LET'S DO LUNCH': BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE AMERICAN CHARACTER

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REVIEW ESSAY

   ‘LET’S DO LUNCH’: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE
               AMERICAN CHARACTER

                        PETER BASTIAN

The First American. By H.W.Brands, New York, Doubleday, 2000, pp. 765,
$US 17.00 (paper).

Benjamin Franklin. By Edmund S Morgan, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 2002, pp. xi + 339, $US 28.00 (cloth).

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. By Walter Isaacson, New York,
Simon and Shuster, 2003, pp. 590, $US30.00 (cloth).

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. By Gordon S. Wood, New
York, The Penguin Press, 2004, pp. xvi + 287, $US 25.95 (cloth).

Even before the first generation of revolutionaries had passed from the
scene, some were already jealous of the importance given to Benjamin
Franklin’s role in the achievement of American independence. John Adams
could hardly contain his disgust in his 1791 prediction when he claimed that
Franklin and Washington would be remembered as the two heroes of the
revolution. Interestingly, for many subsequent generations of Americans,
Franklin would be remembered as a prototype for American national virtues
and values, rather than for his revolutionary contributions. Nineteenth
century Americans in particular were taken with his entertaining
autobiography that demonstrated how a poor boy could make good and with
his practical ‘Poor Richard’ aphorisms that seemed so apt for an
increasingly middle class and prosperous democratic society. For those
critics of American society, Franklin’s apparent crass materialism provided
an easy focus for their attacks on twentieth century Babbittry. Although the
later part of that century saw a decline in admiration for Franklin, he never
went completely out of favour with historians or with the general public.
The approaching tercentenary of Franklin’s birth in 2006 has seen a plethora
of recent works aiming to once again interpret Franklin’s career and
relevance to American society in the twenty first century.

H.W. Brands began this trend with his biography running to some 765 pages
and offering the most comprehensive account of Franklin’s career since Carl
Van Doren’s monumental 1938 study.i Certainly there is much to record.
Even the staunchest Franklin critic would have to concede the man’s
achievements. He was after all a very successful businessman due to his

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hard work, shrewd investments and to the creation of his entertaining and
highly profitable almanacs. Retiring at age forty-two, he devoted his time to
a range of civic improvements and inventions as well as conducting
substantial experiments with electricity that earned him international fame.
He embarked on a successful career in Pennsylvanian politics before leaving
for London where he pursued imperial interests for himself and his colony.
He came to be regarded as something of a spokesperson for the colonies, at
least by many in the various British ministries. Unable to prevent a rift
between England and the colonies he returned home to serve in the Second
Continental Congress where he was appointed to the committee that drafted
the Declaration of Independence. Having voted for independence he then set
off at the age of seventy for Paris. Here he helped secure a treaty of alliance
with France and negotiated the peace treaty with the British that gave his
new country generous boundaries and recognized its national independence.
When he returned home in 1785 he immediately became President of
Pennsylvania and then a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention. Before his
death in 1790 he was engaged in a campaign to end slavery and wrote his
last satirical article only weeks before he died. It is hardly surprising that
Franklin’s career has been admired by generations of Americans. His
humble origins and self-made success stood out amongst the leading
revolutionaries, many of whom were born into relatively comfortable
circumstances. At an age when many of his contemporaries had retired,
Franklin, a generation older than most of the founding fathers, worked
tirelessly for independence especially in France and was one of the few
founding fathers who wanted the new federal government to seriously deal
with the slavery issue.

Every aspect of Franklin’s long life is covered by Brands and if there is a
major criticism of his work it is for the frequent digressions that provide a
context for Franklin’s career. While the reader needs some understanding of
Pennsylvanian politics or the workings of the English imperial trading
system, these sometimes digress for pages, detracting from the main story
and lengthening what was always going to be a long book. Brands argues
that Franklin continually sought a larger stage, from Boston to Philadelphia
to London but that at heart was an American Briton, rather than the other
way around. When he became disillusioned with the British Empire he
returned home to America, his real love, to fight for its independence. In
many ways he was symbolically and by his nature the ‘first American.’
Brands tends to gloss over any of Franklin’s failings in order to present the
positive side of his considerable achievements. In what is a long and
detailed study Brands does a good job in capturing much of the essential
essence of an elusive personality.

