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Franklin now seems the safest of the founders to celebrate, but when he died, in 1790, he was mistrusted by many in power as a Francophile synonymous with the excesses of the French Revolution. The Senate rejected a proposal to wear badges of mourning in his honor. A year passed before an official eulogy was delivered, by a longtime detractor, Anglican minister William Smith, who belittled Franklin as "ignorant of his own strength."

Condemned as a Jacobin upon his death, he would be satirized as a middlebrow member of the booboisie for more than a century after. Sociologist Max Weber believed Franklin stood for the "earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous engagement in life." Poet John Keats disliked "his mean and thrifty maxims." Historian Charles Angoff labeled him "the father of all the Kiwanians."

"It was elitism, sort of a condescending elitism that looked down on Franklin for having basic middle class values," says Walter Isaacson, author of a 2003 bestseller about Franklin. "For a long time, most intellectuals saw him as a spokesman for capitalism and for making money and getting ahead, a view of America many have had," says historian Gordon Wood.

The denigration of Franklin was partly his own doing. His "Autobiography," unfinished at his death but published posthumously, immortalized him as a crafty self-made man for whom all virtue was but a means to success.

But the "Autobiography" underplays other sides of Franklin: the statesman, dissident and man of conscience, the former slaveholder who eventually called for abolition, the belated rebel who overcame his reverence for the British crown and helped coin one of the era's immortal phrases: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

Franklin is praised now by both the left and right.

"He was a defender of limited government, and he was very much opposed to taking on excessive debt," says Mark Skousen, an author and economist whose edition of the "Autobiography" includes a Franklin quote of appeal to conservatives: "A virtuous and industrious people may be cheaply governed."

David Koepsell, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, said he believes Franklin "would have been dismayed by religious fundamentalism in government. He was a free thinker about many things and at least a skeptic about the afterlife and the divinity of Jesus. He was a scientist, a man of letters and a man of Earth."