The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (123 page)

Even more
amazing than flying was “animal magnetism.” Franklin was indirectly responsible for this strangest enthusiasm of pre-revolutionary Paris, somewhat to his chagrin. Its principal author, Friedrich Anton Mesmer, had studied medicine at Vienna during the period when Franklin’s electrical experiments were becoming known on the European continent. Like many of Franklin’s readers from the Poor Richard days, Mesmer believed in astrology; having learned from Franklin how lighting carried celestial energy to earth, he easily concluded that electricity provided an invisible but pervasive fluid that linked the stars to human lives. Unfortunately for both his scientific theory and his medical practice, electricity was unpleasant to patients, sometimes violently so. But Mesmer was resourceful, and substituting magnetism for electricity as the invisible transmitter, he developed a flourishing practice stroking patients with magnets. In time he dispensed with the magnets, relying simply on his own powers of persuasion to release the therapeutic effects of “animal magnetism.”

Mesmer arrived in Paris about a year after Franklin did, and to the dismay of the medical establishment he quickly cultivated a large and devoted following. The king’s brother, the queen, and such other notables as Lafayette flocked to his group-therapy sessions, which featured hypnosis, apparitions, and messages from beyond the horizon of the quotidian world; typically the groups dissolved into mass hysteria, to the
shrieking delight of all present. Wealthy older women and attractive younger ones were particularly susceptible to the spells of the handsome Austrian—a fact not lost on their husbands and fathers.

Mesmer’s success infuriated the French medical establishment, which denied him a license and sought means to banish him. The government stayed out of the doctors’ spat until Mesmer created a joint stock company to promote his teachings, and raised a subscription of more than 300,000 livres. This moved the animal magnetism debate from the court of science to that of fraud.

In March 1784 King Louis appointed a committee of the Paris faculty of medicine to investigate; the distinguished members included Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who would add a word to several languages by his advocacy of the use of a swift and thereby comparatively humane decapitation machine. The doctors decided they needed help from the Academy of Sciences, whereupon Louis added five members, including the great chemist Lavoisier—who would meet his end at the device endorsed by Dr. Guillotin—and the eminent American, Dr. Franklin.

Franklin had met Mesmer before, in the company of Madame Brillon. Mesmer employed Franklin’s armonica for background music during his séances, and Franklin naturally took an interest. He and Madame Brillon quickly determined that though Mesmer knew little about electricity or magnetism, he played the armonica passably. In her response to one of Franklin’s descriptions of an afterlife in which he and she would consummate their love, Madame Brillon remarked, “In heaven, M. Mesmer will content himself with playing the armonica and will not bother us with his electrical fluid!”

Franklin did not altogether deny the efficacy of Mesmer’s techniques, though he questioned the Austrian’s explanation. The human body was a marvelous mechanism, Franklin told a person who had asked his opinion of Mesmer, and all the more marvelous for being connected to the human mind.

There being so many disorders which cure themselves, and such a disposition in mankind to deceive themselves and one another on these occasions, and living long having given me frequent opportunity of seeing certain remedies cried up as curing every thing, and yet soon after totally laid aside as useless, I cannot but fear that the expectation of great advantage from this new method of treating diseases will prove a delusion.

That delusion may, however, and in some cases, be of use while it lasts. There are in every great rich city a number of persons who are never in health, because they are fond of medicines and always taking them, whereby they derange the natural functions and hurt their constitutions. If these people can be persuaded to forbear their drugs in expectation of being cured by only the physician’s finger or an iron rod pointing at them, they may possibly find good effects, though they mistake the cause.

The royal investigation commenced in the spring of 1784. It was complicated by Mesmer’s refusal to participate. He left the demonstration of his techniques to a disciple, Dr. Charles Deslon, but cleverly distanced himself from Deslon, saying the doctor had borrowed his ideas yet lacked a full understanding of them. In other words, if the commission believed Deslon, he—Mesmer—would be vindicated; if Deslon fell, Mesmerism would still stand.

Franklin’s kidney stone prevented his leaving Passy, so Deslon and the commission came to him. The Mesmeric cure was applied to several patients with maladies ranging from asthma to tumors. The results were ambiguous at best. In one of the more dramatic moments of the experiment, Deslon purportedly magnetized an apricot tree in Franklin’s garden. A blindfolded twelve-year-old boy was then led to four un-magnetized trees, which he embraced, one after the other, to determine the magnetism they contained. At the first tree he sweated and coughed. At the second he said he felt dizzy and his head hurt. At the third his head hurt more and he reported feeling the magnetism growing (although he was in fact moving farther from the test tree). At the fourth tree he fainted, which terminated the experiment.

