AVB
Jesus of Cool, I'm bad, I'm nationwide
AMERICAN history is short on 300th birthdays. Which is only one reason to salute Ben Franklin, who had the foresight to have been born three centuries ago today. It was one of many generous acts for his country. He makes us feel we have a history.
As a man of science, Franklin lamented that he had been born too soon. (A beautiful woman 40 years his junior generally elicited the same regret.) But he could not truly quibble with chronology. In America's seminal story, birth order was on his side. He was already a father - and a thriving publisher - when Adams and Washington were in swaddling clothes. He retired from the printing business when Jefferson was 4. He had flown his kite when Madison was an infant; by the time Hamilton was born he had turned to politics, and proposed a first plan for colonial union. He could have been either man's grandfather.
Franklin was, too, the founder who came the furthest. He alone spent six decades as a British subject before embracing the revolutionary cause, to which he applied the zeal of a convert. He neither hailed from an elite nor subscribed to one. The youngest son of a youngest son, he chafed as much against entitled elder siblings as against enthroned upper classes. Until Tom Sawyer displaced him, he ranked as our foremost juvenile delinquent. Franklin's autobiography begins with defying his family and running away from home. "Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking," he reflected afterward, with ample reason. He thought he was writing his own story but was of course writing America's as well.
Neither birth order nor longevity - he signed every document central to America's founding - would alone have established Franklin as the ur-American, however. He was a true egalitarian, which could not be said of Adams. For all his ingenuity he was less a manufacturer of ideas than a purveyor of them; he was no dreamy Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton may well have known everything, but Franklin questioned everything.
His curiosity was matched by the suppleness of his mind, one singularly free of hobgoblins. (His ability to argue either side of an issue with equal vigor drove Adams to distraction.) Nor was there anything orthodox or evangelical about Franklin, who took his Puritanism as he took his Enlightenment ideals: with a splash of water, hold the doctrine. His religion was tolerance, his sect pragmatism.
When did he become so plushly, so comfortably, so voluptuously American? As the features are not aquiline, so the morals are far from impeccable. With equal genius Franklin codified good behavior and defied it. He was an organization man who was not particularly organized, a committee man who worked most effectively through back channels. With equal gusto he preached temperance and wrote drinking songs. He practiced frugality only, he admitted, so long as it was absolutely necessary. Diligence was his middle name, but few have made dilatoriness sound so attractive. A great deal of his famed industry consisted of getting someone else to whitewash the fence.
That Franklin would one day be anointed "the first great American" was far from clear during his lifetime. He was proud of his social sprint, which he merrily advertised. To his mind it made the success all the sweeter. He who had been born to poverty and obscurity had dined with royalty! But social mobility was not something one bragged about in the l8th century. It was Franklin who gave work and bootstraps - among other things - a good name. One easily forgets that "democrat," too, was a dirty word in colonial America.
Born too soon on those counts, Franklin died too soon as well. The United States Senate chose not to mourn him; his official eulogy fell to his avowed enemy, the Reverend William Smith. And the 19th century was not kind to Franklin. Tangled up with his fictional alter ego, the almanac-writing Poor Richard, he was too practical, too rational, too stubbornly middle class. Keats sniffed at his "mean and thrifty maxims." Emerson had little use for him. Thoreau, Melville, Poe had none.
There was something shabby, shambling, shallow about the likeable lowlife, King of Rotarians. No poet has ever sung Franklin's praises. On his 200th birthday this newspaper extended tepid good wishes: "He seems to have been quite without definite ambition, his attitude toward life was mildly cynical, and by inclination he was a manager rather than a leader of men."
It did not help that Franklin stood as the only founder who made an art of levity. Where it is unclear if James Madison even had a personality, Franklin is all pluck and charm. Irony was his natural idiom. He is to Jefferson or Washington as Molière is to Corneille, winking farce and earthy intrigue versus piety and nobility, the satirical versus the sententious. By his own admission Franklin was a rascal, one well pleased with his cunning, the more so when the result of his machinations happened to be the founding of a hospital. He was equal parts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bugs Bunny.
His role as a public servant was difficult to grasp, long submerged, at times unwelcome. His last public act was to petition Congress against slavery. Weeks before his death he reminded his colleagues that liberty should extend "without distinction of color to all descriptions of people." No one believed so deeply in an unfettered society, in free ideas as fervently as in free markets. Franklin managed to cast a vote for both, opting not to patent his inventions. It was preferable they be available to all.
A materialistic age returns him to his glory, none more so than our overachieving own. His passions are ours: smarts, self-improvement, social welfare and better cellphone reception for all. We have him to thank for the sugar-busting one-minute manager who wins thin-thighed friends and influences highly effective people in 30 days. At the same time he is just the merit-maniac for an age that prefers its presidents from Midland, Tex., rather than from Andover and Yale. In an anti-intellectual climate Franklin's earthy insights feel just right. He was smart enough to keep his learning lite.
