Literature and Journalism

Inspirations, Intersections, and Inventions from Ben Franklin to Stephen Colbert

Mark Canada

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137329301
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first of its kind, this collection will explore the ways that literature and journalism have intersected in the work of American writers. Covering the impact of the newspaper on Whitman's poetry, nineteenth-century reporters' fabrications, and Stephen Colbert's alternative journalism, this book will illuminate and inform.

Chapter 1

Benjamin Franklin, Literary Journalism, and Finding a National Subject

Carla Mulford

SOME OF THE MOST MEMORABLE STORIES FOUND in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography are those related to his youth, when he taught himself to enter the world of words by working his way through the literary journalism of his day. Franklin’s recollections in the autobiography tell of Franklin’s hard work at his brother’s press and his having taught himself to write literary journalism by imitating The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. He became so skilled at such writing that he was able to dupe his brother into publishing his artful sketches, the inventive periodical series of “letters” by “Silence Dogood.” When Franklin established his own press in Philadelphia, his literary journalism found its maturity in his writings for his Pennsylvania Gazette and his Poor Richard almanacs. Such a literary apprenticeship suited Franklin’s creative talents and served the colonies well when Franklin traveled to England and France to negotiate on the colonies’ behalf during and then after the war against Britain.

Examining Benjamin Franklin’s literary journalism enables us to observe that through much of his career Franklin attempted to use the press—and literary journalism in particular—to craft a version of British national identity that featured British North Americans as the ideal “true and loyal subjects” of Great Britain. As America’s “Creole pioneer” (as Benedict Anderson labeled him), Franklin saw, by the end of his life, that the liberal identity embraced by Britons in England—an identity that he had spent much of his writing and printing career attempting to establish—had greater viability in North America than it ever had in Britain.1 This chapter will examine the threads of early modern liberalism interwoven with the history of literary journalism by looking into the career of Benjamin Franklin. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll consider four different moments in Franklin’s writing career: his early contributions (the “Silence Dogood” essays), which featured many of the positions we might associate with the Whig liberalism available in Cato’s Letters (by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon), which Franklin admired; his middle years, when, as chief negotiator for the colonies in England, Franklin sought to find a middle course for the Empire that would be acceptable to Britons in North America and Britain (periodical writings in the London Chronicle, among other newspapers); his later years as peace negotiator working strenuously to negotiate the lasting peace that became the Treaty of Paris of 1783 (a hoax newssheet); and his last years, when Franklin, an elder statesman, served the Constitutional Convention and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. In most ways, Franklin’s literary journalism contributed in major ways to the fostering of American national identity.

Literary Journalism in British North America

The impact of literary journalism in the colonies can best be assessed if we consider the print media available to most readers prior to the appearance of literary journalism in the newspapers and magazines in North America. Books were scarce in British North America, because they were printed elsewhere and imported and thus were expensive. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, books were imported by those in elite circles, but, except for the Bible, they were not frequently available for common people, unless they had been brought over in the initial crossing. Few American publishers attempted to publish books because publication was expensive and the reading market uncertain. There were no lending libraries for the general circulation of books. In the absence of newspapers, then, most people in the colonies would have had little or nothing to read. In fact, the newspaper was the medium most frequently read, after the Bible.

In North America, rates of literacy were relatively high—higher, in fact, than in many parts of Europe. Richard Brown has noted that in some regions, literacy levels were at 90 percent by the year 1800.2 Given the high rate of literacy, it is likely that newspapers were read by both women and men and by people of all stations and backgrounds. But few received formal training in reading and writing, and few attended the few colleges (Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary) that were originally established. Until Benjamin Franklin devised a different educational agenda for a college in Philadelphia in the mid-eighteenth century, university culture was expressly designed in behalf of classical training. Young men were taught to read Greek and Latin, and they were trained primarily for the ministry. In life outside university, by contrast, newspapers, especially those employing literary journalism, became the medium of exchange of news and cultural values for most people. They formed the center of community activity, from the largely government-oriented, commercial endeavors of the first newspapers to the more elaborate literary journalistic endeavors of the press of James Franklin and others who followed his lead in printing journalism more like that available in London and European centers of learning. The rise of literary journalism promoted the formation of literate cultures in North America. Beginning in 1691 in Anglophone North America, newspapers numbered well over 2,100 by 1820; 461 of them lasted longer than ten years.3 Such printing numbers indicate that newspapers were the central vehicles for the circulation of vernacular culture.

