Showing papers in "Social Science Information in 1983"

Dr. Benjamin Franklin's celestial telegraph, or Indian blessings to gas-lit American drawing rooms

Abstract: IN HIS CELEBRATED ESSAY, "AMERICA'S COMING OF AGE" (1915), VAN WYCK Brooks developed the influential thesis that American culture seemed forever split between visionaries and practical men, between the acquisition of culture and the acquisition of money, so that the United States seemed to lack a "centre." Brooks presented the "Indianized" image of the ancestor of all "high-brows" and visionaries, Jonathan Edwards, "rapt scholar in his parsonage among the Indians" and confessed to an "old-time and so to speak aboriginal affection" for Edwards. On the other side of Brooks's coin was the "unmitigated practicality" of the prototypical "low-brow," Benjamin Franklin, representative of his own Poor Richard's stark utility. "But where," Brooks concluded, "is all that is real, where is personality and all its works, if it is not essentially somewhere, somehow, in some not very vague way, between."1 Brooks's distinction between the practical scientist-inventor and the visionary theologian and theorist has been reiterated many times, yet needs to be questioned. In American alchemy, for example, the eastern and western traditions-the one leading toward eternal life and the other toward gold-were not only fused, but gave momentum to the exploration of ores and mining in New England. It was as if these seventeenthand eighteenthcentury visionaries were trying to convince Brooks that American visionaries were also setting out to be practical men. Alchemy in America survived through the third decade of the nineteenth century, inspired practical and