Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Jennifer J. Baker, Yale University

During Benjamin Franklin's lifetime, his international reputation rested largely on his scientific experiments. Yet, Edmund S. Morgan writes, Franklin himself valued above all the practical applications—rather than the theories—that derived from these experiments: the lightning rod that would protect ships and buildings, the stove that would heat a home more efficiently. In keeping with Franklin's own priorities, Morgan has chosen to reconstruct Franklin's life as it was "lived usefully" (p. 29). He presents, not a comprehensive account, but an interpretive biography focusing on Franklin's public projects, statecraft, and diplomacy.	1
This biography does not always proceed chronologically, and it tells little of Franklin's family background, birth, and youth in Boston. (Given the biographer's angle, this would make sense, though Franklin did boast in his memoirs, somewhat in jest, that his public-spiritedness emerged at the age of ten, when he organized the construction of a wharf so his playfellows would have a place to sit while fishing for minnows.) Morgan's story begins in 1726, the year Franklin, at age twenty, returned from what would be the first of three trips to England during the course of his life. Told in the historical present, the opening segments present an athletic, energetic, and, above all, curious young man. Morgan draws the reader in with an absorbing survey of a lifetime of scientific endeavors: studies of pelagic crabs, speculations on the repulsion of oil and water, careful trackings of the Gulf Stream, and numerous designs to make ships roomier, steadier, and more aerodynamic.	2
Though Morgan offers a brief account of Franklin's years as a printer, he is primarily interested in the change that occurred after his retirement from business in 1748 at age forty-two. From 1748 to 1750, Morgan writes, Franklin "developed a new commitment to using his talents in behalf of others" (p. 29). He took inspiration from Richard Savage's poem "On Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works"; he insisted, in a letter to his mother, "I would rather have it said, he lived usefully, than, He died rich" (p. 29). He published his findings on electricity in the hope they would prove useful to others, and he refused to engage in public debates about them—for fear, Morgan surmises, that defending them would only be self-serving. After having declined to serve in the Pennsylvania Assembly years earlier, Franklin finally accepted election to the legislature in 1751. In these years, he founded several institutions to improve life in his adopted town of Philadelphia—including most notably a free library, a hospital, and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania—and he proposed the Albany Plan for a representative union to defend the colonies during the French and Indian War.	3
According to Morgan, these were also the years when some of the man's many contradictions emerged. While Franklin valued diplomacy and cooperation, his anger could get the better of him. His scathing attacks on German immigrants came back to haunt him in later years. His efforts to unseat the proprietary Penn family bordered on obsessive, and he ended up devoting more time and energy to this battle than it deserved. The revolutionary crisis two decades later brought out perhaps the greatest contradiction. Though Franklin relished his English identity and had worked tirelessly to save colonial ties with Britain, he eventually became one of the key figures in the move for independence and, as a diplomat in France after the war, did more than anyone to establish the young republic's credibility overseas and to procure much-needed loans. As his famous "Join or Die" cartoon made clear, there was no turning back once Franklin sided with the cause of independence, and he was not always a model of temperance. In 1772, he stirred up trouble by publicizing the private letters of Thomas Hutchinson, the loyalist Massachusetts governor, and as a result was dismissed from his position as a postmaster general. In 1775, Franklin cut off all ties with his only living son, William, because he remained loyal to the crown.	. . .