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Edmund Morgan’s work is even more of a positive portrait than Brands
although it is not even half the length. Morgan is one of the pre-eminent
scholars of colonial America with a career stretching back some sixty years.
Like other recent Franklin scholars, Morgan was able to read the entire
collection of Franklin papers on CD-ROM rather than waiting for Yale
University Press to complete their painstaking printed editions. These
papers are, by Morgan’s own admission, the main source for his book which
is clearly meant to be a sympathetic study of Franklin and his contributions
to America. The problem is of course that Franklin, even more than many of
the other founding fathers, was notorious for his literary creations. His
letters were often skillfully crafted not only for the recipient but also for
other potential readers. Gordon S Wood points out that in July 1775
Franklin drafted a letter to his English friend, William Strahan, bluntly
severing all friendship between them because of the behaviour of the British
Army in America. In fact he never sent the letter but simply showed it to
local Philadelphians who were suspicious that Franklin might be a British
spy. These suspicions could have been inflamed if they had seen the letter
Franklin really sent to Strahan a few days later that continued their
friendship unabated. Morgan is wary about using Franklin’s
autobiographical account of his early life, which Brands, Isaacson and
Wood use (despite questioning its reliability) without any serious analysis.
Morgan gives us a portrait of a multi-talented achiever who served his
nation well, especially during the revolutionary period. He sees Franklin as
the real hero in France in securing the alliance and negotiating the peace
treaty with the British. The failings of Franklin and his often poor and
erratic political judgments, especially in the colonial period, are readily
forgiven by Morgan in what is an entertaining, well written but ultimately
somewhat uncritical evaluation of Franklin’s career.

Walter Isaacson’s previous works include a solid biography of Henry
Kissinger and a study of the ‘Wise Men’ who led the United States into the
Cold war era. In one sense Franklin appears to be a strange choice for his
next biography. However, Isaacson fits into a trend that some academic
historians have tried to ignore in recent times - the journalist or writer who
is able to produce a popular best selling biography of well-known figures.
Richard Brookhiser and Joseph Ellis (since his retirement from academia)
are notable examples of this trend with their various eighteenth century
biographies and Isaacson has clearly joined them. His book has enjoyed
good sales and its format, with relatively short chapters each divided into
smaller subsections, makes for easy reading. Isaacson also has the clear
writing style of a good journalist. The result is an entertaining and
sympathetic biography that has been shaped by earlier works. Gordon S
Wood is right in his review of Isaacson that he tends to project onto
Franklin his ‘own enthusiastic, common-sensical, and thoroughly American

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character’.ii Franklin in this portrayal is clearly someone whose interests and
talents are relevant for contemporary Americans. In fairness Isaacson’s final
chapter, in which he traces the changing views of Franklin since his death
and ends with a five-page evaluation of Franklin’s character, is probably the
best summary of Franklin in all the books under review. In terms of
accessibility, balance and ease of reading, Isaacson has produced a good
contemporary text on Franklin.

