The Many Faces of Benjamin Franklin
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.
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