|
|
|
REVIEW ESSAY
Benjamin Franklin at 300: The Show Goes On A Review of the Reviews
| Benjamin Franklin. By Edmund S. Morgan. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. xi, 339p. Illustrations, notes, index. $24.95.)The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. By Gordon S. Wood. (New York: Penguin Press, 2004. xii, 299p. Illustrations, notes, index. $29.95.)Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. By Walter Isaacson. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. 590p. Illustrations, appendices, notes, index. $30.)Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. By David Waldstreicher. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xv, 315p. Illustrations, notes, index. $25.)A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. By Stacy Schiff. (New York: Henry Holt, 2005. xvii, 489p. Illustrations, chronology, selected bibliography, notes, index. $30.)The Life of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 1, Journalist, 1706–1730. By J. A. Leo Lemay. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. xiv, 549p.. Illustrations, appendix, sources and documentation, notes, index. $39.95.)
|
| At the dawn of the new millennium, Alan Taylor wrote off one of the greatest men of the old one. Or, at any rate, he insisted that the rest of us did. Presuming to know our minds, he maintained that, nowadays, "we know Ben Franklin mainly from an old advertising image: an elderly man in knickers, long coat, and spectacles, with a bald crown and long hair—a zealot foolishly determined to fly a kite during a thunderstorm." |
1
|
|
This Franklin seemed to Taylor to seem to us merely "eccentric, comic, antiquated, and harmless." Incapable any longer of arousing "either controversy or adulation," he could only provoke "laughter." We had "reduced" him to "a kite-flying fool." We could "only dimly sense his importance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the paragon of, and the pattern for, American middle-class values." He "no longer matter[ed]."1 |
2
|
|
Taylor is an astute historian, but those were foolish things to say, even in 2001. In the quarter century before Taylor's derisive dismissal, Franklin had already been the subject of more full-scale biographies than any of the other founding fathers and of a mounting host of specialized studies besides. In just the decade before, scholars had produced sophisticated monographs and anthologies on Franklin's science, his religion, his enemies, his deviousness, his relations with women, his political career, his father, his son, his son-in-law, his place in the Enlightenment, and his role in American thought and culture. |
3
|
|
If Taylor's assessment was bad historiography, it was even worse prophecy. In the last five years, Franklin has mattered mightily. Time magazine put him on its cover. Major dance and musical companies commissioned pieces celebrating him. An exhibit that is arguably the most sumptuous piece of public history ever mounted in America is now traveling the country. And a host of books about him have appeared and continue to appear in a convergence unsurpassed since the centennial of the Civil War. |
4
|
|
The authors of these books are neither hacks nor journeymen. A couple of them have won the Pulitzer Prize. One is a National Humanities Medalist. One of them is arguably the dean of American journalism. Another is inarguably the dean of Franklin scholarship. One is a distinguished historian at Harvard. Another is perhaps the most distinguished historian at Yale. And the works themselves include both sweeping biographies—one of them projected to run to seven massive volumes—and specialized studies. There are entire volumes on Franklin's science, his medicine, his religion, his diplomacy, his racial thought, his electrical experiments, and his epistemology. |
. . . |
There are about 12086 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
