The story of the self-made man begins with Franklin. Though he was hardly the first man to rise from poverty to prominence, no one in America’s short history had started out so low and ended up so high. Franklin, the tenth son of a Boston candle-maker, became a world-famous scientist, an influential patriot and diplomat, and, not least, a wealthy man of business. But America’s self-made story also begins with Franklin because of his talents as a writer. In the Autobiography, Franklin offered an irresistible account of his unlikely path to prosperity, one that would thrill later generations even as they misinterpreted it. For Franklin, succeeding in business had been a means to an end. The wealth he accumulated freed him to devote himself to loftier endeavors: science, public service, the pursuit of moral perfection.2 Franklin didn’t set out to be the face of American capitalism, but in the decades after his death, that’s what he became.
I asked my father recently if he’d ever read Franklin’s Autobiography. “No,” he replied, tapping his back pocket. “But Benjamin Franklin and I are well acquainted.”
Franklin’s brother James was a cruel master, taken to expressing his displeasure with his young apprentice by beating him. Franklin, understandably, took this “extreamly amiss,” though he would later credit his brother’s “harsh and tyrannical Treatment” with instilling in him his lifelong “Aversion to arbitrary Power.” The time would come when Franklin would express that aversion to some of the most powerful men in Europe. For the moment, he just wanted to escape his brother’s harsh rule. When an opportunity presented itself, he ran away, securing passage on a sloop bound for New York, under the pretense that he’d “got a naughty Girl with Child”—apparently a more acceptable excuse for traveling as an unaccompanied minor than breaking your indenture. Finding no printing work in New York, Franklin pushed on to Philadelphia.
Franklin’s account of the unpromising figure he cut on his first morning in his adopted city is one of the most famous passages in American literature, and an ur-text in the mythology of the self-made man. With little to his name save the shirt on his back and the change of stockings he’s stuffed into the pockets of his pants, Franklin sets out down Market Street looking for something to eat. Locating a baker, he asks for a biscuit “such as we had in Boston,” but is told they don’t make that kind of biscuit in Philadelphia. So Franklin asks instead for three pennies worth of whatever bread is on offer, prompting the baker to hand him “three great Puffy Rolls”—far more sustenance than Franklin has bargained for. With no room in his pockets thanks to the spare hosiery, Franklin walks back up Market Street, a giant roll under each arm, noshing on the third. His future wife, Deborah Read, happens to be standing in her father’s doorway as Franklin walks by and bears witness to his “most awkward ridiculous Appearance.”
Franklin lingers on the image of his ridiculous, roll-toting self so that we might “compare such unlikely Beginnings with the Figure I have since made there.” After Franklin, no man could claim to be self-made if he couldn’t produce an account of his own unlikely beginnings, the less auspicious the better. (In his memoir, the successful 19th-century clock-maker Chauncey Jerome tried to one-up Franklin by wandering around New Haven on his first day in the city while carrying a pile of clothing, bread, and some cheese.3) The familiarity of the trope today dulls the impact of what at the time was a radical stroke. Implicit in Franklin’s invitation to compare this lowly born boy to the prominent man he would become is the idea that any man might aspire to similar heights.4