BENJAMIN  FRANKLIN

Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson ; Published by Simon and Schuster ; Pages 590 ; Price U.S. $ 30/-

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Benjamin Franklin ( 1706--1790) ranks among the greatest Americans. Physically he resembled Dicken’s avuncular Pickwick---being bald and cuddly and became the most beloved of the Founding Fathers.

At the end of the book, Isaacson has neatly summarised the achievements of Franklin.

"Franklin’s belief that he could serve God by serving his fellow man may strike as mundane, but it was in truth a worthy creed that he deeply believed and faithfully followed. He was remarkably versatile in this service. He devised legislatures and lightning rods, lotteries and lending libraries. He sought practical ways to make stoves less smoky and commonwealths less corrupt. He organised neighbourhood constabularies and international alliances. He combined two types of lenses to create bifocals and two concepts of representation to foster the nation’s federal compromise. As his friend, the French statesman Turgot said in his famous epigram, he snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

He was a phenomenal inventor especially of items of use for the common man. He bettered the designs for urinary catheters and storage batteries. Immanuel Kant called him "the new Prometheus" because of his experiments with kites and lightning. For this work, he was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal by the Royal Society - the first person living outside Britain to be honoured in this way. He was responsible for the first lending library and the first fire department. He displayed skill as a diplomat and forged an alliance between America and France He helped writing the US constitution in 1787. 

His autobiography is an all-time classic book.

Franklin was a professional accomplisher, making money in several business ventures, including publishing and real estate, organising the US postal service, politicking endlessly, crisscrossing the Atlantic as a diplomat extraordinaire, having dalliances with women young and old, charming kings and queens, exhausting his relatives and friends.

This latest attempt in writing his biography is by Walter Isaacson, a former Editor of Time, currently Aspen Institute President .

The book is a lively, readable and joyous book. Isaacson admires his subject deeply, and makes us admire him.

In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin’s life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the runaway apprentice who became, over the course of his eighty-four-year life, America’s best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard’s Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation’s alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.

In this colourful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin’s amazing life, showing how he helped to forge the American national identity and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century.

He provides a swift, entertaining narrative with just enough background material to make the story accessible to a wide audience.

According to him, Franklin has been vilified in romantic periods and lionised in entrepreneurial ones.

Franklin was a quintessential Enlightenment figure, who went down very well among the French of the 18th century, where his wit, his lack of dogmatism, his attachment to reason and his practical approach to life were immensely admired. He was sensibly regarded as a prototypical American, which was a new thing in this world in the late 18th century.

Franklin rose to eminence from fairly modest beginnings in Boston, the 10th son of the pious Josiah and Abiah Franklin, who indentured their precocious boy to an older brother, James, where he learnt the craft of printing.

Young Ben pretended that he had got a girl pregnant, escaping his brother's clutches on a ship to New York, from where he proceeded to Philadelphia in 1723 with only a single Dutch dollar in his pocket. He was 17 years old, with nothing but a decent knowledge of the printing business.

It was rags to riches from that point on. Ben networked like a fiend, quickly befriending the governor of the state, who employed him in various capacities. He set up a print shop, and soon owned a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette - the most widely read paper in the colonies. He wrote and self-published almanacs and books. He became, indeed, a mogul of sorts. Isaacson writes : "Franklin's print shop had by then grown into a successful, vertically integrated media conglomerate. He had a printing press, publishing house, newspaper, an almanac series and partial control of the postal system. The successful books he had printed ranged from Bibles and psalters to Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela . . . He also had built a network of profitable partnerships and franchises . Money flowed in, much of which he invested, quite wisely, in Philadelphia property."

Franklin at 42, only halfway through his life, retired from printing to become a world-famous scientist, inventor, public servant, administrator, diplomat, writer, wit and bon vivant. He also became a flirt, attracting a wide range of women, foreign and domestic.

Isaacson writes of Franklin's common-law marriage to Deborah Read. He settled in with her in 1730, unable to marry her because she had been previously married to an unreliable potter who absconded to the West Indies. Bigamy being a crime, Franklin protected himself by simply living with Deborah.

Franklin certainly adored his women. In a wry essay of 1745, "Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress", Franklin argues for the virtues of sleeping with older women. He lists many reasons for this preference.

He spent many years abroad without his wife, and was perceived in France as a successful womaniser.

The great triumph of Franklin's old age was, of course, his work at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. At 81, he played a central role in the drafting of that magnificent document, although he understood its flaws only too well. His withering last words to the convention suggest how fiercely independent, and prophetic he could be:

"I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the people if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."

He was, by consensus, the best writer in eighteenth-century America, as well as the nation’s first media tycoon and its shrewdest diplomat.

Isaacson is most fascinated with Franklin the social and political tactician—Machiavelli as transplanted to a young democracy . While Franklin was clearly delighted by himself—what a piece of work is Ben—being a genius was in some ways inconvenient, especially in those days when duels were fought over insults .

He wanted his public to believe that his virtuous virtuosity was the whole story, but his compulsive manipulativeness sometimes can have a sociopathic tinge.

In his treatment of his family, benign neglect is possibly the best that can be said. Franklin ignored his wife’s pleas to return to Philadelphia from London, where he lived without her for some ten years, even after she’d had a stroke.

Isaacson reminds us that Franklin essentially retired, wealthy and content, in his early 40s and devoted the rest of his days to doing acts of public good, pressing the cause of meritocracy in the service of “social mobility rather than an established elite” and furthering the cause of American independence at considerable risk to his property and person.

Franklin remains an ideal American type.

P.P.Ramachandran.

26/04/2020.

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