The Many Faces of Benjamin Franklin
Franklin brought the same service orientation to his scientific experiments and inventions. He never learned enough mathematics to become a great theoretical scientist, but he was such a brilliant observer, experimenter, and tinkerer that he could not help coming up with new insights into the workings of the physical world. Nor could he help inventing new devices, or making improvements upon old ones, to help people live in that world. Even as a youth wild about swimming, he developed a set of paddles for hands and feet that would propel a swimmer more swiftly through the water. More to the point, though, Franklin refused to profit from what he discovered or developed, declining even to patent the lightning rod or the Franklin stove when either alone would have earned him a fortune. He viewed his discoveries as gifts to humanity.
Through science and invention, as well as through association and affiliation, Franklin hoped to contribute to the sum of human happiness. "Human Felicity," he wrote in his autobiography, "is produc'd not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day." Yet oddly, as Morgan notes, though he was a more brilliant scientist than Jefferson, Franklin did not share Jefferson's belief that science was more important than "public service," by which he specifically meant government and public administration. At first refusing election to the Pennsylvania Assembly, he accepted it in 1751, remaining there until he was sent as the Assembly's agent to England in 1764. Just as important, in 1753, he became joint postmaster of the British American Colonies, which sparked a growing interest in the fate of the Colonies as a whole. That interest led him to propose the Albany Plan the following year--a loose colonial federation for mutual defense. But it was an idea ahead of its time, alarming both to some colonial leaders and to the king's ministers.
What all of the new biographies add is an invaluably richer understanding of the political Franklin. And, above all, they drive home two crucial points about that man: first, that he was the most idiosyncratic and distinctive of the founders. Second, that he was the most indispensable of the lot. Simply put, unlike his more republican compeers, he was the forerunner of the quintessential American--the prototype of middling, lower-case "d" democrat who would emerge as the dominant national type in the early 19th century. And largely because of his great practical genius, his commitment to public service, his considerable PR skills, and his international fame, he was the essential figure in the founding enterprise.
Franklin was in many ways typical of his fellow leaders in having been a loyal British subject for most of his life. Indeed, later than most of the others (in part because he was so often in England working to change minds in court and Parliament), he believed he could make the king and his men understand that simply respecting British Americans' rights as full British subjects deserving of representation would guarantee a large, prospering, and contented British empire.
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