Gordon S Wood was well aware of many of the character failings of
Franklin and the questions that hang over his career. Wood reviewed
extensively both Morgan and Isaacson for the New York Review of Books
and was critical of these works for failing to address many issues including
their assumptions that Franklin was always a latent American patriot even
when living for so long in London.iii Wood implies that his work will
address the twofold issue of the Americanization of Franklin as per the title
of his book. The first issue is how and why did Franklin become an
American patriot since he was such a lover of the British Empire? The
second is why did the Franklin of the eighteenth century become
transformed into the mythical symbol for later generations of Americans?
Woods answer to the first seems a narrow explanation of personality and
ambitions. Franklin was badly treated by the British establishment in
London in the early 1770s and his plans to become a leading imperial
statesman were effectively destroyed by his enemies. He was driven out of
London by British hostility and he never forgave them for this betrayal.
Once he had made the emotional break with Britain there would be no going
back even if this cost him friendships and an estrangement from his own
son. This may be a reasonable explanation, although I suspect it is only one
part of a much more complicated set of motives. Wood gives us no insights,
anywhere in his account, as to why Franklin proved to be such a good hater
once spurned by England. Early in the book Wood accepts that Franklin had
the most elusive personality of all of the Founding Fathers but the suspicion
is that the author cannot pin it down either. Brands and to an extent Isaacson
certainly do not ignore these events cited by Wood. Brands begins his book
with the story of Franklin’s humiliation before the Privy Council in 1774
and sees it as a major reason for his defection to the American cause.

Wood is on stronger grounds when he argues that Franklin recovered from
his bitter London experiences with his roles as adored statesman, scientist
and international figure in Paris where he played such a crucial part in
securing the French alliance and held it together for several years. In this
Wood and Morgan are generally at one (with both coming to the same
conclusions) in arguing for the brilliance of Franklin’s French policies and
denigrating the contributions of diplomats such as John Adams. It was also
the French who first ‘invented’ the Franklin image. They assumed he was a

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Quaker because of his Pennsylvanian background and depicted him in
countless simple and rustic images. Franklin, ever the opportunist, acted out
these expected images by dressing in a plain suit and fur cap and thereby
came to personify America to his French audience. In comparison to the
adoration shown him in Paris, most Americans, outside of Pennsylvania,
had a more ambiguous attitude towards Franklin once he returned home in
1785. Some of this was due to the unending jealousy of John Adams and the
paranoia of Samuel Adams and the Lee family who spread malicious
rumours about Franklin to all who would listen. Wood argues that
Franklin’s death in 1790 was more widely mourned in France than it was in
America outside of Philadelphia itself.

On the second question as to why Franklin became such a popular figure to
subsequent generations of Americans, Wood covers ground others have
dealt with before. The publication and popularity of Franklin’s
Autobiography from 1792 (unknown to the public during Franklin’s
lifetime) and the changing nature of American society that saw the triumph
of middle class values apparently akin to Franklin’s early career are all
noted. However Carla Mulford’s 1999 article on much of this same material
offers better coverage in her twenty-eight pages than Wood does in his final
eleven.iv Given his intention of explaining the Americanization of Franklin,
these pages represent a fairly limited discussion and Isaacson has a better
overall evaluation of the issues. All in all despite some interesting points in
places, Wood does not add all that much to our understanding of Franklin or
to that present in the books he has criticised.

All of these works highlight the problems in dealing with the long, elusive
and sometimes contradictory career of Franklin. They often beg the
important questions on some of the more controversial aspects of Franklin’s
life. If, for example, Franklin was always implicitly an American patriot (as
Brands, Morgan and Isaacson assume) why was his loyalty to the
revolutionary cause suspected by many of his countrymen? When he
returned to Philadelphia in 1775 rumours circulated throughout the city that
he was a secret British spy. Even after his service to the cause of
independence, he returned to Philadelphia in 1785 to the accusation of being
a French spy. For a man so closely associated with national values how was
it that this apparently quintessential American preferred spending most of
his last thirty-three years living either in London or in Paris?