Most newspaper publishers were their own writers of text, as well. Success in the trade meant that the publisher would have to be an informed and able writer. As Benedict Anderson, following Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, has reminded us, it was in colonial North America that publishers first hit on the newspaper as a primary vehicle for making money in the absence of a market for and the materials to produce a significant book trade. In Anderson’s words, “Printers starting new presses always included a newspaper in their productions, to which they were usually the main, even the sole, contributor. Thus the printer-journalist was initially an essentially North American phenomenon.”4

Printers relied on postmasters for the circulation of the latest news, both incoming and outgoing, so ties between the postmaster’s office and the printer’s store helped foster business. In Anderson’s words, “Since the main problem facing the printer-journalist was reaching readers, there developed an alliance with the post-master so intimate that often each became the other. Hence, the printer’s office emerged as the key to North American communications and community intellectual life.”5 When Benjamin Franklin succeeded in establishing his own admired newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and then became the Pennsylvania government’s printer and the postmaster of Philadelphia, he was well on his way to having a significant monopoly over the circulation of news (and thus of culture) in the middle colonies of North America at precisely the time when intellectual and mercantile commercial power shifted away from the port cities of Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island, to Philadelphia. Yet Franklin’s idea of using the press to consolidate colonial Britons was ultimately premature, as signaled by the failure of his attempt to develop a news magazine—the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, for All the British Plantations in America (1741)—that he hoped would circulate through the various printers in the printing network he had set up from Rhode Island and Massachusetts through New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, to South Carolina and the Caribbean.6 Even though Franklin’s General Magazine ultimately failed, it reveals his acute understanding of the extent to which periodicals—and in particular, literary journalism—might be used to sway public opinion, so that imperial subjects, however dispersed around the Atlantic Ocean, might conceive of themselves as having a common interest and common destiny.

The Idea of a Free and Informed Citizenry and Franklin’s Early Literary Journalism

Political consolidation, especially with regard to the North American colonies, was important to Britain during the eighteenth century, yet the interest politics that dominated the ministry and court life worked against the very possibility of forming a system of common values that those in power would acknowledge as viable. The political situation tended to pit wealthy and powerful groups (i.e., the aristocracy and growing mercantile classes) against laboring people. Tory interests sought to overpower Whig interests, and out of the fray between the two groups emerged Cato’s Letters. For fostering the idea of political consolidation under the notion of British “liberties,” while propagandizing French and Spanish oppression, no greater vehicle was available than Cato’s Letters. These were printed and reprinted in Britain and the colonies in the early eighteenth century. Written by John Trenchard (1662–1723), an Irish Commonwealthman and Whig propagandist educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Thomas Gordon (c. 1692–1750), a Scot trained for the bar perhaps at Edinburgh, Cato’s Letters were published in the London Journal and later in the British Journal from 1720 to 1723.7 The initial letters were a response to the South Sea Bubble (an investment banking scheme that nearly bankrupted Britain’s major shareholders and thus the Commonwealth), but the 144 letters eventually covered most of the central tenets of liberal thought. Written under the pseudonym Cato, the name of a Roman statesman (95–46 BCE) who had defended individual rights against the tyranny of Julius Caesar, the letters supported political and civil liberties such as individual and constitutional liberties, the freedom of the press, and freedom of conscience and denigrated the idea of standing armies and the powers associated with the established church. They reveal how literary journalism was used as political propaganda, and their impress marked a liberal tendency in political discourse for Britons globally situated.

Even a cursory search for Cato’s Letters in eighteenth-century newspapers reveals their wide circulation throughout the British Commonwealth. Ireland, Scotland, North America, and England all printed and reprinted the letters, sometimes with editorial glosses indicating the importance of the letters to this or that local social or political matter but frequently with no editorial gloss whatsoever. The Letters were especially popular in the colonies, where trade restrictions and local problems over church and town governance caused fiscal instability, ecclesiastical power contests, and political rancor. They were first published in British North America (by Benjamin Franklin) in James Franklin’s New-England Courant in 1721 and then reprinted throughout the eighteenth century in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. The Letters’ appeal to the colonists is understandable, given the colonies’ political subordination to England. Colonial administration and the Navigation Acts affected matters of trade and manufacture, local self-governance, military funding, and taxation. Cato’s Letters on individual liberties and freedom of conscience were particularly important to the colonists, fostering a liberal republican message that the colonists absorbed through the medium of journalistic prose. Through the open exchanges of ideas available in Cato’s Letters and other writings on society and politics in the journalistic media, Britons in North America came to understand the fractures in the supposedly common political discourse, especially the discourse of civil and religious liberty, of the British commonwealth.

