by Ralph Frasca

Ralph Frasca’s piece shows us how Ben Franklin’s ascendance from lowly printer to wealthy impresario parallels the development of the American press itself. When Franklin was a very young man, being a printer ruined his chances of marriage; his intended’s parents, like most respectable people of the day, regarded printing as dirty, undignified, unprofitable “mechanic’s” work. By the time he died, Franklin was the richest man in America, renowned for his innumerable talents, including publishing. Over the course of the 18th century, Franklin helped to make printing respectable and to enshrine freedom of the press as an essential American value.

Frasca attributes the evolution and expansion of the American colonial press to four factors: rising literacy rates; decreasing British censorship; the apprentice system; and printing networks. America’s press initially got off to a slow start—the first legal and continuously published newspaper did not appear until 1704, with John Campbell’s Boston News-Letter. This remained the only newspaper in North America until 1719. British governors feared the heretical and chaotic effect of a free press in the colonies, and worked hard to suppress it. But both the printing boom and the growing rebellion were unstoppable, thanks in no small part to Franklin’s elaborate system of printing networks that stretched from New England to the West Indies. Frasca describes how Franklin’s innovative, franchise-like operations transformed printing from the domain of wealthy family “dynasties”­­—once the only entities that could afford it—to a respectable and influential art practiced by a thriving professional class. By 1776, a distinctly American press was an essential component of the emerging American republic.

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Image:  Franklin as a Printer, from John Bigelow, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 1868; illustrated and inlaid by Joseph M. P. and Emily Price, 1887).