The Many Faces of Benjamin Franklin
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.)
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