Englishness, Britishness, Americanness, what does it all mean? Franklin thought critically about identity. His cartoon is a paper embodiment that evidences his views towards American and Great Britain. Todd Thompson’s 2007 scholarship, "Invectives...against the Americans": Benjamin Franklin's Satiric Nationalism in the Stamp Act Crisis, demystifies Franklin’s intents behind identity. Just like in his print neworks, Franklin took a neutral approach to also politically denouncing the Stamp Act. In this conjuncture in the communication circuit, the three identities: Englishness, Britishness, and Americanness were ironically supporting each other. In a series of satirical letter, Thompson examines that “Franklin navigates these competing nationalisms, Franklin's letters augmented political polemic with belletristic literary devices in an aesthetic attempt to deny the "otherness" of Americans (thus reclaiming their "British-ness") while defending the very 'American" characteristics on which English nationalists based their "othering" attacks. (25) Franklin’s neutrality was merely a front, and his catalyst for satire was the Stamp Act. On one hand, the colonists were expected to have values of British culture -- imposed upon them by British imperialism. But Englishness was not reserved for Americans; it was only for the elite political powers. The expectations for colonists to act British but not English was an ironic juxtaposition. In its very nature, it created as Thompson writes, an “otherness” concerning American identity. Tracking back to Franklin’s neutrality, Thompson concludes his argument by asserting that Franklin strategically used his gray stance to draft an American identity. Thompson writes,
“This and other satiric letters that Franklin wrote and published during the Stamp Act Crisis enabled him to test and circulate ideas-in London, in America, and in his own mind-that he dare not speak in his official, diplomatic capacity as a colonial agent. The intensification of a culturally exclusive English nationalism required that Franklin combine his claims for the unity of American and British interests with satirical defenses of Americans themselves. In these letters, Franklin contemplated and disseminated notions of cultural resistance as political resistance by performing a national difference that defensively embraced the very American-ness that English writers had stereotyped pejoratively. (34)
The very medium being repressed (paper) allowed Franklin to cleverly convey messages that unraveled the otherness of Americans. The Stamp Act drastically shifted the political and economic climate of the United States. As Thompson’s recalls, Great Britain could send its troops to America to enforce the Stamp Act, but it would be a vain effort. Something, an otherness, about the attempt to control paper did not settle well with colonial America. Through the Stamp Act, Americans began to formulate the foundation for constitutional liberty of no taxation without representation.
“This and other satiric letters that Franklin wrote and published during the Stamp Act Crisis enabled him to test and circulate ideas-in London, in America, and in his own mind-that he dare not speak in his official, diplomatic capacity as a colonial agent. The intensification of a culturally exclusive English nationalism required that Franklin combine his claims for the unity of American and British interests with satirical defenses of Americans themselves. In these letters, Franklin contemplated and disseminated notions of cultural resistance as political resistance by performing a national difference that defensively embraced the very American-ness that English writers had stereotyped pejoratively. (34)
The very medium being repressed (paper) allowed Franklin to cleverly convey messages that unraveled the otherness of Americans. The Stamp Act drastically shifted the political and economic climate of the United States. As Thompson’s recalls, Great Britain could send its troops to America to enforce the Stamp Act, but it would be a vain effort. Something, an otherness, about the attempt to control paper did not settle well with colonial America. Through the Stamp Act, Americans began to formulate the foundation for constitutional liberty of no taxation without representation.