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Book Reviews
| Benjamin Franklin's Vision of American Community: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology. By Lester C. Olson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. xviii, 323p. Illustrations, notes, indices. $49.95.)The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 37, March 16 through August 15, 1782. Edited by Ellen R. Cohn et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. lxii, 896p. Illustrations, notes, index. $90.)
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The heart of Lester C. Olson's well-researched study of Benjamin Franklin's imagery is a study of Franklin's four best-known pictorial creations: the "JOIN, or DIE" snake cartoon (1754); the engraved image of the dismembered Britannia, "MAGNA Britannia: her Colonies REDUC'd," (late 1765 or early 1766); the thirteen interlinked chains of "WE ARE ONE," on the paper currency (1776); and the Libertas Americana medal (1782–83). Besides an introduction to emblems and symbols, Olson includes a chapter on "Franklin's Earliest Commentary Envisioning Colony Union" and two concluding chapters, one on "Franklin's Verbal Images Representing British America" and another on "National Character and the Great Seal of the United States." |
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Writing on the snake cartoon, the most famous cartoon in American political history, Olson breaks new ground in the section "British Audiences for 'JOIN, or DIE,' 1754" (pp. 46–53), where he proves that British officials in London read references to the snake cartoon in dispatches from America and that some saw the cartoon in one or more colonial newspapers. The next section, "'JOIN, or DIE' during the Stamp Act Controversy, 1765–66" (pp. 53–68) is also ground-breaking and thorough. |
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I do not fault Olson for not citing an earlier work by an authority on the symbols of America, E. McClung Fleming's "Seeing Snakes in the American Arts," for it appeared in an obscure place (Delaware Antiques Show Catalogue 1969, pp. 75–85 [odd pages only]), but it contains useful information supplementing Olson, and therefore I mention it. I admire Olson's research and scholarship in the chapter devoted to the Libertas Americana medal, especially the three sections on its distribution in France, the United States, and its use in international diplomacy (pp. 158–93). |
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Olson's primary thesis is that the four symbols chart Franklin's change from an American Whig who believed in "Britain's constitutional monarchy" to a rebel who believed in "republicanism as a form of government in the United States" (p. 17). There is no doubt that Franklin was an American Whig from the time of his writing for the New-England Courant in 1721 to at least 1754 and that he believed in a republican government by 1783, but I am not sure that Franklin unreservedly believed in a "constitutional monarchy" before the Revolution, nor am I convinced that either of the earlier two symbols show that he did. Franklin has numerous satirical references to monarchs and the idea of aristocracy in Poor Richard in the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s, as well as in various other writings before 1773. |
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Franklin's 1751 editorial comparing the transportation of criminals to America to dumping "Jakes on our Tables" and his satire a month later advocating exchanging "Rattlesnakes for Felons" were the bitterest anti-English satires before 1773. If the snake cartoon of 1754 is read in light of the editorial and satire of three years earlier, then it could be seen as a threat prefiguring the "Don't Tread on Me" message so common as a symbol of America during the Revolution. To be sure, in 1754 the symbol primarily called for unity of the colonies in order to fight the French and Indians, though the thought probably occurred to Franklin that if they were unified, perhaps they could also (as the English feared) defy England. Olson, however, is in the good company of Verner S. Crane, Esmond Wright, and others in seeing a consistent development in Franklin's political thinking during the prerevolutionary years. I am in the minority in finding that Franklin shifted back and forth, sometimes being more bitter and anti-English than any of his contemporaries and sometimes (though only when writing personal letters to English friends or writing propaganda for an English audience) sounding like an Anglophile and a lover of the British monarch. |
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