Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as an Eighteenth-Century Omnivore’s Dilemma Dana Medoro University of Manitoba Custom makes killing, handling, and feeding upon flesh and blood, without distinction, so easy and familiar unto mankind. And the same is to be under- stood of men killing and oppressing those of their own kind. […] If men have but Power and Custom on their side, they think all is well. Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) My refusing to eat Flesh occasioned an Inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my Singularity. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) lthough Benjamin Franklin tried his hand at virtually every intel- Alectual pursuit the eighteenth century had to offer—from scientific inven- tion and music to politics and philosophy—he always referred to himself as the “printer of Philadelphia.” And although he died a rich and internation- ally renowned man, he paints a vivid picture of himself in the early pages of The Autobiography as a half-starved runaway stuffing bread into his mouth as he wanders through Philadelphia looking for somewhere to sleep. Having just escaped his violent brother, to whom he had been indentured as a printer’s apprentice, Franklin sets into motion what he came to stand for in and beyond the revolutionary era: the promise of a self-made man, free from tyranny and caste. Keeping a sense of this promise or potential ESC 36.4 (December 2010): 91–107 at the surface of his recollections, he skilfully crafts his autobiography according to a philosophy of character as something made, broken down, and reassembled, like a composed form of moveable type in a printing Dana Medoro is press. Unfinished and open to revision—he repeatedly describes his mis- Associate Professor of takes and infidelities, for instance, as errata, a printer’s idiom—Franklin American Literature also comes to us in a famously incomplete manuscript, broken off at key and Culture in the points in the narrative and posthumously published. All of these rup- Department of English, tures notwithstanding, a progression of overdetermined analogies con- Film, and Theatre at the necting meat and violence moves across Franklin’s self-presentation. In University of Manitoba. addition, the powerfully articulated, influential vegetarian philosophies of the eighteenth century align these analogies with the main currents of Enlightenment thought: not only its theories of rational self-creation and governance (versus aristocratic inheritance) but also its repudiation of tyranny over other beings, human and animal. From Locke, Rousseau, and Buffon to Adam Smith and Voltaire, the foremost thinkers of Franklin’s time grappled with or at least addressed the use of animals for food in one way or another, raising questions about human cruelty, economic efficiency, and social hierarchy.1 In Tristram Stuart’s words: Vegetarianism circled the full gamut of eighteenth-century society.[...] People connected their food with morality and they had mechanisms for dealing with the theological con- text of sympathy and the health impacts of meat. In the era before the French Revolution, the landscape was already dot- ted with wild men seeking for a union with nature, which the Romantics would take to new extremes. From the anatomical observations of the scientists to the social anthropology of the Rousseauists, man’s nature herbivore or carnivore had become a central preoccupation of European culture. (255) These intellectual movements also contributed to the period’s revival of interest in Pythagoras, the mythical Greek founder of ascetic vegetarian- ism and exponent of the doctrine of animal souls.2 It is Pythagoreanism, as I will ultimately argue, that underlies the rituals of self-improvement and 1 In Thoughts Concerning Education (1692), for instance, John Locke critiques the custom of “eating too much flesh” and of misleading children into it (quoted in Stuart 145). Stuart’s Bloodless Revolution also includes discussions of Rousseau, Buffon, Smith, and Voltaire, among others, showing how far-reaching the issue of meat eating was. See in particular Stuart’s chapter 20, subtitled “Voltaire’s Hindu Prophet.” 