A Sort of Tribune: Edmund Morgan’s Ben Franklin
Written: Nov 16 '02 (Updated Nov 16 '02)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Mature, incredibly insightful, marvelously wise, the perfect pocket biography of the Archetypal American Founder
Cons: Surely you jest
The Bottom Line: A classic of biography as intaglio: engaged and engaging, lucid, compelling, and profound. Simply splendid
|
|
|
| mshawpyle's Full Review: Benjamin Franklin Books |
All About the Benjamins…
I am, perhaps, of the last generation to have been expected as a matter of course to read the lives of American Heroes, growing up. Nowadays, of course, the Leftish amongst us disbelieve in the Hero and wince in agony at applying the qualifier ‘American’ as anything but a pejorative term; whilst a large chunk of the Right, alas, seems to have become so suspicious of subversion in the culture wars as to have joined the Left-Deconstructionists in denigrating and distrusting reading, and books.
This is, in its way, as novel a situation as it is an odd – and dangerous – one. There is no question that the tradition of a Pollio, say: the effort (at least) to tell the unvarnished truth: is what ‘real history’ is about; and despite the blandishments of various false gods in the guise of ‘Objective Forces’ and other deities of tatterdemalion Determinism, history is au fond merely collective biography, such that ‘real biography’ likewise is devoted to ‘warts and all’ portraiture. But there was, until the past century, equally no question that the young were, and properly were, ‘socialized’ (that dire term), were in fact educated to virtue and baptized into the common culture, by Livian biography and history: congenial but honorable works, not Parson Weems’s drivel, that might point the moral and adorn the tale, but did not descend to mendacity or intellectual dishonesty. (In fact, as the sorry tale of Mr Michael Bellesiles has shown, that sort of thing happens in the academy these days.)
Nor were these didactic histories and ‘brief lives’ untrue, as far as they went. David McCullough merely echoes a conviction long unanimous, from Aristotle to Herodotus to Locke to Sam Johnson to Macauley to Churchill, in noting that it is possible to get all the facts right and miss the truth, and it is likewise possible (though a damned sight more difficult) to nail the truth without telling all the facts, or without recounting them all correctly. No one who has read, say, Chesterton on Dickens, or still more Chesterton on Aquinas or Francis, will gainsay that.
And this doling out of didactic history to the young was a meet and proper thing. Young people – and not just young Americans – deserve and require to make the early acquaintance of a Ben Franklin, say, but they do not, in the beginning, need to know of his advice on choosing a mistress. Until lately, early exposure to the lives of the ‘good and the great’ had the threefold purpose of inculcating virtue and making the young free of our common heritage; of at once sponsoring in them an attachment to the local, to Burke’s ‘little platoons’ of society, and simultaneously subsuming this attachment in a broader world beyond their own horizons; and – with any luck at all – of predisposing them to care about real, deep, adult biography and history, where the gilt and the banners are not infrequently spattered with mud and blood.
For example, I was raised a Southerner of Southerners, and a Texan to boot. We had our household lars: Patrick Henry and Tom Jefferson, Washington the remote and marmoreal, earthy Sam Houston, the rip-roaring Bigfoot Wallace, and of course the South’s King Arthur, R. E. Lee, and his paladins: the parfit gentil cavalier Jeb, in his cinnamon beard and plumes; iron-graven Stonewall; the rash Hood and the Gallant Pelham. But Mr Lincoln, whose name was politically still anathema, was yet held up as a type of hero, studying his schoolbooks by the flickering of uncertain firelight, making tableaux of youthful honesty; tart, Yankee John Adams was forever linked in one great labor with Our Own Mr Jefferson, as co-authors of our liberty; and TR, that apostle of the strenuous life who overcame childhood weakness to dare and achieve greatly, was our pet ‘good’ Republican.
