9/22/2011 – Franklin’s Rhetorical style in “Advice to a Young Tradesman”

In his short information piece, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” Franklin presents us with memorable maxims encouraging the reader to remember that “Time is Money” and equally influential at the time, that “Credit is Money” also. These simple and easy to remember phrases are representative of the lifestyle Franklin liked to cultivate—and his simple rhetorical style makes them even more indelible. In fact, they remain popular maxims to this day. He cleverly puts the terms of savings and interest into metaphoric language that anthropomorphizes currency: “Money can beget Money, and its Offspring can beget more.” This imagery-based language paints a picture in the mind of the reader, solidifying the Additionally, he maintains his obsession with image, and its importance in establishing good credit and consequently good report with creditors: “The Sound of your Hammer at Five in the Morning or Nine at Night, heard by a Creditor, makes him easy Six Months longer. But if he sees you at a Billiard Table, or hear your Voice in a Tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his Money the next Day.”

These lines in Franklin’s short advice column stood out to me, as I’m sure they did to many colonial American’s. In actuality, it seems that this advice would have served all colonials well, not just the tradesmen. Style is the marriage of form and function, and Franklin’s words merge both perfectly here. While the message is an extremely vital one for the self-education of the population and the progress of society as a whole, it would not be communicated as effectively in another tone. This short and simple article makes use of economic writing and real life examples that resonate with the common man who would have read it in the mid-eighteenth century. In fact, keeping with his maxim that “Time is Money,” I’m sure that Franklin took into account his own words in the drafting of the advice.

#9/22/2011

Back to Basics

Every morning, I wake up to a newspaper article detailing the dire economic environment we all live in. This morning, I learned that Standard & Poor’s had downgraded Italy’s credit rating. This morning, I read an article that outlined the reasons Greece should simply default on its debt rather than continue to receive aid packages from members of the Eurozone and the United States. This morning, I learned that an online poker site was actually a Ponzi Scheme that robbed its loyal customers of more than $440 million. This morning, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for global growth to a measly four percent in its flagship report, the “World Economic Outlook.” In that same report, the IMF warned that the United States and many European economies are on track to have a “lost decade” like the one Japan’s economy experienced in the 1990s. This means that there is a chance that one decade of my life as an American citizen will be considered a wash; an era devoid of progress. Today, money is more complicated than ever before. Perhaps this is why I found Franklin’s two pieces, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One” and “Rules Proper to be Observed in Trade” so refreshing, yet simultaneously so disheartening. Money was so simple back then! Franklin writes, “Remember that CREDIT is Money,” (p. 320). If banks had printed this line in bold letters at the top of every mortgage contract that was issued before 2007, perhaps people would have thought twice about taking loans to purchase homes they could never afford to own. On the next page, he asserts, “Waste neither Time nor Money, but make the best Use of both. He that gets all he can honestly, and saves all he gets (necessary Expences excepted) will certainly become RICH,” (p. 321-2). As far as I can tell, never before in human history has this sentiment been so widely disregarded as it is today. Of course, the majority of Americans earn honest livings and practice frugality when they can, but that’s certainly not what the newspapers remind us of each morning. Instead, we are bombarded by stories about the seemingly rampant dishonesty in business today. I don’t think Franklin could have ever dreamed that one day, long after he was gone, the nature and culture of money would become so convoluted. Economists, whose job it is to study the history of financial markets and to forecast the economic future of America, don’t truly know how to fix the mess we’re in. Yet, when broken down in Franklin’s pieces, the same basic rules still apply. I don’t know if we will be able to avoid a “lost decade,” but getting back to basics certainly couldn’t hurt.

Financial Fears and Sexist Laws 9/15

The first time I read this collection of works on women’s place in society, I was too infuriated by Rousseau’s piece on the “Duties of Women” to notice much else. His misogynistic arguments about training young girls to submit themselves to the will of others made me furious for the generations of women raised under this pretext. His statement that “woman is specially made for man’s delight” was especially disconcerting, as it seems to mirror assertions like “dogs are a man’s best friend.” After reading Rousseau, even Wollstonecraft’s piece seemed to cater to sexist social constructs.
However re-reading these texts in preparation for this blog post allowed me to get past some of the sexist reasoning and look at the roots of the arguments. What I became conscious of the second time around is that most of the motivations for pigeonholing women with laws or blanket statements about human nature have nothing to do with women themselves. The driving force behind a treaty on women’s duties or laws forbidding children out of wedlock appears to be based on economic fears—not the fact that women are unfit to govern themselves.
Rousseau claims that it is “treason” for a woman to commit adultery because the child would literally be “robbing” the woman’s husband and diminishing the inheritance of his legitimate children. His argument has nothing to with any difference between the moral character of men and women but instead focuses on the economic implications of affairs. It makes fiscal sense that a man would want to establish harsher penalties for female adultery, because his money is at stake. Additionally, Rousseau’s arguments about the education of girls are based on the fact that women will forever be economically dependent on men, not on arguments about their inferior mental capacity. He states that women must rely on their natural cunning in order to get things, but ends his piece with the warning that men should guard against the abuse of this ‘gift’—implying that the gullible man may experience financial losses at the hands of a manipulative wife.
The Speech of Miss Polly Baker also focuses less on the capabilities or tendencies of women and more on the financial and economic aspects of Polly Baker’s innocence. She points out that she has raised 5 children without burdening the state and therefore has committed no crime. She also suggests the biggest fault she has committed is depriving the state of a marriage fee. Even Franklin’s humorous pieces that address married life and women’s duties are written about the problems that can occur when women take control of finances. It seems that men during this period were less concerned with women’s “inferior” nature than they were about their bank accounts. Unfortunately that seems to have inspired them to curtail the rights of women until they felt economically "safe," rather than giving women the ability to make and spend their own money.