Some have argued, following Clinton Rossiter, that Cato’s Letters more than any other texts were the central reading matter of the American revolutionary generation. As Rossiter famously phrased it, “no one can spend any time in the newspapers, library inventories, and pamphlets of colonial America without realizing that Cato’s Letters rather than Locke’s Civil Government was the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period.”8 This statement assumes that newspaper media had so permeated the cultural fabric that a fundamental shift in the circulation of ideas had occurred, from manuscript to print and from books and pamphlets to serial publication. Serial production enabled readers to participate more widely in what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community”: an idealized formative relationship between the self and one’s community that laid the basis for nationalism. Cato’s Letters could be taken as a pre-eminent vehicle for assisting the formation of national values that would later facilitate the state formation of British North America as the United States. Jefferson’s language in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”—has resonance with Cato’s letter No. 45, “Of the Equality and Inequality of Men,” which opens, “Men are naturally equal, and none ever rose above the rest but by force or consent: No man was ever born above all the rest, nor below them all.”9 This exemplifies the extent to which individuals could call into being a nation, based on a presumably common cultural and political link to others in the same imagined community that was initially consolidated by the serialized circulation of print.

When James Franklin started his newspaper, The New-England Courant, in 1721, he was launching a new kind of journal in North America. Benjamin Franklin, apprenticed in his brother’s print shop, was on the proverbial ground floor, finding type and working the presses, finding material for newspaper filler, and listening in on the literate conversations of James and his friends as they critiqued local and London government. They must have been reading Cato’s Letters from the start of their publication in London in 1720, and just as soon as the newspapers offering them reached Boston. Indeed, it seems as if James Franklin’s continued challenging of the government’s high-handed approach to governance arose partly from a sense that it was time for individual and press liberty to be tested in New England as well as old.

The opening numbers of James Franklin’s paper, likely set to press by his brother Benjamin, called into question the government’s authority in handling smallpox inoculations.10 The newspaper then went on to criticize members of the General Court and the means by which the court sought to protect its own interests against all critics. James Franklin would later be found guilty of malfeasance in printing criticisms against the town for not providing the proper protection for its citizens. Legal actions against James Franklin prompted local authorities to call for his arrest. James Franklin went into hiding to avoid jail. The authorities’ goal was clear: they wanted the newspaper to be shut down. Young Benjamin Franklin took over the publication of the newspaper.11

In taking over the newspaper in his brother’s absence, Benjamin Franklin proved just as fearless as James had been.12 Benjamin Franklin’s earlier “letters” by Silence Dogood, his pseudonym for a middle-aged matron, had criticized social hypocrisy, the folly of hankering after fashion when practical apparel was more useful, and the quality of learning taking place at Harvard, where parents essentially bought their sons seats at the throne of indolence. Once his brother James had to go into hiding, however, Benjamin Franklin took a different approach: he reprinted Cato’s Letters—the first printing of the Letters in the colonies—on the topics of freedom of speech in a purportedly free country and on religious hypocrisy and its deleterious effects when political leaders are also religious leaders. Benjamin Franklin’s “Silence Dogood” letter No. 8, published July 9, 1722, reprinted Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letter No. 15 from the London Journal (No. 80), originally printed on February 4, 1721. Full of references to Charles I’s proclamations abolishing parliaments, “Cato,” quoted by Silence Dogood, observed, “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.” In addition to reprising the assertions by “Cato” that linked freedom of thought with freedom of speech and general civil liberties, “Silence” also quoted a portion associating freedom of speech with the security of property. This part related directly to the government’s effort to seize James Franklin’s presses. Speaking of the “natural right” of freedom of speech, Cato wrote, “This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Contributors