The Civic Entrepreneur
Ben Franklin and the City He Built
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William Penn imagined Philadelphia as a utopian “greene country towne” when he founded the city in 1682. Unwalled, and “laid out with a beautiful regularity, the streets large, strait, and crossing each other at right angles,” Philadelphia would avoid the crowding and unsanitary conditions of Europe while serving as a symbol of openness and religious toleration. Seventy-five years later, Benjamin Franklin encountered a city that “had the disgrace of suffering those streets to remain long unpaved,” kicking up oppressive dust clouds in dry weather and transformed into quagmires when wet. Franklin took it upon himself to find a neighborhood streetsweeper, persuade his neighbors to fund him, and build the public case for legislation to pave the city’s streets. This kind of practical civics and public spiritedness—this was Franklin at his most characteristic. He understood that “these trifling matters” were the foundations upon which great institutions were built.1
Franklin was the nation’s first civic entrepreneur.
From the time he was a young printer in his early twenties, Franklin set out not only to improve his own moral character and financial station, but those of his fellow strivers. In 1727, at the age of twenty-one, he founded the Junto, a club of young tradesmen, artisans, and “leather aprons” like himself—social aspirants excluded from the more exclusive gentlemen’s societies inhabited by Philadelphia’s elite. As Walter Isaacson describes it, the Junto “celebrated civic virtue, mutual benefits, the improvement of self and society, and the proposition that hardworking citizens could do well by doing good.” More civic laboratory than discussion club, its members identified practical problems, debated solutions, and transformed those ideas into institutions. From the Junto would emerge proposals for neighborhood constables, a volunteer fire company, and the academy that would become the University of Pennsylvania.
Its earliest and most enduring success was a library. Initially collected from Junto members’ personal collections, the Library Company of Philadelphia became America’s first subscription library in 1731—and still exists today. Franklin believed that democratized knowledge “improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries,” and credited the Library and its many successors with educating the colonists about their rights. The Latin motto Franklin gave the library was as much his life’s credo and could equally grace the lintels of any of his institutions: Communiter Bona profundere Deum est—“To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.”
