The Books: “The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin” (H.W. Brands)

Next Daily Excerpt:

Next book in my American history section is The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands.

As you can probably tell I have arranged my American History biographies (we’re in that section now, in case you didn’t notice) by TOPIC, rather than by author. Believe me, I have agonized over whether or not this was the right choice. I am still not sure, and periodically I arrange all the biographies by author’s name … but there’s something I really like about seeing all of the John Adams books next to each other, the Washington books, etc.

The First American is a big hefty fun book – I am sure there are better-written biographies of Franklin out there – this one was just the most recent. I enjoyed it, even though it’s obviously a rather “typical” book. I like it for its breadth – but that’s really just because of who Franklin was. Any biography of Franklin is necessarily going to be massive. He had such a deep life, such a long life – with so many different facets. It’s really kind of astonishing. His commitment to civic duty – his practical bent – (“Let’s set up a fire department like the one I saw in England …” “Let’s create a public lending library …”) – It’s just awe-inspiring. There are still people like that today, of course – self-starters – people who don’t WAIT for stuff to be given to them – and when you read any biography of Ben Franklin, you kind of start to think that you should never wait for anything, that you should go right ahead and do it yourself. Get people involved! Invest in the community! Figure out what needs to be done, and get the community to do it. Self-sufficiency. He was just a master at all of this. Or – yes. He was a master. But it’s more that – it just seems that that’s who he WAS. I don’t know, I never met the guy – but he seems like a very positive can-do personality. He backed it up with intimidating brain power, obviously – but he just seems very very likable to me. And of course people would want to get on board with his schemes. And all of this is without even mentioning his role in the American Revolution!

I knew immediately the excerpt I wanted to post. This is one of the main reasons that I feel like I would have LIKED Ben Franklin. He was such a NUT. He was 16 years old and an apprentice in his brother’s printing shop in Boston – they produced the paper The Courant. Only I can’t remember what was going on with the father, exactly – but Ben’s brother James was running the show. There was quite a bit of sturm and drang here – James Franklin despised Cotton Mather (which you just didn’t do at that time) and put scathing attacks on Mather into his paper. Mather fought back – the establishment fought back – James reached out for allies in the community (many of whom were sick to death of Mather’s pious bullshit.) Anyway – they got people in the community to write “op eds” in support of the paper (all under pseudonyms, of course).

And … I am just so in love with what Ben Franklin – a kid of SIXTEEN – did.

So creative! So HUMOROUS! One of his main things was: never attack directly. You lose half your audience that way. Learn to make your points in a subtler way. Do it through humor. Or aphorisms. Make people LAUGH, soften them up – they’ll be more inclined to agree with you.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt. Ben Franklin creates a persona – and completely channels her personality. It’s an act of transformation, of … acting, if you will. I just LOVE it.

From The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands.

Consequently it was with pleasure that James awoke one morning to discover beneath the door of the print shop a contribution from a genuine outsider. Actually, this contributor was not an outsider at all; it was Ben Franklin, who had observed the genesis of the Courant and its challenge to Mather and the Massachusetts hierarchy but who conspicuously had not been invited to join the undertaking. Because he had not – and because he realized that James might be less than enthusiastic about his younger brother’s participation in the new project – Ben carefully disguised his handwriting and signed the letter “Silence Dogood”. James read the missive with growing delight – which increased the more from his appreciation that the author’s very name tweaked Cotton Mather, whose recently published Silentarius followed his earlier Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good. James shared the Dogood letter with his colleagues; they registered equal approval. James ran it in the April 2, 1722, issue of the Courant.

Mrs. Dogood introduced herself to Courant patrons by chaffing them for the contemporary unwillingness “either to commend or dispraise what they read until they are in some measure informed who or what the author of it is, whether he be poor or rich, old or young, a scholar or a leather apron man.” She (Ben Franklin, rather) proceeded to mock this timidity by fabricating a fanciful background for herself. She had, she said, been born at sea en route from the old England to New England. But the joy surrounding her birth had turned to sorrow almost at once when a huge wave swept across the deck of the vessel and carried her celebrating father to his watery doom. It was a misfortune, Silence said, “which though I was not then capable of knowing, I shall never be able to forget.”

