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.
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.)
Paper trail. Behind these re-evaluations lies the ample offering of an even more monumental scholarly endeavor: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin Project. Launched by Yale University and the American Philosophical Society in 1954, the project is devoted to annotating and publishing nearly everything Franklin wrote and received--some 30,000 documents in all. So far, it has brought out 36 volumes of a projected 47-volume opus. A soon-to-be-released CD-ROM will allow the curious reader to peruse the same documents that recent biographers have examined, but it will be approximately an additional 13 years before all the documents are annotated.
Franklin turns out to be both more delightful and more troubling than the man we thought we knew. According to Ellen Cohn, editor in chief of the Papers, "There's not a single thing he writes that doesn't belie extraordinary intelligence--and often charm and wit." She also points to a major reason so few people have been aware of Franklin's darker side. "Franklin never tried to exacerbate tensions," she says. "He vented in private, in letters he never sent but put in a drawer." Similarly, to Edmund Morgan, who is finishing an introduction to the CD-ROM, the papers above all reveal "the range and sharpness of the intellect hidden behind all those aphorisms." Franklin, as Morgan puts it, "was just so damn bright--but he did hide it. It was another democratic aspect of the man."
A vast intellect is not the only thing Franklin hid. What comes through clearly in all of the new biographies is a powerful contradiction at the heart of this most gregarious and beloved of individuals: a profound reticence and distance verging on coldness, particularly in relation to those people with whom he should have been closest. As Morgan writes: "But we have to admit at the outset that there are things we will never know about Franklin."
Among them, prominently, was the high cost of being such a thoroughly self-made man. Sneaking away from his native Boston after apprenticing both to his father and to his brother was no easy step, and Franklin bore the guilt. The Puritan strictures of New England were certainly ample justification, and Isaacson astutely ventures that Franklin's abbreviated schooling resulted less from his family's financial difficulties than from his father's belief that Ben's free-thinking ways made him ill-suited for a clerically oriented Harvard education. But while he might have had career reasons for leaving home, his lingering touchiness about family betrayal came out with repressed force in his break with his own son, William (born of an out-of-wedlock dalliance). Charging William with betraying the primordial bond of filial allegiance by remaining a British loyalist during the Revolution, Franklin never fully forgave the son on whom he had so long doted--and for whom he had expressly written his autobiography. It was, as Isaacson and Morgan make clear, too hard by half.
And Franklin could be inhumanly icy with others in his family as well. Beginning in the 1750s, he spent more time in Europe than he did at home--usually enjoying the company, and sometimes the strong affections, of women whom he charmed. But when his wife, Deborah, wrote pleading for him to return, fearing (rightly) that poor health would soon lead her to the grave, he remained abroad, responding with letters that mainly discussed matters of household business.
But Franklin, to add to his complexity, clearly sensed the limitations of his personality almost in the same way that he sensed the limitations of the abstract deism that he embraced after rejecting his father's Calvinism. In fact, he may have perceived a connection between his inner nature and his adopted creed. In any case, as Isaacson shows, Franklin knew that a highly cerebral acknowledgment of the distant, clockmaker God of deism was no more conducive to ethical behavior than were some of his own deepest instincts. So what did he do? He constructed a rigid--and now famous--system of behavioral self-accounting that would make him not only successful but also a better person. "I made a little Book in which I allotted a Page for each of the Virtues," he wrote in his autobiography. "I rul'd each Page with red Ink, so as to have seven Columns, marking each Column with a Letter for the Day." And for any of the 13 virtues he deemed himself insufficient on any given day--including temperance, industry, and humility--Franklin would ink in a "little black Spot."
One virtue not listed among the 13 that he sought to cultivate was charity, love of one's fellow man, the one that, in Morgan's words, was the "guiding principle" of Franklin's life. Morgan's explanation of this curious omission is typically subtle: "By exhibiting it conspicuously in his own life while making no pretension to it, he was perhaps affirming to himself the superiority of a `moral perfection' that had nothing to do with Christianity."
Franklin had to do good in order to feel that he was good. It was a demanding spiritual-ethical formula, even for the man who devised it--and it's one that has fared precariously in American culture. Believers in revealed religion, particularly born-again evangelicals, have objected that it emphasizes works at the expense of grace. They have a point. Franklin's ethic placed so great an emphasis on what the sociologist Max Weber called "worldly asceticism" that only the most strong willed and self-disciplined could successfully live by it. Yet in Franklin's case, the ethic not only sustained him but also helped him produce a prodigious quantity of good works. And it did so because Franklin liked people so much--people in general, that is, and people of all walks and all kinds--that serving them was a pleasure. Making this public wiser, healthier, and happier, whether through his newspaper (the Pennsylvania Gazette ) or his almanacs, was, for Franklin, at once pleasurable and profitable.
Public deeds. If service came almost naturally to Franklin, he hit upon another useful mechanism when he founded the Junto Club in 1727, a year before he opened his own print shop. A society of 12 leather-apron tradesmen, it served as an association for libation, conversation, debate, education, and mutual support. And eventually, through Franklin's subtle urgings (he always led indirectly, being a poor public speaker if a brilliant conversationalist), it and other clubs it spawned raised subscriptions for a library, a fire insurance company, a hospital, and all of those other worthy Philadelphia institutions (including what came to be the University of Pennsylvania) for which Franklin is credited.
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.
But when he finally abandoned all hope of reconciliation, no founder became more zealous in support of separation, and none worked harder to achieve it. If anything, history (largely because it listened too much to John Adams, who deeply envied and resented Franklin and the adoration the French showered upon him) has vastly understated the importance of what Franklin, an old man with many physical afflictions, accomplished for the struggling nation. He secured from the French not only direct military aid but also the financial support that would keep the Continental Army fighting. And he secured international recognition for the fledgling nation even as he helped negotiate favorable terms of peace.
Compromise. At home, his influence was just as vital. Though many of his ideas for a new and stronger constitution were too democratic for his more republican compatriots--he favored a weak executive and a unicameral house--he was the spirit of compromise, quietly nudging the process along when it looked as though fiery political antagonists would bring it to a halt. And for Franklin, compromise was no easy ideal. He had to swallow hard to accept the continued existence of slavery, which he knew (though a former slave owner himself) was a blight upon the republic and which he brilliantly attacked in one of his last literary efforts, a withering satire entitled "Sidi Mehemet on the Slave Trade."
It is a curious thing about Franklin, as Isaacson emphasizes when he reflects back on the man whose life and mind he explored for more than a decade: He was the most brilliant and accomplished of the founders, but he eschewed their latent and overt elitism, their abiding wariness about the people in general. "The most interesting thing was how resolutely he pushed for middle-class values and virtues to be the basis for American society, rather than the elitist values pushed by Jefferson and Adams," says Isaacson.
Morgan echoes and elaborates that judgment: "Franklin was the most democratic in thinking that government shouldn't be run by the wisest but instead by the ordinary people. He realized you may not always get the wisest decisions that way, but he was willing to submit to the judgment of the majority."
It wasn't simply blind faith. He believed that the public could be made gentler, wiser, and, in the long run, amenable to doing the right thing. He believed so because he had devoted his life--successfully, he thought--to making the various publics he served do just that. The democratic venture would not have continued unless other Americans had come along to share Franklin's faith and dedication.
This story appears in the June 23, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.