A man of many talents indeed!
Posted on 06/19/2003 7:01:07 AM PDT by bedolido
Ben Franklin comes to us almost too neatly packaged in a series of indelible images and unforgettable vignettes. He's the fellow on the hundred-dollar bill or the man Americans remember for flying a kite in an electrical storm. But recent scholarship, reflected in several new biographies and a well-received PBS special, reminds us of a richer, more complicated story behind the schoolbook images; more surprising, it makes a powerful case that Franklin was probably the most indispensable of the Founding Fathers.
Begin in 1723, when the strapping, Boston-born apprentice arrives penniless in Philadelphia at age 17, having torn loose from family moorings and Puritan restraints to seek a new life in the more tolerant middle Colonies. The indefatigable entrepreneur proceeds to build a printing and publishing business that is so successful (not only with his newspaper but also with those maxim-filled almanacs that make "Poor Richard" the first of America's self-help gurus) that he can retire at age 32.
Retire but hardly turn idle. The ultimate civic do-gooder, he works through a network of clubs and societies to endow his adopted city with libraries, schools, hospitals, and other valuable public institutions and services. At the same time, he rapidly becomes known as one of the world's great scientists and inventors, honored by European academies and earning mankind's lasting gratitude not only for bifocals and lightning rods but also for a profound new understanding of electricity and its properties.
Founding grandfather. Increasingly engaged in Pennsylvania and colonial politics, Franklin eventually becomes the elder statesman among the Founding Fathers who reminds his fellow revolutionaries that they must hang together or hang separately. A seasoned trans-Atlantic voyager (four round trips during his lifetime), he serves in England as a tireless agent for the Colonies and then in France as a wily diplomat for his struggling new nation. Much of his success owes to his celebrity throughout Europe, where he is revered as a rustic, coonskin-capped philosopher, a bon vivant, and even something of a lady's man. His quiet but decisive contributions to forging a "more perfect Union" at Philadelphia's constitutional conventions serve as the great man's swan song.
If there were a Founding Fathers theme park, Franklin would have to be the leading attraction. It's not just that he had more facets than any other founder, as even Thomas Jefferson appreciated. ("Alexander Hamilton might have got higher SAT scores," quips historian Joseph Ellis, "but Franklin was the wisest.") A newspaperman, essayist, pamphleteer, memoirist, and compulsive correspondent, Franklin also left us with a compelling record of what he did. The images that have fixed him so firmly in the popular imagination are themselves testimony to one of his many talents. He was arguably the first great PR man, not only because he sensed the growing power of that amorphous entity, the public, but also because he knew how crucial the opinion of the public would be. In fact, he devoted much of his life's work to shaping it: informing and elevating it for the most part but manipulating it when he thought it was necessary for personal, commercial, or political advantage.
Not that we should doubt the broad outlines of the self-portrait that he presented to the public through his own writings, including the enduringly popular Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which was published in book form only after he died in 1790. He truly was the self-made man, whose accomplishments and qualities would later inspire the author Horatio Alger to pen a series of bestselling rags-to riches stories. Franklin's personal example and his copious guidelines for success in life and business--dispensed in successive editions of Poor Richard's Almanack and distilled in the widely read book The Way to Wealth--provide both the insights and techniques for countless self-help advisers, management counselors, and even the assorted proponents of the cognitive and positive psychology movements (both of which are strongly associated with University of Pennsylvania psychiatrists and psychologists). As biographer and former CNN head Walter Isaacson notes, America's current leading management guru, Steven Covey, does a brisk trade in "Franklin Covey Organizers." And there are at least six recent self-help guides with Franklin in their title.
But not all American writers and thinkers have looked upon Franklin with such favor. Even when they were fascinated by the man, writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald saw him as the patron saint of the money-grubbing, soulless American bourgeois, the very cliche-spouting glad-hander that Sinclair Lewis would satirize in his novel Babbitt. And not only Americans recoiled at Franklin's influence. In his Studies of Classic American Literature, British novelist D. H. Lawrence put it succinctly: "And now I, at least, know why I can't stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom." And thousand of hippies in the 1960s knew exactly what Lawrence meant.
The trouble with the iconic Franklin, whether loved or hated, is that he is a flatter, less interesting man--and even a less consequential historical figure--than the Franklin who has begun to emerge in recent years. On one hand, Franklin has benefited from the recent scholarly reconsideration of the entire founding generation. This revisionist enterprise looks at the Founding Fathers neither as plaster saints nor as dispensable Dead White Males. Instead, it depicts them as gifted but quite human players in a process that could have turned out quite differently, even disastrously, if other political leaders, with different characters and different ideas, had been upon the scene.
Political biography, group and individual, is a favored form of the new political historians, whether academic or nonacademic, and Franklin has deservedly received a generous share of attention. In addition to excellent portraits by H. W. Brands of Texas A&M (The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin) and by the distinguished Yale historian Edmund Morgan (Benjamin Franklin), next month will see the publication of Isaacson's long-awaited treatment, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Coming next year is a study by Gordon Wood, the Brown University scholar whose work helped kick-start the new political history. Lighter but no less authoritative considerations of the man range from last year's three-part PBS special to science writer Tom Tucker's newly published Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax. (Proving his subject's PR skills, Tucker reveals that Franklin never himself conducted the famous kite experiment that he conceived.)
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.com ...
My vote is for John Adams.
Walter Isaacson? Forgive me but I think I will skip the new book.
A man of many talents indeed!
I think they thought I was serious and didn't print my letter. But take out a yuppie food stamp and look hard at the portrait, then watch a few Hammer Dracula films...
--Boris
Makes Franklin seem even better.
A true inspiration to the Zot Brigade.
The Body of B. Franklin, Printer, like the cover of an old book, Its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here food for worms. But the work shall not be lost, for it will, as he believed appear once more in a new and more elegant edition revised and corrected by the author.
Ben lives.
<|:)~
At least this year.
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