Franklin and the commissioners filed their report, with his name heading the list of signatures. A public version was hurried into print, and twenty thousand copies were snatched up. The report declared the claims of animal magnetism unproven; such mitigation of symptoms as appeared were due to the customary causes of self-delusion and ordinary remission.

A second version of the report was read to the Academy of Sciences but otherwise kept confidential. It addressed the moral—which was to say, sexual—dangers to women of the Mesmer approach. “Touch them in one point, and you touch them everywhere,” it noted suggestively and most disapprovingly. By all means, the practice of animal magnetism must be discouraged.

The Franklin report did just that. A contemporary engraving showed Franklin and his colleagues delivering a copy of their report; the document
radiated a magnetic force of its own that overturned Mesmer’s apparatus, to the discomfiture of his patients, including one half-dressed and blindfolded woman. Mesmer and Deslon were shown fleeing the scene, the former on a broomstick, the latter on a winged donkey.

Yet Franklin was not so sure what he and the commission had accomplished. “The report is published and makes a great deal of talk,” he wrote Temple. “Every body agrees it is well written, but many wonder at the force of imagination described in it, as occasioning convulsions &c., and some fear that consequences may be drawn from it by infidels to weaken our faith in some of the miracles of the New Testament…. Some think it will put an end to Mesmerism. But there is a wonderful deal of credulity in the world, and deceptions as absurd have supported themselves for ages.”

Franklin
preferred philosophy, but diplomacy insisted. As ranking American minister in Europe, he carried the burden of counseling emigrants to the new nation on what to expect. And a burden it was. “I am pestered continually,” he wrote Charles Thomson, “with numbers of letters from people in different parts of Europe who would go to settle in America but who manifest very extravagant expectations, such as I can by no means encourage, and who appear otherwise to be very improper persons.” To save himself trouble Franklin composed and printed a pamphlet entitled
Information to Those Who Would Remove to America.
The pamphlet’s nominal purpose was to correct common misconceptions about America; it also served as a confession by Franklin as to what America stood for.

First among the misconceptions was that Americans were rich but ignorant, able, and willing to shower wealth upon Europeans with the slightest ingenuity. Second was the belief that with so many new governments and so few families of standing, the thirteen states must have hundreds of offices available to well-born Europeans willing to cross the water. Third was the notion that the new governments bestowed land gratis on strangers, complete with livestock, tools, and slaves. “These are all wild imaginings,” Franklin declared, “and those who go to America with expectations founded upon them will surely find themselves disappointed.”

What was the reality? “Though there are in that country few people so miserable as the poor of Europe, there are also very few that in
Europe would be called rich. It is rather a happy mediocrity that prevails.” Americans were far from ignorant; their country supported nine colleges or universities and numerous academies. The several states did employ many people, but those employed often served at personal sacrifice. “It is a rule established in some of the states that no office should be so profitable as to make it desirable.”

Birth counted for next to nothing in America. “People do not enquire, concerning a stranger,
What is he?
But
What can he do?
If he has any useful art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him; but a mere man of quality, who on that account wants to live upon the public by some office or salary, will be despised and disregarded.” This practical outlook colored every aspect of American life. “The people have a saying, that God Almighty is himself a mechanic, the greatest in the universe; and he is respected more for the variety, ingenuity and utility of his handiworks than for the antiquity of his family.”

The only encouragement offered to strangers was what derived from liberty and good laws. Who came without a fortune must work to eat. “America is the land of labour, and by no means what the English call
Lubberland,
and the French
Pays de Cocagne,
where the streets are said to be paved with half-peck loaves, the houses tiled with pancakes, and where the fowls fly about already roasted, crying,
Come eat me!
”

Who, then,
should
travel to America? “Hearty young labouring men, who understand the husbandry of corn and cattle…. Artisans of all the necessary and useful kinds…. Persons of moderate fortunes and capitals, who having a number of children to provide for, are desirous of bringing them up to industry.” Such people would find opportunities for material improvement unequaled in Europe.

They would find something else as well. America was a land where virtue grew among the corn. “Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of the morals and virtue of a nation. Hence bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents.” Comforting too was the encouragement American liberty and tolerance afforded to real religion. “Atheism is unknown there, infidelity rare and secret, so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an atheist or an infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness with which the different sects treat each other, by the remarkable prosperity with which he has been pleased to favour the whole country.”