Benjamin Franklin, wisest and most insightful of all American fathers, had a great many things to say. Yet it wasn’t his oratorical skill that won for him his scientific, his philosophic, and—as a consequence of the first two—his international renown. Rather, it was his ability to marry on the written page his humor and pith, his insight and depth. It remains a marriage that only a few American scribblers have been able to touch; fewer still to have consummated to any fruitful end. Its tendency is to evade the writers’ grasp. To my personal frustration, I can be sure it’s been withheld from me, a writer who fashions himself in the Franklinian mold.
He was the everyman’s literary god, though himself a skeptic till the very end. He played the part of minister of maxims and preacher of apothegms that every person—be he learned or lay—might understand, absorb, celebrate, and finally apply to his own daily life. He was the leather-apron-wearing philosopher of Philadelphia, the bifocal-wielding Renaissance man. He was the young nation’s resident sage, a workaday master of short truths and wit. He provided the subtlety to a busy and sometimes crude country whose refinement hadn’t yet come.
It’s fitting that his greatest impact was to be heard not through the airwaves, but seen on the page. He did, after all, own an inexhaustible little print shop over whose content and daily output he presided for many years. Also listed among his assets were a disproportionate number of paper mills operating in the colonies at the time. Under his proprietorship were as many as eighteen rather sizable mills, though his reach into the parchment business didn’t stop there; he lent credit to and expected a return from at least a dozen other mills located mainly in the northeast. It still dizzies the mind to think that at the time of his greatest commercial presence, Franklin was likely the most prodigious dealer of paper in the entire English-speaking world (a world, mind you, that was quite large and upon which the sun seldom set).
Once transformed from a wild, natural bark to a quiet but eager parchment, Franklin would set about enlivening it once again. He did so not by some colonial sorcery, but with the dab of his ink. In this, we witness a true resuscitation from wood to word. He did so in a miscellany of mediums: almanacs, gazettes, autobiographies—you name it and, probably, Franklin’s name was on it.
Or, as I should say, his names were on it. Of these sometimes goofy, often self-deprecating monikers we count such gems as Alice Addertongue, Cecilia Shortface, Polly Baker, and—best known of his feminine facades, Silence Dogood. Though all had a risible, tangible bite, it was the last that was also the earliest of his alter-egos. It was by way of her (or, should we say, his) anonymity that Franklin’s work at long last came into being.
By the modern standards of The New York Times, Franklin’s tyrant of an elder brother James decided that young Benjamin’s work was “ill-fit” to print. Alas, printed it was not. In this apparently pre-nepotistic age, James wouldn’t tolerate his ankle-biter of a younger brother filling up his gazette with his precocious genius—no matter how clever and appetizing that genius might be. Simply to get a word into this grown-up journal, young Benjamin had to think outside of the box. It was in this outward thinking that he developed his first of many noms do plume. More than the name, the sentiments expressed by this mysterious Silence struck a chord. Through the city they rang and James danced to the tune of the increased readership they brought.
But the gig couldn’t long be sustained. James soon discovered his brother’s attempt at identity theft and scolded him for having committed the crime at his expense. Upon being found out, Benjamin was canned by a brother whose fury knew no bounds. So odd was James’ sense of sibling rivalry—if not sibling enmity—that it’s difficult fully to comprehend. Today, a brother relies upon his elder to get ahead or to be so positioned that he might succeed in the toil of life. Indeed, such a fraternity of animosity can hardly be conceived.
Having been let go, Benjamin was ready to make a move. Sensing himself persona non grata in the vengeful midst of James the unjust, he decided to cut ties not only with his family and his security, but his hometown as well. He made up his mind to flee an unenviable, repressive, violent, and above all stagnant position under his brother’s thumb, and turn his compass south. New York was his next stop, whither he arrived after a few short weeks.
Being that he was a loyalist until forced by expedience to become a lover of this land, one would think that Franklin might’ve enjoyed a life in that “Empire” state. After all, it was a state whose sympathies tended to look east where the motherly isles laid supreme. Whatever the cause though, New York simply wasn’t for him. That incipient nexus of media, gossip, scandal, and life wasn’t yet what it would become. For want of work and a different, more vibrant city better aligned to his taste, Franklin decided to continue on south. A latter-day Ben may have been advised by a future New Yorker to seek his fortunes out west; there, a nineteenth-century Horace Greeley would declare, was where prosperity lived and liberty breathed. But in this age, the west was too new, too savage, too vast. He’d have to content himself with the developing cities on the eastern coast. It was there, bobbing along the Delaware River, that he encountered a city with a Grecian name.
Greek in conception, Quaker in execution, that city of brotherly amours would soon fall in love with its newest son. Franklin alighted onto the docks of Philadelphia at the age of sixteen and immediately set off to apprentice himself in the craft he knew best: printing. By grit, ingenuity (and chastity, and temperance, and a dozen other self-prescribed and suffocating virtues in between), Franklin was able to branch out on his own and become the most successful of the city’s and then the colonies’ printers. His works were ubiquitous; his wisdom adored. Along with his Pennsylvania Gazette (a far-reaching political and cultural newspaper of the day), he published his still famous Poor Richard’s Alamanck to whose wisdom we continually return even as “almanac” gathers dust as a synonym for “antique”.
One could go on in greater detail about Old Ben’s life; surely, the voyage would be worth the flight. You see, his career as a “businessman” as outlined above spanned but half of his jam-packed life. Thereafter, having retired from his commercial commitments at the unripe age of forty-five, he carried on for four more decades in every field without losing a step. He continued, with possibly less disposable time (a consequence of his numerous and eclectic tastes), to indulge those fields he considered his greatest passions: science, politics, diplomacy, philosophy, venery, and the written word. He approached all with an inquisitive and unquenchable zeal. One could list as his achievements the library, the university, the fire department, the Gulf Stream, the bifocal, the philosophical society, the taming of electricity, the teaching of a country, and the French fluency that would help secure for this nation a loan and then a war. Having considered all these things, you’d still have only an incomplete portrait of this polymorphous man.
Yet the one line that permeates his life is his ability to produce letters. We see them written on his monuments and inscribed on our skin. Equally a man of action, experimentation, and quiet thought, it’s to his written wisdom we turn when in need of inspiration and self-evident truth.
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