In times of my despair for the state of the union, I often find myself turning to the past for historical perspective. It’s always comforting to know that people before me…before us…went through trying times and survived. And thus it was a month or so ago when I got on my bike and rode it for days buried under my headphones listening to the entire 24 hours of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin…an American Life.
My schoolboy education in Franklin’s life and works was typically superficial — the kite…the glasses…the Declaration of Independence…and we’re done. Isaacson’s biography broadened and deepened the profile to portray Franklin as — if not exactly an American Leonardo — an American polymath of the highest order.
Befitting a future revolutionary, Franklin was naturally born to challenge authority. One of his grandfathers defied the law in defending shopkeepers and artisans — what the French would call the bourgeoisie — against wealthy landowners. Ben himself was often inclined to tilt at sacred cows. In an earlier post I referred to the story of how the family newspaper he helped run outside the dictates of the Boston clergy went head-to-head with Cotton Mather of Salem witch trial fame. My abiding appetite for irony compels me to repeat the story here:
During one of the regularly occurring smallpox epidemics that devastated wide swatches of the early New England populace, three of Mather’s children were afflicted. Mather, who had turned to preaching from medicine (or what passed for medicine at the time), put his physician’s hat back on to study the disease. In so doing he had noticed a scar on the arm of one of his slaves, and upon inquiry learned that the slave, like other Boston blacks he would interview, had been inoculated against the pox back in Africa. Later, when a ship arrived in Boston Harbor carrying another wave of smallpox victims, Mather — this witch trial loving, slave-owning, Puritan preacher — single-handedly led a futile attempt to inoculate the population against the threat. In this, he was opposed by the Franklin newspaper, owned and operated by design to be free from clergy control. And therein lay the self-made trap. The paper did not oppose inoculation on the merits. Indeed it didn’t even make a pretense of examining the merits. It opposed it as a way of poking a finger in the eye of the church establishment. It labeled Mather’s push for inoculation as just more religious mumbo-jumbo and an attempt to gin up fear of the pox to make people even more beholden to the ministerial class.
Throughout his life Franklin remained a noted religious skeptic, best captured in the story of his near death at sea. After surviving it, he was urged to thank God by donating to a church. Franklin, ever the pragmatist, declined, saying he’d rather donate to a lighthouse. Nonetheless throughout his life he donated to the building of numerous houses of worship for an array of gods and was a strong advocate for religious freedom. At his death the full range of religious leaders of Philadelphia, despite knowing he had refused to become a follower of any of them, gathered to mark his passing.
For a man so closely identified as an American revolutionary, he resisted revolution for decades, preferring instead that America remain a part of the British realm…albeit with distinct privileges and autonomy. As was his habit, he sought accommodation until it was clear there could be none and then he would cast his lot with principle. He would’ve made a perfectly modern Congressional Democrat, constantly trying to accommodate an implacable political foe.
On social policy he was…well, religious in his belief that hard work, frugality, and self-reliance were the keys to success. Before the GOP was taken over by gun nuts, religious zealots and bigots, he would’ve made a perfectly mainstream modern Republican, warning against welfare as a crutch and an inducement to a life of indolence.
He had a zest for trying on new identities, frequently writing under pseudonyms, often female (Silence Dogood!). This allowed him to throw out ideas without prejudicing them with his name as well as advance opinions under the guise of someone other. He gleefully trafficked in what today we would call fake news. This would’ve made him a major mischief-maker on the Internet and maybe led to exposure, embarrassment and expulsion as has happened to others who’ve been caught practicing such deception.
He famously had a zest for women…and after the kites and glasses this is probably the thing most adult students of Franklin know about him. There are multitudes of women coming in and out of his life, while his common law wife Deborah anchored it both figuratively and literally for 44 years. Isaacson’s book is filled with salacious details drawn from the letters of Franklin and his women. Most fascinating among them was Polly Stevenson, who Franklin met when she was 18 and he was in his 40s. She was the daughter of his landlady in London, another woman with whom Franklin was rumored to be very much involved. Franklin and Polly had a relationship that would last through the rest of his life and would be filled with voluminous letters back and forth documenting their respect for one another’s intellect as well as their personal affection. She made her first trans-Atlantic crossing with her children to be at his deathbed. It is fair to ask how such a prodigious public figure and ladies’ man as Franklin would fare in the era of #MeToo.
Franklin would stand on no less shaky ground on today’s racial justice spectrum as a one-time owner of household slaves. Though as benign in treatment of them as one who owns other humans beings can be said to be, he also made racist comments, which if made in the current environment would probably cost him a career most anywhere outside of Fox News. That would be too bad because, like Barack Obama on the subject of gay marriage, Franklin evolved. His evolution was facilitated by a visit to a school established for African American children, which led him to conceive of “a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race than I had ever before entertained.” Even that admission would be damning in today’s context, but Franklin went on to become President of the Philadelphia Abolition Society and in his dying days petitioned Congress to abolish slavery a half century before the Civil War. So as with Jefferson and other Founding Fathers, it was complicated.
Isaacson notes that Franklin’s reputation has gone in and out of fashion with the times, and he concludes his biography with a summary of how various critics have attempted to take Franklin down off his pedestal. He has been belittled as a well of shallow aphorisms to irrigate the self-help industry. He has been attacked for pushing virtues laced with hypocrisy for infliction upon children and employees who don’t seem to be measuring up. He has been excoriated as the godfather of American Babbitry…the inclination of business or professional men to conform unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards. His post-modern ironic distancing on most matters has cost him points with those who place a higher value on unreserved passion for cause.
I must admit that coming as it did in the last hour of my audio tour through Franklin’s life, I found the criticisms disorienting. Over the preceding 23 hours I had come to know and admire Franklin more than most — though not all — of America’s historical figures. The man who was welcome at the table of the 18th century’s best and brightest had earned a place at mine. In that game we like to play where we plan a fantasy dinner for 5 notable people living or dead, Ben would be there. Not only would I like Ben to dine with me and Bruce Springsteen and Michelle Goldberg and Mark Twain and Katharine Hepburn, but for all his flaws I’d like him to resume his prominent place in American public life.
Franklin’s hand for compromise has left his fingerprints all over our nation’s founding. Could he play as significant a role in today’s politics where compromise is dismissed as capitulation, corruption, or just flat out inconceivable? Could one such man no matter how resourceful and charming make a difference? Even with all I know about the unrelenting nastiness, pettiness, and vengeful nature of today’s politics, I think he could. Franklin the scientist would come into our world enthralled with our ascent from earth to the moon…may even contribute an actual invention to it. But Franklin the patriot, like most of us, would be despondent at our equally breathtaking descent from George Washington to Donald Trump. I’ve got to believe, however, that as one small, ignorant, self-absorbed bigot could bring this nation to its knees, so too could one great, democratic, enlightened man lift it up.
