Benjamin Franklin's Evolving Views on Race and Ethnicity

Beginning of article

How DO STUDENTS react when they read this passage (see page 10)?

   [The immigrants] who come [to
   America] are generally of the most
   ignorant stupid sort of their own
   nation, ... Their own clergy have
   very little influence over the people ...
   Not being used to liberty, they know
   not how to make a modest use of it ...
   they are not esteemed men till they
   have shown their manhood by beating
   their mothers ... now they come in
   droves ... Few of their children in the
   country learn English ...

The author is none other than Benjamin Franklin--inventor, diplomat, and founder-writing in 1753 about German immigrants to America. (1) Without knowing that, however, some readers might guess that the author was writing in the second half of the 1800s, during the great wave of Chinese immigration, or in the early 1900s, when immigrants from Eastern Europe crowded onto Ellis Island. Others might guess that it's a letter to the editor from a current newspaper.

"Swarthy" Germans and the Peculiar Institution

Franklin was clearly unhappy about the great number of Germans who were immigrating to his home town of Philadelphia, even though many supported him by patronizing his printing business. (2) Before the Revolutionary War, he grumbled about Philadelphia's bilingual (English and German) street signs and complained that the Pennsylvania parliament needed to use translators. After the war, people considered whether English or German should be the national language, and Franklin …