The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America
While the colonies were securing political separation from England, a group of Americans were instrumental in establishing American intellectual and scientific freedom from European tradition and in developing a vibrant and distinctly practical culture for the new nation. The leading proponents of this independence were the remarkable Benjamin Franklin and his associates (the Junto), including botanist John Bartram, astronomer David Rittenhouse, physician Benjamin Rush, and industrial visionary Tench Coxe. In this highly readable account of the societies (the title one, later the American Philosophical Society, being the prototype), academies, mechanics’ associations, and other social institutions the group engendered that believed science and experimentation to be collective endeavors, Lyons illuminates a formative period in American cultural history, the theme being that “the value of learning and knowledge . . . is directly proportional to its practical import and utility.” While this emphasis originated with early colonists’ need to adapt to an unfamiliar environment, Lyons’ focus on Franklin and Quaker Philadelphia is apt, though he rightly credits an English precedent with the Royal Society. The book will be compared to Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001), which covered a comparably germinal group a century later. --Mark Levine