Then there is the issue of Franklin’s long list of apparent political
misjudgements. He pursued the policy of trying to obtain a royal
government for Pennsylvania despite warnings of its dangers by many in the
colony. He caused his friend John Hughes considerable personal suffering
by suggesting he obtain a post as a stamp distributor during the Stamp Act

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crisis. Only a spectacular back flip by Franklin himself restored his
popularity with the voters of Pennsylvania when he finally realised the
unpopularity of the Stamp Act. He courted the favour of the British ministry
basically misleading them as to American views on paying future taxes and
he advocated American representation in Parliament when virtually no one
in North America accepted such a scheme. He sent purloined letters to
friends in Massachusetts thinking this would resolve the imperial crisis by
forcing Thomas Hutchinson (one of the letter writers) to resign as governor.
In fact this only worsened the problems and led to Franklin being savaged in
front of the Privy Council for his duplicity. As a diplomat in France he
employed a private secretary who was a British spy and leaked many of the
American delegation’s secrets to the enemy. Franklin’s own control over the
finances, papers and general administration of the delegation was often a
shambles. These do not appear to be the record of a man exhibiting astute
and prudent political judgements.

Finally, there is the issue of his treatment of his friends and family. Franklin
had a long list of enemies, usually former friends and business partners with
whom he had fallings out. Indeed, he rarely kept close intimate friends for
any length of time despite being a great joiner of clubs and societies. He
effectively abandoned his wife Deborah to live in England for years on end
and refused to return home either for his only daughter’s wedding or when
his wife’s health began to fail. Yet he could cut short a holiday to attend the
British Court for the King’s birthday. He was close to his son, William, for
many years but when he chose the loyalist cause, Franklin effectively cut
him out of his life and spurned all attempts by William at reconciliation. He
even went so far as to take control of William’s own illegitimate son,
William Temple, and used him as a substitute son to cause William even
further pain. There is a general suspicion that Franklin’s world revolved
around himself and much of his unattractive side was hidden by his
deliberately cultivated friendly veneer unless crossed by anyone.

What does this say about Franklin as some sort of prototype of the
American national character? In one sense defining American character in
this way has largely gone out of fashion but nevertheless in Bush’s
America, there are signs of a revival. Identifying patriotic figures to give
American history a better sense of continuity and seamlessness has certainly
come back into vogue.v Franklin with his apparently folksy ways, his
democratic leanings, his success by hard work and his easy accessibility
does seem more identifiable to modern Americans than the aloofness of
Washington, the evasiveness of Jefferson or the emotionalism of John
Adams That Franklin would also have been able to look visitors in the eye
and promise ‘Let’s do lunch’ without any intention of ever seeing them

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again, may reflect his insincerity, but this is not a fault likely to be
considered by many as a serious character defect.

I suspect that Franklin would have been delighted not only with his
lingering fame in American society but also with the difficulty historians
have had in trying to pin down his elusive personality. He was always a man
of immense contradictions and cunning which has made it hard for
historians to decide who he really was and what he actually believed. In this
sense he offers the chance of being all things to all people more than almost
any other of the founding fathers. It is noteworthy that everyone of the
books under discussion still recounts the story of the seventeen year old
Franklin arriving in Philadelphia and walking down Market Street with
fresh bread under his arms and past his future wife Deborah standing in
front of her house. It may have happened exactly the way Franklin
described it in his autobiography and it may also be pure fiction. After all
Franklin was in England at the time of writing and long separated from his
wife in Philadelphia. There is some evidence Franklin felt a little guilty
about his treatment of Deborah so why not put her in the story as one of his
first sights all those years ago and assuage some of this guilt. It is
impossible to know what really happened but it is an interesting reflection
on just how good a storyteller Franklin was, so that even now historians,
despite their suspicions, still relate the events in the way that he told it. In
this sense Franklin still has the better of his interpreters.

ENDNOTES

i
  Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, The Viking Press, New York, 1938.
ii
    Gordon S Wood, ‘Uncle Ben’ New York Review of Books, Volume 50, No 19, 4
December 2003.
iii
    Gordon S. Wood ‘Wise Men’ New York Review of Books, Volume 49, No 14, 26
September 2002.
iv
    Carla Mulford, ‘Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory’ New
England Quarterly, Volume 72, No. 3, September, 1999, pp.415-443.
v
    See my review, ‘Some Dead White Males Do Matter; John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson Revisited’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol 21, No 2,
December, 2002, pp. 101-110.