The death of her father had made an indigent of her mother, with the result that the infant Silence was placed in foster care outside Boston, where she passed her childhood “in vanity and idleness” until being bound over to a country minister, “a pious good-natured young man and a bachelor.” This godly fellow instructed the girl in all that was necessary for the female sex to learn – “needlework, writing, arithmetic, &c.” (Had James known of Ben’s earlier defense of education for girls, he might have guessed the identity of Silence Dogood at this point.) Because she displayed a head for books, the minister allowed her the run of his library, “which though it was but small, yet it was well chose to inform the understanding rightly and enable the mind to frame great and noble ideas.” This bucolic idyll was interrupted briefly by the news that her poor mother had died – “leaving me as it were by my self, having no relations on earth within my knowledge” – but soon enough it resumed. “I passed away the time with a mixture of profit and pleasure, having no affliction but what was imaginary and created in my own fancy; as nothing is more common with us women than to be grieving for nothing when we have nothing else to grieve for.”

Almost certainly none of the readers of the Courant guessed that this ironically knowing voice belonged to a sixteen-year-old boy; neither did James, who inserted after Silence Dogood’s first epistle an invitation for more. Any such additional missives could be delivered to the printing house or to the candle shop of Josiah Franklin. “No questions shall be asked of the bearer.”

Ben later said he felt “exquisite pleasure” at the approbation this first effort in journalism elicited; he took particular satisfaction from listening to james and the others guess who the anonymous author might be. “None were named but men of some character among us for learning ad ingenuity.” During the next six months Ben continued his correspondence, delivering fifteen Dogood letters in all.

His topics ranged from love to learning to lamenting the death of dear ones. As in the first letter, insight and irony were evenly matched. Silence related how, to her astonishment, her ministerial benefactor presently essayed to woo her. “There is certainly scarce any part of a man’s life in which he appears more silly and ridiculous than when he makes his first onset in courtship.” (As Ben was of an age, if not an economic condition, to consider courtship, the reader who knows the identity of Silence Dogood discerns a certain dawning in him of the difficulties of the endeavor.) But gratitude inclined Silence to accept his suit, leading to wedlock and “the height of conjugal love and mutual endearments”, not to mention “two likely girls and a boy.” Tragically, her husband was carried off by illness almost as suddenly as her father had been swept away by the ocean, and Silence was left to look after herself and her offspring. Yet, as she assured readers, especially the men among them: “I could be easily persuaded to marry again … I am courteous and affable, good humoured (unless I am first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes witty.”

Silence satirized the state of higher education in Boston, lampooning Harvard College – the alma mater of Cotton Mather, among other establishment influentials – as a snobbish ivory tower where students “learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely and enter a room genteelly (which might as well be acquired at a dancing school) and from whence they return, after abundance of trouble and charge, as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and conceited.” She chided men for being as foolish as the women they criticized for idleness and folly: “Are not the men to blame for their folly in maintaining us in idleness?” She scoffed at women for silliness equal to men’s – how else to explain hoop petticoats, those “monstrous topsy-turvy mortar pieces” that looked more like “engines of war” than ornaments of the fair sex. Having experienced multiple deaths in her family, she offered a formula for eulogizing departed loved ones, pointing out that tears were the easier to elicit the more unexpected and violent the demise. “It will be best if he went away suddenly, being killed, drowned, or froze to death.” The address in such a case ought to include a litany of melancholic expressions such as “dreadful, deadly, cruel cold death, unhappy fate, weeping eyes.” An experienced speaker would wring the maximal lachrymation from an audience, but in a pinch anyone could deliver the doleful sentiments. “Put them into the empty skull of some young Harvard (but in case you have ne’er a one at hand, you may use your own).” Rhymes were nice: “power, flower; quiver, shiver; grieve us, leave us.” A concluding flourish was the mark of a really distinguished graveside encomium. “If you can procure a scrap of Latin to put at the end, it will garnish it mightily.”

Had they come from the pen of a mature writer, the Dogood letters would deserve to be considered a delightful example of social satire. Coming as they did from the pen of a mere youth, they reveal emerging genius. Some of what Franklin wrote he might have experienced indirectly; some he extrapolated from his reading; much he must simply have imagined. But the tone is uniformly confident and true to the character he created. Silence is irreverent and full of herself, yet she brings most readers – the proud and pwerful excepted – into the realm of her sympathy. They laugh when she laughs, and laugh at whom she laughs at. She is one of the more memorable minor characters of American literature, and all the more memorable for being the creation of a sixteen-year-old boy.