America's first autobiographer, he presides over an age of memoirs, to which he comes wreathed in lapses and confessions. He was not above seducing his best friend's girl; he left his fiancée in the lurch; he sired an illegitimate son. Between reason and inclination, he well understood, there is no contest, especially as the reasonable man can find an excuse for anything. (He once justified his divided affections by arguing that a man who was loyal to many women was more loyal than a man loyal only to one.) He evinced a wish to be reborn without his so-called errata; little did he realize that those imperfections were his letters of recommendation to posterity. Washington is all about admiration, Franklin a continual ache of aspiration. He is the forgiving founder. Whatever he was made of, it was not Rushmorean granite.
Like so many eminent characters in our literature, Franklin refused to settle comfortably into a category. He was not only the prince of self-invention, but the king of second acts. He had no great faith in human nature but an abiding one in collective human enterprise. "For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom," he reminded the signers of our Constitution, "you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views." But he was also a preternaturally happy man. He truly believed that it was always morning in America.
The most read writer in colonial America, Franklin found that only the Bible outsold his almanacs. (The former, he reasoned, you bought once. The latter had to be purchased annually.) He also pioneered a media role for which he has not been given proper credit. As Hawthorne observed - it was not necessarily a compliment - Franklin was "the counselor and household friend to almost every family in America." He has but one successor today. He was less Ted Turner than Oprah Winfrey, ladling up an expertly seasoned stew of human frailty and triumph, entertainment and inspiration.
BY his 250th birthday, Franklin had survived the slights to be feted across the world. The tributes were appropriate to a man who had always thought globally. He understood that America was not an island; it was at his suggestion that maps of the world graced the walls of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Eloquently he articulated what the War of Independence represented beyond American shores: "We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious it is for the Americans to be called by providence to this post of honor," he reminded Congress during a dark winter of the war.
A few years later he offered up what may be the best one-line definition of this country. The New World, he asserted, judged a man not by who he was, but by what he could do. And what Franklin could do was staggering. His legacy is not a political philosophy but a protean existence, act after act of bold curiosity, brash risk-taking, raw ingenuity. Once those constituted a definition of the American character. Today they would more likely be termed "hypomania," a fair diagnosis for any individual who manages single-handedly to found a library, fire company, police force, hospital, university, insurance company, sanitation department and militia.
How much do we value Franklin? Since 1799, Washington has been acknowledged to have been "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." For much of the last century Franklin appears to have been first in everything else. He was not one to put theory before practice, however. None but the empirical test will do for Dr. Franklin. How dear is he to us? Well, who would you rather have in your wallet, George Washington or Ben Franklin? He makes us feel rich.
As a man of science, Franklin lamented that he had been born too soon. (A beautiful woman 40 years his junior generally elicited the same regret.) But he could not truly quibble with chronology. In America's seminal story, birth order was on his side. He was already a father - and a thriving publisher - when Adams and Washington were in swaddling clothes. He retired from the printing business when Jefferson was 4. He had flown his kite when Madison was an infant; by the time Hamilton was born he had turned to politics, and proposed a first plan for colonial union. He could have been either man's grandfather.
Franklin was, too, the founder who came the furthest. He alone spent six decades as a British subject before embracing the revolutionary cause, to which he applied the zeal of a convert. He neither hailed from an elite nor subscribed to one. The youngest son of a youngest son, he chafed as much against entitled elder siblings as against enthroned upper classes. Until Tom Sawyer displaced him, he ranked as our foremost juvenile delinquent. Franklin's autobiography begins with defying his family and running away from home. "Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking," he reflected afterward, with ample reason. He thought he was writing his own story but was of course writing America's as well.
Neither birth order nor longevity - he signed every document central to America's founding - would alone have established Franklin as the ur-American, however. He was a true egalitarian, which could not be said of Adams. For all his ingenuity he was less a manufacturer of ideas than a purveyor of them; he was no dreamy Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton may well have known everything, but Franklin questioned everything.
His curiosity was matched by the suppleness of his mind, one singularly free of hobgoblins. (His ability to argue either side of an issue with equal vigor drove Adams to distraction.) Nor was there anything orthodox or evangelical about Franklin, who took his Puritanism as he took his Enlightenment ideals: with a splash of water, hold the doctrine. His religion was tolerance, his sect pragmatism.
When did he become so plushly, so comfortably, so voluptuously American? As the features are not aquiline, so the morals are far from impeccable. With equal genius Franklin codified good behavior and defied it. He was an organization man who was not particularly organized, a committee man who worked most effectively through back channels. With equal gusto he preached temperance and wrote drinking songs. He practiced frugality only, he admitted, so long as it was absolutely necessary. Diligence was his middle name, but few have made dilatoriness sound so attractive. A great deal of his famed industry consisted of getting someone else to whitewash the fence.