2 For a thorough background on the revival of Pythagoreanism in the eighteenth century, see Stuart’s Bloodless Revolution. See also Colin Spencer’s The Heretic’s 92 | Medoro abstinence from meat that are mapped out in The Autobiography, and it is Enlightenment philosophy, with its anti-aristocratic foundations, that in turn links those rituals to Franklin’s representation of the American War of Independence. Franklin conceptually pairs the British domination of colonial America with the hierarchical authority of humans over other animals, powerfully leveling both at one point when he reckons with the idea that meat is the murder of a fellow being. Like the Enlightenment thinkers who contemplated Pythagorean prin- ciples—and took them seriously enough to either borrow or reject them3— Franklin incorporates them into political and personal re-compositions of his character and country. In other words, he takes the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis into a secular way of understanding or ratio- nalizing the kind of metamorphoses needed to reinvent himself as an American and a revolutionary. This idea falls in line with those of other Franklin scholars, concurring that his composite self-portrayal is one of the most interesting facets of The Autobiography; as Michael Warner puts it, “Franklin thought of his own life with the detachment with which one arranges objects, thus bringing his career under the structure of rationality […] and public involvement” (Warner 89). My main intention, however, is to ask why this career comes into being through the precepts of radical vegetarianism (persistently overlooked in Franklin scholarship) and why Franklin’s famous rationality falters before the lure of meat. The radical vegetarians of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries—Thomas Tryon and John Oswald, for instance—were sometimes sim- ilarly inconsistent, Oswald’s compassion for animals and his revolutionary zeal particularly “scary and puzzling,” according to Tristram Stuart (299). Yet, as Stuart further demonstrates, the belief in egalitarian societies, both for humans and between humans and other animals, accompanied calls to revolution at the same time that a “bloodless revolution” of vegetarianism developed as a way of articulating positions against violent governance. Franklin’s Autobiography illuminates these complicated undertows: his characterization of America’s founding or independence pairs the “blood- less diet” of the early eighteenth-century anti-aristocratic vegetarianism with justifications for the bloodshed of the war. Such analogies form part of the text’s political unconscious, for, as Edward Cahill asserts in “Benjamin Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Tryon also published a book on Pythagoras’s “mystik philosophy.” 3 I return to this point later in this article, noting the philosophers who addressed the Pythagorean concept of animal souls or metempsychosis. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography | 93 Franklin’s Interiors,” The Autobiography remains fascinating and important because of such inadvertent disclosures and these disclosures accompany its “anti-luxury politics” (3)—a politics that seems inevitably to influence Franklin’s depictions of food. If Franklin’s text distinguishes the violence of the revolutionary war as a form of colonial self-defense, as a refusal to be butchered by the English, it may not be overtly intentional, but it corresponds to the representation of his vegetarianism as a form of independence from his violent brother. And while his initial reluctance to break with England can be traced to the pacifism of the Quakers with whom Franklin was associated, it is also the European Enlightenment that illuminates a complex, sometimes contradictory, politics of vegetarianism at the foundations of his revolu- tionary awakening. As his memories come together across the different sections of his book to reveal an aversion to violence—Franklin worked for ten years trying to prevent war with England—this aversion arises in proximity to his references to meat eating and then metamorphoses into a form of American self-assertion. In Vegetarian America: A History, authors Karen and Michael Iacobbo assert that “the recorded history of vegetarianism in the United States, scant as it has been, has usually been written about not only as an anomaly but also as a quirk of individual personalities rather than as a significant element of the past to be studied” (3). This tends to be precisely how Ben- jamin Franklin’s interest in vegetarianism is classified and recorded: as an idiosyncrasy of his famously clear-headed personality or as a momentary diversion in the progression of his career.4 Although Franklin’s refusal to eat meat as a young man often justifies his inclusion in lists of vegetarian icons, claiming him among the ranks for a time, it is left unexplored or tangentially related to the transatlantic reach of early eighteenth-century radical vegetarian writer Thomas Tryon. Such references usually appear like this: at an early age, Franklin came across Tryon’s highly influential treatise The Way to Health (first published in 1691), committed himself to its dietary ethic, and then one day succumbed (probably salivating) to the smell of fried fish and never looked back. 4 In a recent article titled “Benjamin Franklin and the Limits of Secular Society,” Nancy Glazener brushes past the matter in parenthetical haste, noting that “Franklin’s