For my generation and those that preceded us, Benjamin Franklin was as much the diligent ’prentice who fled candlewax (and the dread prospect of the manse) for the intoxication of printer’s ink, quite as much as he was the man on the $100 bill. He stood for a certain largeness of mind, inventive, wizardly even, a natural philosopher who dabbled in a genteel way in politics and in his ripe age became a titan of the Revolution and the Republic’s infancy: a man who naturally found liberal-minded Philadelphia more congenial than crabbed, Puritan Boston.
But the early grounding of Americans in their own history has ceased to be acceptable, it seems. And contemporaneously with that radical change in how we are shaped as a people has been a change in the academy, equally radical: the wholesale adoption of very silly ideas about history, and objectivity, and subjectivism, and epistemology. It is a culture of partisanship and parti pris ‘lying for the greater truth’ that inevitably gave birth to a Bellesiles, in fact. In my own general field, for example, I am all too familiar with historians of, say, the War Between the States, who regard it as a period from the 1850s to the 1870s, care obsessively about dubious and unprovable theses regarding the roles of women (not infrequently spelled ‘Womyn’) and gays, and would not know a redan from a lunette and could not tell you the Order of Battle at Brandy Station on a bet. Worse yet, they consider the War itself an irrelevance. The result of these two novel departures in education has been to leave the lay person, both as a child and as an adult, without any hopes of getting what everyone from Thucydides to Suetonius to Gibbon to Charles Beard would have called an ‘historical education.’
Well, Nature, famously, abhors a vacuum (and isn’t all that fond of the electric broom, for that matter), and into this gap have poured narrative historians, good, bad, and indifferent. Their name is legion and of their publications there is no end. It is therefore a cause for celebration when an historian or biographer of traditional academic rigor and formidable intellectual honesty, and one capable of writing English prose that at once pleases and profits the reader, issues a work of any magnitude.
Well, set off the fireworks and strike up the band, for Edmund S. Morgan has done precisely that.
Men of Good Understanding
Firstly, of course, it is an indescribable relief to spend time, in these days, with a truly mature mind. Franklin, of course, who was the original Elephant’s Child with his ’satiable curiosity, is very much the possessor of a mature mind: his character is of intellectual curiosity and the power of Reason all compound, with its touch of Leonardo, its family resemblance to that other smiling rationalist Voltaire, and its quite unexpected affinity to that High Anglican and High Tory, Dr Johnson.
But so too, in full measure, pressed down and running over, is Professor Morgan’s a mature mind, one with which it is a pleasure and a privilege to spend time.
Edmund S. Morgan brings to this work not only his sly wit, elfin charm, prodigious and lightly-worn learning, and smooth, sinewy prose, a style as unfettered as the action of a good fly-rod reel; he brings also a unique familiarity with his subject. Professor Morgan is the doyen of Franklin studies, not in the way that a Donald or a Boritt is a leader in Lincoln studies, not even in the fashion in which a Dumas Malone was the dean of all things Jeffersonian: rather, he is to Franklin’s life and work what Clyde N. Wilson is to John C. Calhoun’s, the True Proprietor. Certainly, Professor Morgan has shown the breadth of his powers, notably as author of Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (a work I consider as indispensable, despite my occasional disagreements with some arguments, as I do Wallace Notestein’s The English People on the Eve of Colonization and Leyburn’s The Scotch-Irish: A Social History),[1] and of American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.
But Professor Morgan’s life’s work, when you get right down to it, has been his editorship of the Franklin Papers, and it is from that unparalleled familiarity with, that immersion in, Franklin’s life and work that this succinct but encyclopedic volume is distilled.
In fact, Professor Morgan is quite modest about the volume, charmingly and unnecessarily, just as GKC brushed off his work on Thomas Aquinas as being but the sketch plan of a highly complex city. Both were seriously underestimating their contributions. It were possible, unquestionably, for a biographer to pile further incident upon further incident, to the point of numbing repetition, and still do no more than Professor Morgan has done in delineating Benjamin Franklin’s character. And such laborious multiplication of minutiæ would be graceless by contrast, as well.
