Restoring an Original

National Review, Nov 10, 2003 by Tracy Lee Simmons

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 608 pp., $30)

When Thomas Jefferson first presented himself at Versailles in 1784, one observer wrote that the spectacle of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Jefferson at court put him in mind of nothing so much as a cannonball, a teapot, and a candlestick. The comparisons worked because they referred to the commonest of objects. The American Founders have strutted before history ever since not only as indispensable patriarchs, but also as representative American types. They were us, in essence, only more so.

Benjamin Franklin, though, stood alone. He always has. Yet he has not stood aloof. Washington was carved from marble; Hamilton is deemed the unlikely offshore prodigy; Adams seems faintly dynastic and remote; Jefferson glides across the stage as the original philosopher-prince. But Franklin is set off, a folksy sage beside an elite clique of soldiers and savants. He seems both below and above all these luminaries, both less and more. He's the man of humble stock who rose to the greatest heights by dint of genius and grit, reminding us all of the boons to be accrued from American industry, thrift, and a little native optimism. There's something quaintly accessible about this original Can-Do American. Franklin is, as Walter Isaacson says, the Founder who "winks" at us.

Or so it seems to us now. During his own life, Franklin was one of the most famous men in the world. It's instructive to see why. After taking up his ambassadorial duties in Paris in 1776, he came to stand -- particularly in some stale, bored, and hidebound European minds -- for that extravagant flowering of humanity that the New World had finally brought forth after more than a century of frontier austerities and colonial subjection. He was Rousseau's man of nature come to life, a common man in common clothes speaking common words who had been spared the sophisticated corruptions of civilization. His portly image appeared on snuffboxes, statuettes, lithographs, and medals. He was Revolutionary Man become Republican Man. Both his scientific inventiveness and his political audacity elevated him into an empyrean of statesmen, tinkerers, and dreamers. He seemed to live many incarnations simultaneously: inventor, publisher, writer, statesman, diplomat. The epigram attributed to Turgot got around: "He seized the lightning from the sky and the scepter from the tyrants." What was more, it was believed. Not fulsomely did Jefferson say, when he came to replace Franklin in Paris, "No one can replace him, Sir, I am only his successor."

While Franklin's is the kind of life ever ripe for biographical treatment in a country enamored of its beginnings, his is not the stuff -- a la Jefferson -- of incessant new exposes, which is odd, given his visibility and importance, not to mention his own share of juicy scandal. Nonetheless, the loss probably isn't great. His story needs telling only once every generation -- though no less. Of such men we need reminding.

Walter Isaacson, formerly of Time and CNN, is as good a candidate as any to give Franklin's life a fair shot, and, as this new book proves, much better than many. Scholars would write mere scholarship; Isaacson has written a biography worthy of its subject, with a plain, straightforward tone that its subject would likely have approved. This volume is well documented, but it also saunters, making it both diverting and informative.

Most of this biography moves at a leisurely pace. We follow Franklin's birth in Boston in 1706, the son of a tallow chandler, through his early success at the Boston Latin School. He dropped out of school at age ten; we then see the young polymath teaching himself to write by imitating Addison and Steele's Spectator volumes. We see him through his harsh servitude as a printer's apprentice to his brother on the New England Courant, to the day he struck out on his own, practically penniless, for Philadelphia, which was when his troubles really began. And so on, all the way to international fame, through many reversals of fortune that would have destroyed lesser men. It's a good yarn.

Yet this book doesn't come entirely without serious, academic-like aspirations. Isaacson tells us that Franklin set out quite consciously to "create a new American archetype": the proud self-made man. This may be true. Franklin certainly sought to promote a strong, solid middle class, and he lived to see growing middling prosperity in the one country for which he seemed supremely fit. He thought virtue thrived best with that middle class of shopkeepers and farmers. The challenge, of course, was to encourage that class to embody the virtues he extolled, lest it be reduced to crass commercial appetites.

This challenge Franklin met early on when, from 1732 to 1758, he published Poor Richard's Almanack, studded with homespun advice for this burgeoning class; its echoes reverberate in the self-help section of every bookstore today. "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." "God helps them that help themselves." "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." These axioms every schoolchild once knew, before Dewey. And some nuggets of advice seem, to the modern sensibility, downright greedy, though they lose nothing in spiky humor. "There are three faithful friends -- an old wife, an old dog, and ready money." "Where there's marriage, without love, there will be love without marriage." "Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards." Try to find these sentences stuck to refrigerator doors now out in Westchester.