Stacy Schiff: Poor Richard's Redemption
[Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America."]
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....
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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....