What Professor Morgan understands, and conveys with the lightest of touches, is that his subject left a mass of material: words public and private, testaments political and personal, essays and state papers and correspondence that in quality as in quantity staggers the modern mind and delights the biographer. Moreover, as Professor Morgan again comprehends and again quietly but unassailably demonstrates, we live in a world that is in many respects Dr Franklin’s memorial: a technological world, a world in which applied science – beginning most fundamentally with the harnessing of Franklin’s electricity – increasingly dominates material life, and a world, also, in which the Republic Dr Franklin godfathered and the principles in which he sought to educate it are daily more nearly conquerant.
In this sense, then, for Franklin far more than for Christopher Wren, he who seeks the man’s monument need only look about him; and to the extent a narrative is needed, Professor Morgan has the grace and wisdom to know, as well he ought as editor of the Franklin Papers, that his subject has spoken to the issue and ought be allowed to speak for himself. It is a credit at once to Professor Morgan’s wisdom, moderation, and talent, that he lets Franklin have the floor, and has written only a ‘brief life’ in the Aubreyan or Waltonian sense: one sufficient to grant profound insight into Franklin’s mind, but not such as to stifle or surfeit the urge to get to know Franklin on his own terms. ‘Great riches in a little room,’ indeed.
Moderation and Utility
I don’t think that anyone who cares at all about the past is immune from the temptation to speculate, How would our world look to one of our forebears? The task of explaining XXIst Century America to Adams, Jefferson, or Henry – or indeed to Fulton, Whitney, Lincoln, or Lee – is, I confess, one I would shy from. One can’t help but have the feeling, though, that Franklin, of all the Founders, would be likeliest to understand much of it, and would have the liveliest interest in it. (Certainly, given his reputation [and despite Professor Morgan’s discretion], I think he’d need no explanation at all when it came to, say, the phenomenon of Miss Britney Spears. Speaking, that is, of lively interests.)
And this is so, truly, because the key to Franklin – if there is a key to Franklin – is in his concept of utility. He was an applied scientist (as we should now call so eminent a ‘natural philosopher’), and one who refused to patent and profit from his most useful discoveries. In morals, in the care of his own health, and in statecraft, he embodied the Lockean principle that Jefferson expressed in that much-misapprehended phrase, ‘the pursuit of happiness.’
The Benjamin Franklin of the swimming exercises and the open windows, the joyously physical Franklin, is the same Franklin who delighted in the properties of electricity and the convection of heat; and both are one with the Dr Franklin whose public service ranged from libraries and fire brigades to revolutions, diplomacy, and Constitution-making. One of the most satisfactory of the many virtues of Professor Morgan’s biography is its recognition of the essential unity of the man, and the subtle and unanswerable demonstration that all his arts were directed to maximizing human happiness, usefulness, and liberty.
In part, I think, this is why it is impossible to imagine Franklin as anything but a Philadelphian, or at the least resident in the Middle Colonies. New England would always have cramped his mind, and the sly, writerly release he found posing as ‘Silence Dogood’ (and this would have obtained even had he created ‘Poor Richard’ in stern Boston) would never have sufficed. Equally, though, Franklin would have been hampered in the South, for though he acquired graces and possessed by nature a sociability that, say, a Philip Fithian[2] could never muster, his devotion to ‘mechanick arts’ would never have gone down well with a Fitzhugh, a Randolph, or a Lee.
The basic unity in Franklin’s character was the ideal of beauty in utility, in usefulness and, yes, in service. Professor Morgan does a masterful job of showing this persistent trait, and letting the evidence impel the conclusion that Franklin saw civil society as the body writ large, with similar measures of prudence, moderation, and temperance, and withal a certain material and sensual joyousness, to be the best prescription for the health of both.
