Jody Kolodzey: Ben Franklin, the Original Fabricator

[Jody Kolodzey has worked for the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times. She is currently the Philadelphia Co-Chair of the National Writers Union and edits Danny Schechter's blog at NewsDissector.org.]

... Playing fast and loose with the facts is old news for some journalists, and the 1980s were another dark decade for the profession. In 1981, Janet Cooke of the Washington Post was forced to relinquish her Pulitzer Prize when it was discovered that her award-winning story — about an 8-year-old heroin addict — was a hoax. Then, in 1989, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled — in a libel case brought against New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm by psychoanalyst Jeffrey M. Masson — that it is permissible for reporters to make up quotes as long as they “do not alter the substantive content of unambiguous remarks." (In a dissenting opinion, one federal judge lamented that the decision gave writers"the right to lie in public," and most editors concurred, asserting that, federal court ruling or no federal court ruling, they would not allow their reporters to concoct quotes.)

But the original poster child for journalistic fabrication is neither Stephen Glass nor Janet Cooke. It is Benjamin Franklin.

In 1722, when he was a 16-year-old apprentice in his brother James's Boston printshop, Ben Franklin contrived a meddlesome widow named Silence Dogood. In a series of 14 letters that were printed in the New England Courant, the weekly paper that James Franklin published,"Silence Dogood" sounded off about social injustices, popular fashions, higher education, the war between the sexes, and other matters."I am not without Hopes, that communicating my small Stock in this manner ... may be at least in some Measure useful," Franklin wrote in the third Silence Dogood letter, dated April 30, 1722.

"Silence Dogood" wasn’t just a pseudonym for a precocious social critic. Like a serious actor preparing for a role, Franklin devised an elaborate history and set of motivations for her. In her letters, she told the story of her life: how she had been born on a voyage from London to Boston (during which her father fell overboard and was drowned), grew up, married a clergyman, and had three children. She noted that she took in boarders, gossiped with neighbors, and kept a garden. She described her appearance ("handsome") and her personality:"I am an Enemy to Vice and a Friend to Virtue. I am one of an extensive Charity, and a great Forgiver of private Injuries: A hearty Lover of the Clergy and all good Men, and a mortal Enemy to arbitrary Government & unlimited Power... I have likewise a natural Inclination to observe and reprove the Faults of others, at which I have an excellent Faculty."

The ruse came to an end when James discovered what Ben was doing, and fired him. Soon afterward, Ben left Boston to seek his fortune in Philadelphia.

Several decades later, while Ben Franklin was expanding on his"Silence Dogood" themes under his own name and in his Poor Richard’s Almanac, fabrication was flourishing under Old King George. In separate incidents in the British Isles during the 1760s, two poets produced bodies of work that they claimed they had"discovered" in the form of ancient manuscripts. In Inverness, Scotland, James Macpherson published three books of verse that he attributed to a third-century Gaelic poet named Ossian. Meanwhile, in Bristol, England, Thomas Chatterton forged several parchments that he passed off as the writings of a 15th-century monk named Thomas Rowley. Macpherson’s and Chatterton’s works were well-written and well-received, and people enjoyed reading them — until it was revealed that they were fakes. Or, more accurately, originals.

Fabrication is a curious form of literary transgression. It is the opposite of plagiarism, in which you claim someone else’s words for your own. In fabrication, you claim that your own words belong to someone else. Its purveyors tend to be highly gifted, and it occurs mostly in cultures and epochs that do not value originality.

Franklin wrote in his seventh Silence Dogood epistle that if there were no good poets, it was"purely because we do not afford that Praise and Encouragement which is merited, when anything extraordinary of this Kind is produc’d among us."

Nowadays, it seems that we are only willing to be entertained by fiction if we are told that it is fact. Is there such a thing as a made-for-TV movie that was not"based on a true story"? Apart from the dubious reality of so-called"reality" programming, even situation comedies such as Seinfeld and Bernie Mac — like I Love Lucy and Ozzie & Harriet before them — blur the lines between the real and the spurious in their actors-cum-characters' lives.

Franklin wrote, while posing as his alter-ego,"I never intend to wrap my Talent in a Napkin." But for a while, he found it expedient to wrap it in a skirt.