessly that we might overlook the fact that he does not identify ‘INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY’ as virtues, but as ‘Words.’ The semiological aspect of the virtues—their presence as signs—reorients the virtue system of time control into the realm of language. Franklin’s ideology of the republic is reorganized from the what, or content, to what Hayden White might call the how that what is conveyed: The ideology of Franklin’s virtue system, of industry in frugality, is inhered in even the rhetorical structures used to convey that system—the very words and the simple style of their arrangement.

In a letter to his brother, Franklin correlates the style of his brother’s ballad, which he judges to be good, with the virtues that the ballad is supposed to foster, and again we see our two words:

"I like your ballad, and think it well adapted for your purpose of discountenancing expensive foppery, and encouraging industry and frugality. If you can get it generally sung in your country, it may probably have a good deal of the effect you hope and expect from it."

The letter then suggests that a more common tune, one that a “country girl in the heart of Massachusets” might compose, will allow the song to disseminate with greater reach and its instructive purposes to work themselves more effectively throughout the population. The ethical value of the ballad is measured by the aesthetic decisions which might render it simple and therefore effective, itself industrious or frugal.

The language of the republic, its management of a system of signs, its semiology, enacts and by its communicability legitimates the larger theoretical system of the polity.

Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, II.V

Mr. Poor Richard, what do you mean when you say that America sought to create a virtue system by contrasting its theory of continuity based on creative responses to contingency to the traditionalism and customary continuity of its monarchic, English forebear?

It is certainly an oversimplification to suggest that the American political crisis was simply a revolutionary inveighing of the despotic activity of King George III. The detested Stamp Act, for example, was introduced and ratified by George Grenville and the Whig coalition of 1763, and the leaders of what would become the American revolutionary movement knew this. The King, in so far as the colonialists understood him to be embodiment of a dysfunctional political system, was held in contempt for being neither able to adequately control his newly received empire (after the Peace of Paris), nor able to stave the corrupting of the political system by interests inimical to notions of English liberty and right, to the colonialists in America claiming that liberty and those rights, and in the end even to himself and his empire. “The heart,” as Pocock puts it, “of the American problem for Britain was less the maintenance of imperial control than the preservation of essentially English institutions which the claims of empire were calling in question.” Cf. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815. (London 1960), 182-85; Pocock, “Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part 1: The imperial crisis,” The Varieties of British political thought, 1500-1800, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge 1993), 278; Pocock, “Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part 2: Empire, revolution and the end of early modernity,” Ibid., 283-317; and Franklin’s note in the Autobiography (Part I, written 1771), excerpted from an editorial in the Pennsylvania Gazette, October 9, 1729: “by the Dictates of Reason there should be a mutual Dependence between the Governor and the Governed, and that to make any Governour independent of his People, would be dangerous, and destructive of their Liberties, and the ready Way to establish Tyranny… Their happy Mother Country will perhaps observe with Pleasure, that tho’ her gallant Cocks and matchless Dogs abate their native Fire and Intrepidity when transported to a Foreign Clime (as the common Notion is) yet her S O N S in the remotest Part of the Earth, and even to the third and fourth Descent, still retain that ardent Spirit of Liberty, and that undaunted Courage in the Defence of it, which has in every Age so gloriously distinguished B R I T O N S and E N G L I S H M E N from all the Rest of Mankind.” Autobiography, 50-51. In revolutionary rhetoric, in other words, the king became an easily contemptible symbol of a dysfunctional political system although the true menace had always been the dysfunctional political system, which the kingship represented.