This does not of course mean, by the bye, that Franklin can be called a Physiocrat in any sense, any more than Hobbes was, or indeed any more than their use of the phrase ‘the Body of Christ’ for the Church means that the Apostles or the Fathers were proto-Physiocrats. What it does mean is that Franklin’s concern was, for his own constitution and for the Constitution of the, yes, body politic, the securing of that old balance, mens sana in corpore sano. It is very much to Professor Morgan’s credit that a recognition of this common thread in Franklin the natural philosopher and Franklin the statesman is ever present, to the author and, through his engaging and never heavy-handed narrative, to any reasonably attentive reader.
‘The Wisdom and Integrity of its Governors’
Franklin’s private maxims of temperance and moderation: nothing to excess, nothing to surfeit, no indulgence that leads to ‘Dulness’ and the ‘Extreams’ of ‘Superfluity’ (all these being Words of Power in Franklin’s private diction): when writ large, inform his statecraft and his sense of ‘publick Duty.’ Franklin, in his early years and well into his middle age, reveled in physical activity quite as much as in mental, but there has never been a man who at some point – endorphins or no endorphins – did not have to force himself to that day’s daily exercise, that day’s swim or walk or run or ride; and Franklin of course well knew this. The direction of the body, the preservation of its health, did not rely solely upon the willingness of its members to engage in exercise: the body, its passions and its temptations to the sedentary life alike, required intellectual governance, the discipline of reason. So too in perfect analogy did the commonwealth, the body politick of civil society.
Likewise, the avoidance of surfeit and superfluity was not limited to the body, but to property, which no man truly held but in trust, to be devoted to the common advancement and programs of general utility. Franklin’s philosophy here very much adumbrates that of Andrew Carnegie in the conviction that a man who hoards, who does not devote the excess of his fortune to the amelioration of the society of which he is a member and which allowed him to achieve his fortune, is ‘thus disgraced.’ Again the unity of Franklin’s convictions is apparent.
Finally, of course, in his statecraft do we most find Franklin’s table maxims and household proverbs, the chestnuts of his commonplace-book, applied on the larger scale. It is the man of industry and of moderation who embraces public service as a public duty, even sometimes as a distasteful duty, one that he would prefer to set aside for the intellectual pleasures, but knows better than to set aside lest all be lost. There is, moreover, no inconsistency in Dr Franklin, the advocate of reconciliation and aspiring architect of a more stable British Empire deep-rooted in British America, and Dr Franklin the revolutionary.
I need not tell you that [consistent principle] sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them – the desire to do right – is precisely the same. The circumstances that govern their actions change, and their conduct must conform to the new order of things. History is full of illustrations of this: Washington himself is an example of this. At one time he fought in the service of the King of Great Britain; at another he fought with the French at Yorktown, under the orders of the Continental Congress of America, against him. He has not been branded by the world with reproach for this, but his course has been applauded.
– R. E. Lee, to P. G. T. Beauregard, October, 1865.
So too with Franklin: his concern, throughout his public life, was that of the right relation between the members of the body politic, whether he was seeking to secure the safety of the colonies against the French and their potential and actual Indian allies, or to secure a fairer representation for the hinterland in the Pennsylvania government, or protesting the ‘interposition’ of the Penns as proprietors between the King and his loyal subjects, or seeking by the Albany Plan to reform the governance of British North America and bind it more firmly to the Crown … or, in the end, to preserving the natural liberties of the Americans from usurpation by ‘the Crown in Parliament.’
It made him, as his farsighted opponent Thomas Penn early perceived, a ‘dangerous’ man, dangerous at least to the pretensions of those intent upon usurping the liberties of the citizen; and it made him the more dangerous, as Penn also shrewdly saw, in that he had to be handled carefully as a result, being in some sort ‘a tribune of the people.’
