The Society for Useful Knowledge Read online

  Contents

  Significant Events

  Chapter One: The Age of Franklin

  Chapter Two: Breaking the Chain

  Chapter Three: The Leather Apron Men

  Chapter Four: Useful Knowledge

  Chapter Five: Sense and Sensibility

  Chapter Six: Dead and Useless Languages

  Chapter Seven: Knowledge and Rebellion

  Chapter Eight: The Mechanics of Revolution

  Epilogue: Manufacturing America

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Plate Section

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  To Michelle, an Adept of Useful Knowledge from Day One

  When speculative Truths are reduced to Practice, when Theories, grounded upon experiments, are applied to common Purposes of life, and when, by these Agriculture is improved, Trade enlarged, and the Arts of Living made more easy and comfortable, and of Course, the Increase and Happiness of Mankind promoted, Knowledge then becomes really useful.

  —The American Society held at Philadelphia for

  Promoting Useful Knowledge

  Significant Events

  These are some of the significant dates associated with the story of The Society for Useful Knowledge. More details are covered in the narrative that follows.

  1620

  The Mayflower, carrying William Bradford and other English and Dutch religious dissidents, arrives at Cape Cod.

  1650

  Restoration of the British monarchy under Charles II, ending republican rule.

  1660

  Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge is founded.

  1681

  King grants William Penn a charter for the American province of Pennsylvania.

  1683

  Englishman Josiah Franklin, father of Benjamin, emigrates to Boston.

  1699

  John Bartram, American botanist, is born in Darby, Pennsylvania.

  1706

  Benjamin Franklin is born in Boston.

  1723

  Franklin breaks his legal contract as an apprentice with his brother James, a Boston printer, and flees to Philadelphia.

  1724

  Franklin arrives in London on Christmas Eve in fruitless pursuit of money and equipment to go into the printing business back in Philadelphia. This is the first of four stints abroad, accounting for much of his adult life.

  1726

  Franklin returns to Philadelphia aboard the Berkshire to begin a short-lived career in business.

  1727

  Franklin and other like-minded craftsmen and mechanics form the Leather Apron Club, more commonly known as the Junto.

  1731

  Franklin and friends form the Library Company of Philadelphia.

  1732

  David Rittenhouse, mechanical and mathematical prodigy, is born outside Philadelphia.

  1743

  Franklin announces the formation of the American Philosophical Society. After a brief flurry of activity, it lies dormant for almost two decades.

  1749

  Franklin begins public campaign for creation of an academy and college in Philadelphia, the future University of Pennsylvania.

  1751

  Franklin publishes details of the lightning rod in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. As with his other inventions, he declines to patent it.

  1753

  The Royal Society of London awards Franklin its Copley Medal, the world’s most prestigious prize for science, for his experiments in electricity.

  1754

  Franklin proposes his Plan of Union, at a colonial conference in Albany, New York, anticipating many of the elements of the future independent American political structure.

  1757

  Pennsylvania legislature sends Franklin to London to represent its interests before the Crown. He does not return until 1762.

  1761

  Americans join the global effort to observe and record the transit of Venus, in an attempt to measure the size of the known universe.

  1764

  Franklin is sent back to London on behalf of the Pennsylvania legislature. He returns empty-handed in 1775.

  1768

  Treaty of union agreed between Philadelphia’s rival knowledge societies, allowing the reconstitution of Franklin’s original American Philosophical Society.

  1769

  The second transit of Venus acts as a powerful spur to the activities of the American Philosophical Society. The Americans win plaudits from abroad.

  1773

  Creation of the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge is announced.

  1774

  First Continental Congress meets in Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Hall, symbol of the power and influence of Pennsylvania’s mechanics.

  1775

  United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures is created. Similar societies are soon active in Boston, Baltimore, New York, Richmond, Wilmington, and Newark.

  1776

  Congress approves final text of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Franklin and others.

  Franklin is sent to Paris to head the American diplomatic effort to win military and political support for the rebellion against the British. He returns in triumph in 1785.

  1777

  Botanist John Bartram dies, four days before the British begin their nine-month occupation of Philadelphia.

  1780

  John Adams and others form Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in emulation of Franklin’s American Philosophical Society.

  1783

  The United States, represented by Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay, and Great Britain sign the Treaty of Paris that ends the War for Independence and recognizes American sovereignty.

  1787

  Franklin and colleagues form the Society for Political Inquiries. The circle provides a forum for Tench Coxe and his vision of an industrialized and technologically advanced America.

