Against Self-Reliance

The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States

William Huntting Howell

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812291162
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Individualism is arguably the most vital tenet of American national identity: American cultural heroes tend to be mavericks and nonconformists, and independence is the fulcrum of the American origin story. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of American artists, writers, and educational philosophers cast imitation and emulation as central to the linked projects of imagining the self and consolidating the nation. Tracing continuities between literature, material culture, and pedagogical theory, William Huntting Howell uncovers an America that celebrated the virtues of humility, contingency, and connection to a complex whole over ambition and distinction. Against Self-Reliance revalues and rethinks what it meant to be repetitive, derivative or pointedly generic in the early republic and beyond. Howell draws on such varied sources as Benjamin Franklin's programs for moral reform, Phillis Wheatley's devotional poetry, David Rittenhouse's coins and astronomical machines, Benjamin Rush's psychological and political theory, Susanna Rowson's schoolbooks, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown and Herman Melville to tease out patterns of dependence in early America. With its incisive critique of America's storied heroic individualism, Against Self-Reliance argues that the arts of dependence were—and are—critical to the project of American independence.

PART I

Copy-Writing

CHAPTER 1

Imitatio Franklin, or the American Example

Prince Richard in the lamb’s skin: with a tongue in the cheek for aristocracy, humbly, arrogantly (that you may wish to imitate me) touching everything.

—William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain

I begin with an epigraph from the early twentieth century because I mean to make an initial point about reception: since the first partial publication of the text that would come to be known as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (in France, in French, in 1791), it has served as a touchstone for numberless studies of the “American Character.”¹ For more than 200 years, and for better and for worse, the Autobiography’s expressions of individualist, rationalist, practical, secular, and capitalist virtues—especially when taken alongside the maxims that Franklin compiled into the preface to Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1757 (subsequently altered and canonized as “The Way to Wealth”)—have been made to stand for something called an “American.”²

Claims for Franklin’s originary “American-ness” cite the Autobiography’s perfect encapsulation of the tectonic epistemological and cultural shifts away from a deferential tradition toward a progressive modernity—the same shifts that marked the eventual creation of the United States. Franklin’s breaking his indenture to his older brother is understood as representative of a broader movement out of an Old World guild system toward self-determined (or “rational,” in Max Weber’s terms) labor; his flight from “provincial” Boston to “cosmopolitan” Philadelphia stands in for a cultural turn from the religious strictures of Puritanism to the boundlessness of the “free” and secular market. More than this, Franklin’s willingness to engage in typically proscribed behaviors (like frolicking with a “naughty” girl whom he has no intention of marrying, disobeying his father and older brother, or abandoning his Massachusetts relations) is thought to reveal an up-to-date sense of the impermanence of sin. His cultivation of the appearance of industry—and his famous insistence that such appearances are at least as important as the virtue of industry itself—mark the triumph of “representation” over “immanence” (to use literary historian Larzer Ziff’s helpful formulations) and usher in a new age of market-oriented self-promotion; his social mobility—from dutiful boy to prodigal son, printer’s devil to royal guest, escaped apprentice to esteemed philosopher—charts the rise of a capitalist and intellectual meritocracy against the decay of hereditary power.³ When Franklin biographer J. A. Leo Lemay calls the Autobiography a “consummate and full statement of the American Dream,” he has hundreds of years of scholarship and popular opinion to back him up.⁴

It is worth noting that all of these “American Dream” and “tradition-to-modernity” transformation stories are grounded in the assumption of a fully realized, utterly original, and independent Franklinian psyche.⁵ For such stories to make a persuasive case for Franklin’s inauguration of a modern American subject, his marching orders must come from within, not from without; Franklin must be self-authored, self-authorizing, and self-contained—a fully autonomous creature. But in making this brief, these stories neglect Franklin’s obsession with imitation and emulation—his instrumental interest in the literary influences that shaped him and his conscientious authorship of new “norms and conventions” for shaping himself and other people.⁶ Franklin’s descriptions of his self-making project are never insular or atomistic. Indeed, they form a model of bold imitation, heroic meekness, and boundless iteration that emerges from the material circumstances (normalized and conventionalized) in which his story takes place. More specifically, the Autobiography folds age-old cultural protocols for developmental copying in with a contemporary sense of the operations of print culture; it recasts personality—and not just autobiographically represented personality—as a material, imitative, and iterable textual effect. In foregrounding the power of a continuing, reflective, and well-remarked literary and behavioral dependence—both explaining how adherence to a particular model will make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise and explicitly providing such a model for others to follow—Franklin finds the grounds of subjectivity and independence in the managed arts of dependency and sets the mold for imagining individuality without individualism.

