Trouble in the Colonial Melting Pot

PHILIP GLEASON


WE ALL KNOW the Founding Fathers have, of late, fallen upon hard times. Even so, it comes as a shock that Benjamin Franklin, long held up as an model of enlightened tolerance, should now be branded a racist. Historians of immigration are of course aware that, as Carl Wittke observed some sixty years ago, Franklin was "not always laudatory" in what he said about the Germans of Pennsylvania. However, the emphasis on his "broad racism" is more recent and is, at least in part, a function of the sharp distinction drawn since the 1970s between race and ethnicity. Ronald Takaki is, in my opinion, the key person in this downward revision of Franklin's reputation. In his Iron Cages (1979); in an essay reprinted in his widely-used anthology, From Different Shores (1987, 1994); and in his multicultural history, A Different Mirror (1993), Takaki features Franklin's racism quite prominently but pays almost no attention to his derogatory comments about the Germans.