At all times, it was Franklin’s guiding principles that were steady and unchanged; it was only the circumstances that changed, such that the consistent application of that principle led to radically inconsistent results. That is why Franklin as much as any of the Founders is characteristically a conservative revolutionary, as America’s was a conservative, a preservative, revolution: no matter how radical, in the literal sense of getting to the root of the problem, their prescriptions became, their object was the preservation and restoration of the health of the body politic, all its members in right relation one to another, and all directed by Reason as master of appetite and passions.
And again, one may stack up fat volumes on Franklin the philosopher, Franklin the inventor, Franklin the diplomat, Franklin the revolutionary, Franklin in every aspect, and still not match the profundity of Professor Morgan’s insight in these matters and his seemingly effortless – and how truly hard-won, as all writers know, is that seeming grace and lack of effort – his effortless depiction of Franklin’s principles through Franklin’s words and deeds.
‘Let the Experiment Be Tried’
In many respects, of course, Franklin’s virtues are very much the XVIIIth Century virtues, and even the most conservative amongst us (that would, in all likelihood, be me) can entertain a doubt or three about the, yes, utility of the Enlightenment’s vision in our darkling age. We have, after all, seen the Enlightenment’s bastards: through the Encyclopedists’s flirtations with Catherine’s Russia, the French Revolution and its irrational Cult of Reason, and subsequent events, we have seen how the Enlightenment itself could devolve into the dry inhuman tyrannies of the Left; and we have seen how the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment’s high-minded suppression of emotion proceeded through ever more vulgar incarnations into the bloody, visceral, soddenly inhuman tyrannies of the Right.
Yet Dr Franklin is in many ways the most timeless of the Founders, or rather the one who most transcends his age. Professor Morgan neither blinks nor burks the evidence: Franklin was a creature of his time and place just as we are ourselves. But there is that pragmatic strain in Dr Franklin, the experimental strain that made him not merely a natural philosopher content to pronounce upon phenomena, but an applied scientist willing to get his hands dirty, that frees him to a large extent of the merely accidental qualities of his background.
And it was this unquenchable desire to go and see and learn and dig and know that is not only so appealing to us, but was so significant in his public life, and remains so in his public legacy. I have written elsewhere – in my review of David McCullough’s life of John Adams – that ‘John Adams has been unjustly disvalued for too long – in part because his Yankee quirks, lovable enough in themselves, are sometimes galling to the rest of the country as reminiscent of New England’s historic smugness, and in part because the Protean Jefferson could always be claimed for and by every party in American history, whereas the Adams philosophy had the disadvantage of consistency.’ Dr Franklin, though, combines the unity of principle one finds in Adams with the flexibility of method, the sheer adaptability, that was one of the facets of Cousin Tom’s many-sided character.
There is in the American character, as there is in the Scots and the English characters, a sense – one that would have startled Aristotle and affronted Leibniz – of the dignity of manual effort in the service of Reason, a refusal to regard the ‘mechanick’ arts as inherently servile and beneath the notice of philosophers. This sense Dr Franklin at once incarnated and by his example helped transmit.
I do not think it is overreaching to submit that this pragmatism of application in the service of consistent principle, so marked in Dr Franklin, is the hallmark, and partly is so by his doing, of the American government, of our Constitution and still more of our political culture (for as Dr Franklin never ceased to observe, even despotisms, much less Constitutional Republicks, depend in the end upon public opinion and assent). The Founders took great chances – great liberties, one might well say. Their accomplishment, after all, was very much ‘a Republick, madam – if you can keep it.’ In their achievement, they were animated, it seems to me, at least in part by Dr Franklin’s credo, that when there were suasive arguments on either side, ‘let the experiment be tried.’
A Thing of Beauty and of Use
Professor Morgan would, I think, admit without a qualm that it has been impossible to live so long and so intimately with Dr Franklin without becoming very attached to the great man: a phenomenon that would have been very familiar to scores, nay, hundreds, of people in Philadelphia, London, and Paris over the latter half of the XVIIIth Century. There is a school of thought that resents too obvious an attachment to the subject in any biographer, as if fondness suspends critical judgment. Then again, there is a school of thought that persists in believing the earth to be flat.