  1787

  Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts is formed. It includes prominent members of the Society for Political Inquiries.

  1788

  Mechanics’ associations take the lead in national celebrations of the new federal Constitution and demand government support for manufacturers.

  1790

  Franklin dies at the age of eighty-four, in Philadelphia. His funeral draws a crowd estimated at two thirds of the city’s total population.

  1791

  Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, submits his Report on Manufactures to the Congress. The plan relies heavily on the work of Coxe, now Hamilton’s deputy.

  1791

  The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SUM) is incorporated in the state of New Jersey, leading to the foundation of the industrial city of Paterson.

  1796

  SUM ends manufacturing efforts and concentrates on business development and the sale of power to independent entrepreneurs. It survives until 1945, when it is absorbed into the city of Paterson.

  1796

  David Rittenhouse, self-taught instrument maker and astronomer, dies.

  1796

  Washington delivers his Farewell Address, warning of the dangers of political factionalism and extolling the diffusion of useful knowledge in a democracy.

  Chapter One

  The Age of Franklin

  In the beginning, all the world was America.

  —John Locke

  Benjamin Franklin did not live to see the first full decade of American sovereignty. Yet he proved the central transformational figure in a transformative period of the nation’s history. Born in 1706 into modest circumstances in Boston, then a mere outpost of fewer than nine thousand residents, Franklin capped his public career eight decades later, in the glittering capital of Paris, where he ushered the newly independent America onto the world stage. He died in 1790, not long after the ratification of the federal Constitution, a document he endorsed, albeit with a certain ironic detachment. Along the way, Franklin’s ideas, actions, and achievements—in short, his own lived experience—helped set America on course for its steady journey from colonial backwater to world power.

  It is no wonder, then, that at the age of seventy-eight Franklin saw himself supremely qualified to spell out the essence of the young republic, leavened with his own hopes and aspirations, for those beyond its shores. In the few short months after victory over the British, sealed by the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, Franklin—the best-known American of his day—had found himself besieged by potential immigrants eager to learn more about this new society and, perhaps, to profit from it. His response was simple and direct. Newcomers must rely on their skills or a commitment to hard, honest work, he explained in the published essay “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” for it was surely ill-advised for highborn Europeans to arrive on American soil in the hopes of simply trading on their breeding or conventional social standing.

  “In Europe it has indeed its Value, but it is a Commodity that cannot be carried to a worse Market than to that of America, where People do not enquire concerning a Stranger, What is he? But What does he do?” Franklin wrote in March 1784. “If he has any useful Art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him; but a mere Man of Quality … wil
l be despised and disregarded.a

  “According to these Opinions of the Americans, one of them would think himself more obliged to a Genealogist, who could prove for him that his Ancestors & Relations for ten Generations had been Ploughmen, Smiths, Carpenters, Turners, Weavers, Tanners, or even Shoemakers, & consequently that they were useful Members of Society.”1

  Here, Franklin gives a concrete American voice to one of the most cherished notions of the Age of Enlightenment—that the value of learning and knowledge, of information and data, is directly proportional to its practical import or utility. In other words, to be of any real value, knowledge has to be truly useful. It cannot rest on blind acceptance of past tradition or rely on sanctification by entrenched authority. After an adolescent detour into what he later dismissed as dangerous “metaphysical Reasonings,” Franklin enthusiastically adopted this notion of useful knowledge as his lifelong intellectual, social, and political standard, and he worked tirelessly to inculcate these values in the new American society that was beginning to take shape all around him.

  In a letter to a young woman he was tutoring in science, Franklin wondered aloud, “What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some Use?”2 Elsewhere, he pointedly directed a scientific colleague not to waste his time on theoretical matters but “employ your time rather in making Experiments than in making Hypotheses and forming imaginary Systems, which we are all too apt to please ourselves with till some Experiment comes, and unluckily destroys them.”3 Faced with the riddle of the possible relationship between lightning and electricity that had so far stumped the finest minds in Europe, Franklin’s response—one that would soon make him and his electric kite world famous—was disarmingly simple: “Let the experiment be made.”4

  Like many others in his day, Franklin was first drawn to the mysteries of electricity after attending a series of public demonstrations on the subject. In fact, he was so taken with the matter that he later purchased the lecturer’s experimental apparatus for his own use. Such demonstrations attracted broad audiences in colonial America, while accounts of new experiments and fresh discoveries were the regular stuff of newspapers and magazines. Typically, these traveling electrical shows involved a brief overview of the latest theories of electrical phenomena and demonstrated the collection of an electrical charge by rubbing a glass tube or rotating a glass sphere against a piece of soft leather, or perhaps a piece of wool or a lump of rosin.

