Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography

Ragged Dick, and indeed all of Alger's rags-to-respectability works, would not have been possible without the help of Benjamin Franklin, or rather, without the help of his famous Autobiography. Now, I have to confess right off the bat to being rather disappointed in the Franklin's attempt at life writing. The introduction warned that it was choppy (having been written over the course of a couple decades, 1771-1790), incomplete (only covering Franklin's life up to 1759), and uneven (written first as a personal work for his son, then slowly morphing into a document for publication), but I confess I was still unprepared for the cobbled-together feeling of the thing. Still, it is a terribly important work, and therefore worth reading, and I'm sure some of his other writings are more enjoyable.

But why you ask is it important to Ragged Dick, and indeed to all of Alger's rag-tag bunch of orphans and drunkard's sons? Because of Franklin's careful construction of the self-improving self, the boot-strapping American achiever. What Franklin gives us in the Autobiography is a portrait of the quintessential American: practical, inventive, ambitious, successful, hard-working. It does not matter where you come from, Franklin tells us; all that matters is what you do.

And what you do makes you who you are. Franklin's course of self-improvement involves scheduling your time into bracketed periods for particular tasks (for instance: 5-8 am "Rise, wash and address Powerful Goodness! Contrive day's business, and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study, and breakfast.") and developing 13 identified moral virtues one at a time all the while charting your progress on a grid. In this way a man may become organized, successful, and virtuous. I'm telling you, Stephen Covey has nothing on Benjamin Franklin.

But what does all of this have to do with the con man? The confidence man is the counter-narrative here; he is what happens when otherwise gifted individuals ignore the exhortations of their parents, their mentors, their community, and their nation and instead choose the easy way to wealth. And yet the narrative of the con man is also Franklin's, for what is the Autobiography but a skilled self-presentation, a symphony on surfaces. When Franklin finds Humility a particularly sticky virtue to acquire he celebrates that he has at least attained the appearance of it.

And can't one pursue a life of crime in much the same way that one pursues a life of virtue? Franklin's plan of personal development inspired boys' advice books by the hundreds as well as Alger's works, but it's also clear that he also inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of the young Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald is clearly taking a swipe at Franklin's course in the virtues when he has his hero follow a similar plan, with results that are more bootleg than bootstrap. Here we see the con man and Franklin's ideal American collide, blurring all the lines in between and touching on that theme familiar to readers of con man literature: the statesman and the con man have everything in common.