There are myriad examples of the dynamic arts of dependence in the Autobiography, but three in particular are crucial for understanding their historical development and influence in early American culture: Franklin’s initial discussions of his Table of Virtues in Part Two (written in 1784), his narratives about self-instruction in the art of the essay (Part One, 1771), and his accounts of the development of a portable version of the Table of Virtues (also in Part Two). By treating each of these examples as meditations on the structures and functions of imitation, emulation, and iteration, it is possible to consider the convergence of textual aesthetics and corporeal behavior that structure Franklin’s project.⁷

Imitate Jesus and Socrates

The second part of the Autobiography is not long, but it is more or less universally acknowledged as the philosophical heart of the text. Veering away from the genealogical and anecdotal history of Part One, Part Two is designed explicitly as a template for the youth of America to follow, a sort of breviary for making little Franklins. Its own centerpiece is one of the most famous lists in American literary history. As part of his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” Franklin enumerates “Thirteen Names of Virtues . . . that at that time occur’d to me as necessary or desirable, and annex’d to each a short Precept, which fully express’d the Extent I gave to its Meaning.”⁸ This Table of Virtues—arguably the foundational textual event of a tradition of American liberal identity—appears as follows:

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to Dulness. Drink not to Elevation.

2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling Conversation.

3. ORDER. Let all your Things have their Places. Let each Part of your Business have its Time.

4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.

5. FRUGALITY. Make no Expence but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.

6. INDUSTRY. Lose no Time. Be always employ’d in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary Actions.

7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. JUSTICE. Wrong none, by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty.

9. MODERATION. Avoid Extreams. Forbear resenting Injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no Uncleanness in Body, Cloaths or Habitation.

11. TRANQUILITY. Be not disturbed at Trifles, or at Accidents common or unavoidable.

12. CHASTITY. Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dulness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another’s Peace or Reputation.

13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.⁹

Critical discussions of the famous table typically treat the whole thing as a bit of Franklin’s famous cheek—D. H. Lawrence called it a “barbed wire fence” in which Franklin “trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock”—and take the last virtue as the biggest joke of them all.¹⁰ In such readings, “HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates” is nothing more than Franklin winking at his readers, acknowledging that the strictness of such a list is too difficult or silly actually to achieve. After all, how could one both be humble and imitate the Son of God and the Sage of Athens? Jesus and Socrates may have been paragons of humility, but the notion of a “paragon of humility” is surely self-contradictory or, as Myra Jehlen puts it, “magnificently paradoxical.”¹¹

I disagree. Franklin is almost certainly having a laugh, but, as the poet William Carlos Williams has written of Franklin, “Nowhere does the full assertion come through save as a joke, jokingly, that masks the rest.”¹² Readings of that thirteenth virtue that see it only ironically emerge from a misreading of Franklin’s terms: for Jehlen, “imitation” means the same thing as “dissimulation” or “obvious counterfeit”—in the same way that “imitation cocoa” makes poor-tasting hot chocolate or “imitation leather” smells like industrial solvents. In these views, Franklin is necessarily a deceiver, one with a rich and complicated inner life that must be concealed from the outside world at all costs; a “real” Franklin (as a “real” American) throbs and connives beneath an opaque shell of sanitized, morally upstanding public appearance.¹³ To imitate Jesus or Socrates is to put on a public mask of perfect innocuousness—the better to gain private advantage, to put one over on the dupes in the public square. But such a characterization of Franklin’s “imitations” unnecessarily limits the relationship between “enacting” and “being”; these interpretations assume a Franklin with an identity separate from his performances—an assumption that the Autobiography itself works very hard to deconstruct and discredit.¹⁴ As James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass put it, “Franklin knew that there was no such thing as ‘mere’ copying. Copying was how one learned. For writer and printer alike, imitation was the key to making a ‘new & more perfect Edition.’ ”¹⁵ For Franklin, in other words, imitation does not conceal vice so much as it instills virtue; simulations are not masks for personality but its essential components.¹⁶

Franklin’s directive to imitate Jesus and Socrates is not a mockery of impossible standards but rather a fusion of somewhat uneasily aligned early eighteenth-century ideas of self-making: the imitatio Christi (made popular in the spiritual biography and autobiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and the still-evolving humanist conception of classical imitation. If we take Socrates as a figure for rationalism and formal scientific method (as many in the eighteenth century did), we can also locate in Franklin’s advice a synthetic third term: a quasi-Deistic conception of logical and empirical subjectivity that fuses the tenets of neo-Platonism and secularized Puritanism and that builds on the interpenetration of textuality and personality to frame a method for reforming humanity.¹⁷ Setting that final possibility aside, I want first to consider the constitutive elements of Franklin’s “Humility”: imitating Jesus and imitating Socrates.

As a model of subjectivity, the imitatio Christi has a long history. Its central doctrine—be as Christ-like as you can—is conceptually straightforward but historically complicated. What it means to be Christ-like evolves over time as ecclesiastical structures morph and splinter and as interpretations of Scripture change. In the Christianity of the late Middle Ages, for example, imitatio was more or less limited to those rare individuals designated as saints; to be like Christ meant to perform miracles—healing the sick with touch, speaking with angels, and so forth. Church elders placed greater emphasis on Christ’s divinity than on his humanity; only those who could suspend the observed laws of nature (that is, miracle workers) were recognized as true imitators of Christ. These miraculous few typically were seen—as Christ himself was—more as objects of adoration than as objects of emulation. Such figures offered glimpses of divinity and confirmed the promise of God’s interventionist favor, but they were so special and so removed from the world of the everyday that they could not be models for living a pious but average life. The saints may have imita...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Imitation Is Suicide
• Part I. Copy-Writing
• Part II. Emulation and Ethics
• Part III. Critiques and Affirmations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments