David Waldstreicher on Franklin and the Crisis of Representation

[from Waldstriecher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: the Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. U of North Carolina P, 1997.]

As Thomas Gustafson has observed, "In America, the pursuit of republican ideals has always been accompanied by attacks against false representation and fears of the people becoming the dupes of artful words and demagogues." The Revolution itself had begun as a protest against certain corruptions of political representation. [...] The most obvious problem of representation is the unruly discourse of unvirtuous men. The second is these men themselves. The wrong people are taken for patriots and represent the people in places of public trust. Finally, emissions of paper money epitomize all personal and rhetorical inflations as the clamor for it becomes the most un-American of activities. The themes of this conspiracy--paper money, inflated rhetoric, patriotic poseurs--add up to a post-Revolutionary crisis of representation. Real disorder and elite fears convereged in a cultural obsession with the representation of wealth and property, representation in spoken and written words, and the self-representation of persons.

The representation crisis was real, and the debate it spawned was thus part of the very phenomenon that critics of misrepresentations sought to address. These problems attending representation may be seen as subtexts of the more familiar strugles over political representation. But, since these comments on money, rhetoric, and identity appear right next to if not within constitutional debates in the press, it is more illuminating to consider each of them as individually important, albeit inseparable, aspects of a larger cultural moment in which the rapid expansion of political culture and the capitalist marketplace stretched many familiar ways of representing things, persons, and ideas to their limits and beyond (61).

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[Walstrecher diagnoses crisis of representation as the need] for some agreed-upon signs of value amid the reconstitution of political discourse, proprietary wealth, and public identities. In the late eighteenth century, identity itself had become increasingly unstable. Highly mobile young people, particularly young men in cities, found that they could make and remake themselves by manipulating appearances. We have come to associate this kind of identity work with success stories like Benjamin Franklin's, but for every Franklin there were probably many rogues like Stephen Burroughs and outright failures like William Moraley. Anonymity was simultaneously a resource for some and a problem for the culture as a whole. Some could rebuild their reputations from scratch, but everyone had to wonder: Which appearances could one trust? (78).