  But the high point undoubtedly consisted of demonstrations that allowed members of the audience to experience the effects of electricity for themselves, either directly from the generator, the so-called electrical machine, or from a charged Leyden jar that could store the electrical fire until it was required. Popular handbooks presented numerous electrical diversions to be tried at home. In one of the most popular parlor games, the Venus electrificata, an insulated woman was given an electrical charge and any young gallant brave enough to give her a kiss was in for a nasty shock.

  This commitment to useful knowledge, backed by experimentation and bodily experience, served as something of a common touchstone among the revolutionary generation, even as wartime unity and shared enthusiasm for an independent America gave way to bitter differences over the future direction of the new nation. Although generally cast in terms of competing economic and foreign policies, the emerging dispute in fact encompassed the entire republican vision that had rallied many to the revolutionary cause in the first place.

  Drawing on their understanding of examples from classical times and keen to avoid the English path of heavy industrialization, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their allies in the so-called Republican faction tended to view economic and political questions primarily in moral terms. America—in its ideal form, at least—should remain an agricultural nation, its rich and abundant lands able to absorb its remarkable population growth well into the future, without recourse to the development of industry and the accompanying dangers of social stratification and its associated ills. Untainted by luxuries and free of political or financial reliance on others, the new, virtuous citizen would be truly liberated to take full part in republican affairs. At the same time, America would freely export its agricultural surpluses to a hungry world but otherwise remain aloof from global affairs.

  Alexander Hamilton and his fellow Federalists, for their part, had no time for throwbacks to an imagined republican utopia. They were intent on cementing a strong, centralized government with the glue of Revolutionary War debt repayment, a banking and credit regime, an expansive reading of federal powers in the new Constitution, an aggressive foreign policy, and ambitious industrial development. Human nature, Hamilton argued, was not motivated or shaped by republican virtue so much as by the pursuit of luxury, which would in turn fuel activity across the entire economy and prevent idleness, impoverishment, and vice from infecting the land.

  So powerful were these divisive passions that they drove immediate postwar politics and gave shape to many of America’s enduring governmental institutions, laws, and practices. America’s publishers and printers labored mightily just to keep pace with the proliferation of pamphlets, polemics, and position papers proffered on all sides. Much to the alarm of George Washington—living symbol of victory over the British and the republic’s first president—the emergence of competing tendencies portended the establishment of permanent political parties, invariably to be led, he warned, by “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men [out] … to subvert the Power of the People.”5

  Despite their very real differences, however, the most prominent figures and factions were united by more than just armed resistance to British domination. They also shared a fundamental—and revolutionary—view of the world, one grounded in popular eighteenth-century ideals of experimental science and experiential knowledge and generally ill-disposed toward received wisdom, classical authority, and religious mystery.

  The true herald of this new America was not Jefferson, with his vision of a self-contained republican idyll resting on the shoulders of the virtuous yeoman farmer. Nor was it his chief rival, Hamilton, with his unshakable faith in mercantilism, industrialization, and direct economic and political competition with the world at large. Rather, we must look to the figure of Benjamin Franklin, whose long and varied life dovetailed with the most significant events in eighteenth-century America.

  By the dawn of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin had already spent most of his adult life in the pursuit of knowledge that might profit society, improve the moral and economic standing of its individual members, and, not least of all, redound to the benefit of Franklin himself. Crucially, he saw such endeavors as primarily a collective pursuit rather than as the preserve of the solitary scientific genius, secreted away in his laboratory or hunched over his lonely workbench. Even his most famous contributions to science and technology—including the kite experiment that established the identity of lightning and electricity, the lightning rod, and the so-called Franklin stove—were the products of teamwork and the free exchange of information, ideas, and observations. For Franklin, true knowledge was both useful and social.

  His quest for useful knowledge and self-improvement flourished within the precincts of the study circle and subscription library, amid the mysteries of the local Masonic lodge, and inside the collegiality of the coffee klatsch, the tavern gathering, and the drinking club. He created his own secret society, primarily of fellow artisans and craftsmen out to better themselves and their position within the hierarchical bounds of prerevolutionary society. And he eagerly adopted the eighteenth-century vogue for the exchange of learned correspondence and left behind an impressive archive of letters, in an array of European languages, with many of the leading scientists of his day.b