That Franklin would one day be anointed "the first great American" was far from clear during his lifetime. He was proud of his social sprint, which he merrily advertised. To his mind it made the success all the sweeter. He who had been born to poverty and obscurity had dined with royalty! But social mobility was not something one bragged about in the l8th century. It was Franklin who gave work and bootstraps - among other things - a good name. One easily forgets that "democrat," too, was a dirty word in colonial America.
Born too soon on those counts, Franklin died too soon as well. The United States Senate chose not to mourn him; his official eulogy fell to his avowed enemy, the Reverend William Smith. And the 19th century was not kind to Franklin. Tangled up with his fictional alter ego, the almanac-writing Poor Richard, he was too practical, too rational, too stubbornly middle class. Keats sniffed at his "mean and thrifty maxims." Emerson had little use for him. Thoreau, Melville, Poe had none.
There was something shabby, shambling, shallow about the likeable lowlife, King of Rotarians. No poet has ever sung Franklin's praises. On his 200th birthday this newspaper extended tepid good wishes: "He seems to have been quite without definite ambition, his attitude toward life was mildly cynical, and by inclination he was a manager rather than a leader of men."
It did not help that Franklin stood as the only founder who made an art of levity. Where it is unclear if James Madison even had a personality, Franklin is all pluck and charm. Irony was his natural idiom. He is to Jefferson or Washington as Molière is to Corneille, winking farce and earthy intrigue versus piety and nobility, the satirical versus the sententious. By his own admission Franklin was a rascal, one well pleased with his cunning, the more so when the result of his machinations happened to be the founding of a hospital. He was equal parts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bugs Bunny.
His role as a public servant was difficult to grasp, long submerged, at times unwelcome. His last public act was to petition Congress against slavery. Weeks before his death he reminded his colleagues that liberty should extend "without distinction of color to all descriptions of people." No one believed so deeply in an unfettered society, in free ideas as fervently as in free markets. Franklin managed to cast a vote for both, opting not to patent his inventions. It was preferable they be available to all.
A materialistic age returns him to his glory, none more so than our overachieving own. His passions are ours: smarts, self-improvement, social welfare and better cellphone reception for all. We have him to thank for the sugar-busting one-minute manager who wins thin-thighed friends and influences highly effective people in 30 days. At the same time he is just the merit-maniac for an age that prefers its presidents from Midland, Tex., rather than from Andover and Yale. In an anti-intellectual climate Franklin's earthy insights feel just right. He was smart enough to keep his learning lite.
America's first autobiographer, he presides over an age of memoirs, to which he comes wreathed in lapses and confessions. He was not above seducing his best friend's girl; he left his fiancée in the lurch; he sired an illegitimate son. Between reason and inclination, he well understood, there is no contest, especially as the reasonable man can find an excuse for anything. (He once justified his divided affections by arguing that a man who was loyal to many women was more loyal than a man loyal only to one.) He evinced a wish to be reborn without his so-called errata; little did he realize that those imperfections were his letters of recommendation to posterity. Washington is all about admiration, Franklin a continual ache of aspiration. He is the forgiving founder. Whatever he was made of, it was not Rushmorean granite.
Like so many eminent characters in our literature, Franklin refused to settle comfortably into a category. He was not only the prince of self-invention, but the king of second acts. He had no great faith in human nature but an abiding one in collective human enterprise. "For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom," he reminded the signers of our Constitution, "you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views." But he was also a preternaturally happy man. He truly believed that it was always morning in America.
The most read writer in colonial America, Franklin found that only the Bible outsold his almanacs. (The former, he reasoned, you bought once. The latter had to be purchased annually.) He also pioneered a media role for which he has not been given proper credit. As Hawthorne observed - it was not necessarily a compliment - Franklin was "the counselor and household friend to almost every family in America." He has but one successor today. He was less Ted Turner than Oprah Winfrey, ladling up an expertly seasoned stew of human frailty and triumph, entertainment and inspiration.
BY his 250th birthday, Franklin had survived the slights to be feted across the world. The tributes were appropriate to a man who had always thought globally. He understood that America was not an island; it was at his suggestion that maps of the world graced the walls of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Eloquently he articulated what the War of Independence represented beyond American shores: "We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious it is for the Americans to be called by providence to this post of honor," he reminded Congress during a dark winter of the war.
A few years later he offered up what may be the best one-line definition of this country. The New World, he asserted, judged a man not by who he was, but by what he could do. And what Franklin could do was staggering. His legacy is not a political philosophy but a protean existence, act after act of bold curiosity, brash risk-taking, raw ingenuity. Once those constituted a definition of the American character. Today they would more likely be termed "hypomania," a fair diagnosis for any individual who manages single-handedly to found a library, fire company, police force, hospital, university, insurance company, sanitation department and militia.
How much do we value Franklin? Since 1799, Washington has been acknowledged to have been "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." For much of the last century Franklin appears to have been first in everything else. He was not one to put theory before practice, however. None but the empirical test will do for Dr. Franklin. How dear is he to us? Well, who would you rather have in your wallet, George Washington or Ben Franklin? He makes us feel rich.
