Apollonian
Guest Columnist
Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751): Benjamin Franklin, Creating a White Nation
Link: https://roadstomodernity.wordpress....51-benjamin-franklin-creating-a-white-nation/
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington’s colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today. Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history’s stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles… We see his reflection in our own time.
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life[
The English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light…why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?
–Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751)[2]
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin evokes familiar praise for America’s founding fathers often located in popular narratives about American history. Isaacson believe ‘Ben’ stands out from the other founding fathers as an accessible, friendly, but extremely intelligent average joe. “he was America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategists.” By portraying himself as a backwoods sage,” Isaacson argues, Franklin tried “to create a new American archetype.” After all, “We see his reflection in our own time.” Maybe Franklin succeeded in creating this new archetype, but no in the way Isaacson imagines.
The election of Donald Trump to the American presidency shed light on the prevalence of slavery, invisible to so many white Americans. We have not come a long way since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. And if anyone has doubt whether Trump’s base is racist, let us remember that former Klan Wizard David Duke encourages fellow white-supremacist to support Trump. As most minorities know, race did not disappear. Although writers celebrate American exceptionalism and hero-myths of the founding fathers, many other scholars show that that race was a central concern in colonial and antebellum America. In fact, race is a quintessential aspect of American history.
Franklin’s Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind portrays two important historical perspectives—American exceptionalism and Universal History—and their relation to racism.[3] American exceptionalism is predicated on the idea that America differs in kind with any other nation. Franklin viewed America as the “city upon the hill” a beacon for modernity and the Enlightenment. American exceptionalism focuses on the idea that it was created consciously created through a rebellion and a utopian vision of working republic, where all people—white men—were created equally. America did not have the long history of monarchies and traditions that obscured Reason’s search for truth.
Franklin argued that the main duty of a founding father was to civilize a territory. During the Enlightenment, scholars developed Universal History, which suggested that all human societies followed the same path of development. Although there were variations according to specific scholars, the most prevalent timeline of development suggested: in the beginning were hunters and gathers (known as savages). The second stage was pastoralism or husbandry where societies depended on animals and simple horticulture (referred to as barbarians). Scholars argued that agriculture, the third stage, was quintessential component of civilization. Scholars also considered a fourth stage—commerce.
John Locke stated that “in the beginning everything was America,” meaning that indigenous American presented an early stage in social development and that the land was untouched by civilizing factors— agriculture.[4]It was the duty of America’s founding fathers to implement civilization. “America is chiefly occupied by Indians, who subsist mostly by Hunting.” Hunters and gatherers owned no land (private property), which was a quintessential aspect of civilization. The founding fathers of a nation, according to Franklin, were to start factors of civilization e.g. private property and agriculture.
Hence the Prince that acquires new territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes natives to give his own people room; the Legislator that makes effectual laws for promoting of trade, increasing Employment, improving land by more or better Tillage; providing more food by Fisheries; securing property, &c. and the man that invents new trades, arts or manufactures, or new improvements in husbandry may be properly called Fathers of their Nation, as they are the cause of the generation of multitudes, by the encouragement they afford marriage.[5]
Once the founding fathers eradicated Native Americans, white people could easily settle the land, but they needed laborers for their plantations. Britons made the mistake of using Africans for slavery. This affected Europeans’ work ethic. “The negroes brought into the English Sugar Islands have greatly diminished the whites there; the poor are by this means deprived of employment.”[6]In the Northern colonies, slaves are not in as high demand as the sugar plantations. However, “slaves also pejorate the Families that use them; the white children become proud, disgusted with labour and being educated in idleness are rendered unfit to get a Living by industry.”[7]Slavery, in other words, made white people lazy.
Franklin’s study of populations reflects a trans-Atlantic interest in the study of populations for reasons of state. “Demographic concerns shaped projects of social engineering, Empire building, and economic improvement” Ted McCormick, from above quote. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that “one of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth-century was the emergence of ‘population’ as an economic and political problem.”[8]Foucault revealed how discourses created both an epistemology and ontology of the subject of the discourses i.e. knowledge of sexuality created and defined sexuality itself. For Foucault, ‘populations,’ aided in creating biopower over people. Biopower, according to Foucault, is a type of knowledge/ power over biological subjects, a power that creates standards of normativity, ideal kinds of biological states, etc. Slave populations presented Europeans with an easy means of manipulating populations through labor organization. Franklin’s essay can be seen as a form of bio-power on a large scale, as he wanted populations to be controlled so that only whites inhabited America.
At the end of the essay, Franklin tells readers who should inhabit America: “the number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly so… the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair and opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.”[9]
Franklin’s essay portrays a nation engineered using biopower to create a haven of white Europeans. This rhetoric continues in today’s racial divide with Trump as the front man “to make America great again.” He spent most of his presidency undoing the policies of Barack Obama. Although Obama was a typical imperialist, he was also a black man and this infuriated Trump and his followers. America is far from an egalitarian nation stratification between race, class, and gender is a hallmark of American history. Franklin’s essay is one voice among many that sought to engineer a white populace.
Notes
[1]Isaacson, Walter. 2004. Benjamin Franklin. New York: Simon and Schuster.
[2]Benjamin, Franklin. n.d. “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751”. Ardent Media. Accessed January 10, 2019.
[3]Here I use ‘racism’ loosely. Racism as we know it today, emerged in the 19thcentury, when thinkers tried to apply biological aspects to different people. As we know, there is no biological determinant of race e.g. all humans are part of the same species. In the eighteenth century, there was no concept of race, Enlightenment thinkers offered theories about the effect of climate on societies that made nations differ from each other.
[4]Lowi, Theodore J. 1996. The End of the Republican Era. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 3.
[5]Benjamin, Franklin. n.d. “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751”. Ardent Media. Accessed January 10, 2019, 221.
[6]Ibid.
[7]Ibid.
[8]Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 25.
[9]Benjamin, Franklin. n.d. “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751”. Ardent Media. Accessed January 10, 2019, 224.
