perfidy

[also posted to blogcritics.org]

I'm deeply in love with our times, a relentless booster for the progress of technology and the wonders of the modern world. Sometimes I like to play a game with myself called "What If Ben Franklin Were Alive Today," in which I see if I am geek enough to explain things to Ben Franklin (were he shot forward in time) so that he would understand. Steel-frame skyscrapers, lasers, baseball, the miniskirt, internal combustion, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the Internet, cellular biology, the periodic table, hip-hop music, it's all fair game. Needless to say I have a lot of spare brain-time on my hands.

Why Benjamin Franklin? Because of who he was. Other figures from history shared his relentless curiosity and erudition: Erasmus, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton come to mind. But these men, save Newton, belong to another age, and Newton was a recluse. But Benjamin Franklin is engaging in so many ways-- he was a rabble-rouser, Renaissance man, writer, editor, diplomat, inventor, scientist, endless self-promoter, the last true Enlightenment thinker and the first true American. Moreover, his work on electricity was the foundation of a mind-boggling array of advances. He wrote the first Pennsylvania constitution! Discovered the gulf stream! Invented lightning rods! And most of all, he was deeply in love with his times.

The difficult thing about Franklin is something I've already mentioned: his gift for managing his personal mythology. As his autobiography proves, he was keenly aware of his reputation and happily manipulated it for his own ends. Consequently it is hard to identify the line between who Franklin was and who he said he was. Is he the simple, self-deprecating moral teacher of Poor Richard's Almanac? Is he the keen-witted inventor who flew a kite, invented bifocals, and wrote endlessly about the sciences? Is he a fraud, content to chase French courtesan tail while other people did the work and then collect the credit? Or is he the enterprising lad and genially amused gray eminence of his own autobiography? Of course, he is all these things. Franklin's nature is too changeable, and his legacy to large, to be captured in one description. All of this makes Edmund Morgan's recent biography of the man very welcome.
Edmund Morgan is one of the great historians of the past century, and he is certainly one of my favorites. Less prone to political self-refutation than younger lions like Eric Foner or Gordon Wood, and less prone to progressive determinism than others of his generation, Morgan's major works are landmarks of contemporary historical thought. Now at the end of a long career Morgan has written a project entirely for himself; a portrait of Ben Franklin drawn entirely from the man's own writings. Although it is billed as a biography, a more apt description of the result would be "appreciation."

It seems Morgan likes to play my game too. As he tells it in the preface, "[Franklin] has made it possible for us to know the man behind that presence better than most of those who enjoyed it could have. Franklin can reach us in writing that speaks with a clarity given to few in any language at any time, and writing was his favored mode of communication. We can read his mail. And we can read an astonishing amount of everything else he wrote. . . . For the past fifty years scholars have been collecting every surviving scrap of it from all over the world, and it will eventually fill forty-six or more printed volumes of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Meanwhile, it is available on one small disk, a product of those inconceivable discoveries he dreamt of. This book exists because of that disk, which enabled me to write it-- no, compelled me to."

This endeavor is rare for two reasons. First, it is uncommon these days for an historian to write a preface without using the words "interrogate," "problematize" or "framework." Second, it is rare that a vanity project of this sort is actually worth reading. On the first count, Morgan has always been relatively immune to theoretical fads, and on the second, he rises far, far above type.

Since Morgan relied entirely on the papers of Benjamin Franklin to write the book, many important episodes in Franklin's life are elided or left out entirely. Morgan treats Franklin's childhood in Boston very briefly, as well as his arrival in Philadelphia (so memorably recounted in Franklin's own Autobiography). Relations between Franklin and his wives are somewhat sketchy, and we do not get very much sense of the good or ill Franklin left in his wake. The trouble is, Franklin is already heavily biographied-- two major contributions to the field have come out in the past two years, by H.W. Brands and Walter Isaacson-- and the difficulty comes in trying not to simply rehash familiar material. So what is to recommend a work which by its own lights is a narrowly-sourced love letter?

The answer is this: Morgan does not pretend to undertake a thorough examination of the life, times, and legacy of Benjamin Franklin (as if you could do that in 300 pages!), but rather only "say[s] enough about the man to show that he is worth the trouble. It is... pretty one-sided, a letter of introduction to a man worth knowing, worth spending time with." On that count, Morgan succeeds totally. We come to know Franklin as a man very much of the world, successful and happy, and unafraid to use his reputation, power, and connections to do what he thinks is right.

Not that the brevity or affection for his subject is a liability. He might be in awe of Franklin, but Morgan is historian enough to acknowledge when events require further discussion, and when Franklin was simply wrong. For example, of all the accounts I've read, Morgan charts most clearly Franklin's transformation from English Patriot to American Patriot in the years leading up to the American Revolution.

Franklin spent the years before the Revolution in England, trying to achieve compromise between the colonies and Crown. At the time, Franklin thought of himself as a British Citizen from America-- not an American. At the same time that his counterparts in the colonies were beginning to speak of revolution, Franklin was still actively dedicated to preserving the union. Morgan spends much time discussing how this identity shaped Franklin's efforts to reconcile an intransigent Parliament to the real needs of the colonies despite repeated setbacks and open hostility. The change comes not after his public humiliation in Parliament, when the powerful forces he had on his side-- William Pitt among them-- cannot sway a government determined to punish the colonies for demanding a say in their own affairs, but after Parliament and King reject out of hand petitions sent from America. To Franklin, this meant that the ancient right of subjects (the colonies) to petition the Crown for a redress of grievances had been revoked, and that Britain had done the damage. Despite this realization, Franklin continued working to keep war at bay, but with the realization that when push came to shove, he was first an American.

The same episode demonstrates that Franklin was prone to miscalculation, often misreading to disastrous effect signals coming from America to England. As the chief agent of America at Parliament, he was often called on to speak for all 13 colonies on slim information, often blundering at full speed into powerful opposition. Morgan digs beneath Franklin's own words here, repeatedly wondering aloud if Franklin in these years understood what he was doing and who he was dealing with. The impression Morgan gives here is quite a departure from the slick and homely man-of-the-world image Franklin himself cultivated.

One gets the sense that Morgan has been doing some outside reading, because he spends many pages on Franklin's time in France raising money for the American Revolution. This in itself is unremarkable, but Morgan seems to have read David McCullough's recent biography of John Adams. In that book McCullough, through Adams, casts the elderly Franklin as a doddering old fraud, chasing tail and recieving guests but never actually doing any work. In contrast Adams comes across in Morgan's book as a pushy, blustery jerk with a persecution complex. The truth is of course somewhere between-- Adams totally failed to understand that tail-chasing was a vital part of court diplomacy in France, and Franklin never let Adams (who was a pushy jerk) in on his plans.

Although it succeeds wonderfully as an "introduction," Morgan's book comes up a little short as straight biography. For example, Morgan ends his story before Franklin's death, mentioning his final works but not his date of passing. This and other episodes of date-free writing might make the chronology a little hard to follow for newcomers, but Morgan helpfully supplies one in the Appendix for those who may get lost. Such issues aside, Morgan has drawn from Franklin's papers a compelling and altogether enjoyable account of the life of the first great American. But it is only a taste. If you intend read Morgan's biography-- and you really ought to, it's short-- I would recommend first reading Franklin's excellent Autobiography (a short and compulsively readable joy), and following Morgan with either the Brands or Isaacson volumes. Both present a more complete picture of the man, but neither comes close to Morgan in examining the human complexity of their mercurial and fascinating subject.