April 2006  

Of Life and Idols

    While serving as an ambassador in Paris during the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin made a point of wearing the simple dress and hairstyle of the American “natural,” much to the delight of French intellectuals and politicians.  In 1779, he wrote to his daughter that her father’s face had become as well known in France as the man in the moon, so common were the medallions, pictures, and prints of it sold to an admiring public.  It’s fair to say that with the with the recent “Franklin Tercentenary,” Americans are hopefully as fascinated by Franklin as the French were - and, I might add, as blind to Franklin’s conscious manipulation of his own persona.

   Franklin was a self-made man in the real sense that he arose from obscurity to prominence.  Born the youngest son of a Boston tallow maker, he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer.  Chafing under James’s harsh control, at age 17 he ran away nearly penniless to Philadelphia .  There, Franklin thrived as a printer, editor, and merchant, launching several newspapers and penning the famous aphorisms of Poor Richard’s Almanac.  He retired comfortably at 42 to devote himself to his interests in science, invention, and public service: experimenting with electricity, crafting bifocals and the Franklin stove, and founding the first public library, volunteer fire brigade, and other civic endeavors. A loyal British subject, Franklin was slow to enlist in the Revolutionary cause, but by 1776, he had committed himself fully to American independence.  Internationally known, he served abroad ably as a diplomat, returning home to lend his reputation and political acumen to the crafting of the new U.S. Constitution.  He died shortly afterwards, in 1790, at age 84.

    But Franklin was also self-made in the sense that he fashioned himself into an American icon to be loved (or loathed) by generations to come.  He painted the icon in his posthumous Autobiography, which became one of the most read books in America (and a book I have recently investigated).  In it we see Franklin ’s rise from poverty and anonymity to money and fame.  But it’s also a story of moral as well as material redemption.  Franklin describes himself as a precocious genius whose reading of modern books caused him to fall from his father’s morality and religion; he became a hotheaded smart aleck and an all-too-freethinking delinquent.  After reflecting on the harms he inflicted on, and suffered from, those close to him, Franklin gave himself a spiritual second chance, came back to God, and departed on his famous project to achieve moral perfection.  His aim was to get control of himself in order to serve God by serving his fellow human beings.  This was his object lesson for all Americans.  Franklin depicts himself in the Autobiography as a morally committed political man (his feats of natural science are almost invisible), who rationally and   pragmatically balances all sides of every issue, never loses his cool, and cares always for the common good.

    In his own lifetime, there were more than a few respectable men (John Adams for one) who thought Franklin a self-aggrandizing phony, but over time his self-portrait as a self-made man has been revered by American entrepreneurs and schoolmarms - and reviled by the 19th-century Transcendentalists.

   In three sparkling biographies, Edward Morgan, Walter Isaacson, and Gorgon Wood tell the Franklin story.  They very much like their man- like him so much that Adams might say they’ve been charmed too easily by the atheistic “old conjurer.”  All three bring the mystical Franklin down a peg or two, in order to humanize him and make him a man we can realistically admire.  The Franklin of these books is by no means the completely cool and self-controlled political leader described in the Autobiography.  Each volume describes him as temporarily blinded- whether by resentment and anger, imperialistic ambition, or elitist isolation- to political realities that would otherwise have been easy to see.  Franklin worked as a printer until he could retire and take up gentlemanly pursuits.  He became the folk hero of the middling sort that began after his death.

   Both Morgan, Yale University ’s Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, and Isaacson, the President of the Aspen Institute and former chairman of CNN, think that Franklin lost his head in the elaborate scheme to bring independently chartered Pennsylvania colony under royal rule, a design Franklin pursued doggedly after 1757.  Since his Quaker party still controlled the Assembly, Franklin was hired as agent and continued to pursue the royal government scheme, which despite his misguided efforts never bore fruit.

    Gordon Wood, a distinguished professor of history at Brown University , doesn’t agree that Franklin had an unruly side, He argues instead the scheme, while ultimately a fiasco, was in perfect accord with Franklin ’s passionate imperialism and monarchism.  As the colonial crisis that would become the American Revolution mounted, Franklin articulated an increasingly Tory-like theory of the empire, according to which the King but not Parliament had authority to deal with the colonies.  The design to replace proprietary rule failed not because Franklin was blinded by hatred of Penn, agues Wood, but because Franklin was unable to win over Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of the American Department and a hard-liner on colonial affairs.  Even so, Franklin ’s hopes for the empire were rekindled in 1772 when, due to the American’s own machinations, Hillsborough was ousted and replaced by the more agreeable Lord Dartmouth. But these hopes were dashed for good by Franklin ’s colossal blunder in the “Hutchinson Affair,” in which he tried to blame British hostility to America not on the Ministry’s and Parliament’s mistakes but on the treachery of Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts .

    Morgan, Isaacson, and Wood  agree that Franklin ’s elitism, which led him to  believe that a few reasonable men could solve any political problem, was another source of his occasional political blindness.  This was especially apparent in the Hutchinson Affair, and also in Franklin ’s misjudgment of colonial opinions and passions during the Stamp Act crisis.  When it finally became clear that is efforts at reconciliation could not prevent the inevitable, Franklin threw in his lot on the side of full-blown independence.  Angry at the empire that had let him down and humiliated him, Franklin transferred his affections personally and fervently to the revolutionary cause. 

   In serving that cause, Franklin found himself in the right circumstances to pull off his most stunning and important achievement: the diplomatic effort that won French support for the Revolution. and, years later, acceptable terms for the peace with Britain .

Clark Wiser

NCSSAR Chaplain