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“Protestant Ethic” is a widely misapplied term, invented by Max Weber, the German sociologist who relied heavily on the writings of Benjamin Franklin to define that concept in his celebrated work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Weber demonstrated boundless imagination and covert irony, slyly deforming Franklin's jolly image, and transforming Poor Richard into Ebenezer Scrooge. In fact, the man behind the playful mask of Poor Richard was a precursor of the lavish “Robber Barons,” especially Andrew Carnegie, who so consciously emulated Franklin. The Robber Barons were central archetypes for the American sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, who formulated The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and Veblen, who is celebrated for his irony, would have been more justified than Weber in using Franklin to illustrate his thesis. In fact, Franklin, who made such enviable use of his leisure, personified Veblen's complicated, and frequently oversimplified concept of “Conspicuous Consumption.” Undeniably, certain prophets of the Gilded Age skillfully developed a rhetoric resembling that of Franklin's mythical Poor Richard, among them, Booker T. Washington, the wily adviser to striving African Americans, and a notable beneficiary of the American tradition of private philanthropy that Carnegie inherited from Benjamin Franklin. Henry Ford was another baron who became a philanthropist. He played the role of a Poor, penny-pinching Richard, but he lived well, and while preaching thrift, he promoted inflation in order to encourage consumer spending.
Frederick Douglass may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.
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