The fact is, I wouldn’t trust a biographer who did not end up with strong opinions about his subject by the end of the task, and I have never accepted the proposition that objectivity and scholarly rigor require a factitious neutrality of judgment, a po-faced positivism. To believe otherwise is to misjudge the best that biography has to offer: Tuchman on Stilwell, Churchill on Marlborough, Mayer on Patrick Henry and on William Lloyd Garrison, Bullock on Hitler and Stalin, Walton on Donne, Russell Kirk on John Randolph of Roanoke, Boswell on Johnson, Southall Freeman on Washington and on Lee, Catton on Grant … and, yes, Morgan on Franklin.
Certainly, stereoscopic vision is the key to a truly three-dimensional view of men and events: this is as true in the intellectual and metaphorical sense as it is in the physical and literal. On balance, for example, I am inclined to give Dr Franklin less of the benefit of the doubt than is Professor Morgan regarding certain passages of diplomacy in France. But these are quibbles: even the most magisterial biographer is in some sense an advocate, and it is actually a service to the reader, not any disservice, to have Professor Morgan’s views to weigh against McCullough’s pleadings for John Adams, just as, for example, it is no burden but a benefit to match and weigh and assess Southall Freeman, Charles Bracelen Flood, and Emory Thomas in the balance on Lee, or to triangulate the elusive Stonewall Jackson through the diverse reportage of Krick, Tanner, Bud Robertson, Byron Farwell, and Frank Vandiver.
Remember the principle: mere multiplication of facts is not equivalent to showing forth the truth.
What is certain is this. Library shelves groan under the weight and heft of volumes, far less objective than this even where ostensibly dispassionate,[3] that seek to show us Franklin the tinkerer, Franklin the Ideal American, Franklin the Object Lesson in Thrift and Industry, Franklin the diplomatist and public man…. None match Professor Morgan’s accomplishment.
In but three hundred pages, Professor Morgan has achieved a graceful, engaging, and endlessly readable and re-readable portrait of Dr Franklin’s mind and character as much as of his world, works, words, and deeds. It is instinct with a profound comprehension of the fundamentals of Franklin’s character. It is written throughout in lucid, satisfying, and evocative prose: æsthetically satisfying prose. Professor Morgan is careful always to show, not to pronounce; to demonstrate, not to declaim: and he has a superb eye for the telling detail, the characteristic anecdote, and the apt quotation.
Professor Morgan, who uniquely possesses the familiarity with his subject that inheres in his life’s task of editing the Franklin Papers, is also unique, or all too nearly so, in combining a gift for narrative history with impeccable academic credentials and precision, as well as with rigorous intellectual honesty. The result is a literary masterwork in a deliberately small frame, a profoundly enlightening biography of Franklin as a man in full, and, in the end, a thing at once useful and attractive. Dr Franklin would have approved.
On 19 and 20 November, 2002, PBS is set to air its Franklin documentary, with Professor Morgan as a commentator. Hie thee first to a bookstore for this volume, and thence to your TV remote.
________________________________
[1] And no, I’m not just saying that about Leyburn merely because I’m a W&L man. Charlie Turner, God rest him, would have attested to that.
[2] Poor lad. A godly Presbyterian from Princeton, sentenced to life amongst the Carters of Nomini Hall and all their FFV company. One is amazed he survived the shock.
[3] Not a commendatory term, necessarily. Few minds have ever been uplifted and galvanized into interest by an Official History. But Mattingly and DeVoto, Churchill and Parkman, Foote and Catton, will be read for pleasure and profit until the last darkness falls, even as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon are and shall be, not despite but precisely because of their passionate engagement with and contagious interest in their matter.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
mshawpyle
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
Trusted by: 391 members
About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.