Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  In his laboratory, Franklin let the ladies feel the tingle of mild shocks, he created miniature bolts of lightning, he made metals glow and wires dance. Once, on the banks of the Schuylkill, which runs through Philadelphia, he ignited some rum by sending an electric charge from one side of the river to the other. It was during one of these laboratory demonstrations that Franklin almost lost his life. He was showing how electricity could kill a turkey, using a charge from two specially constructed Leyden jars, which contained as much power as forty of the ordinary size. The spectators were talking to Franklin and to one another. The conversation distracted him, and he accidentally touched the top wires of the jars while his other hand held the chain that was connected to the outside of both jars. There was a tremendous flash and a crack as loud as a pistol. Franklin’s body vibrated like a man in an epileptic convulsion. He described the impact as a “universal blow from head to foot throughout the body.” Although he did not fall, for a few moments he blacked out. Lucky as usual, he escaped with nothing more serious than soreness in his chest “as if it had been bruised.”

  One day a crowd of gawkers gathered in front of Franklin’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of an electrical miracle or of the electrician himself. Franklin got rid of them with a humorous demonstration of his powers. He sent a healthy charge surging through the iron fence around the front of his house. The galvanized curiosity seekers vanished in a cloud of dust convinced that the devil himself was inside them.

  This was the Franklin that Philadelphia loved, a man who somehow managed to combine laughter with everything, even the pursuit of scientific truth. Already his close friends in Philadelphia treasured gems of his wry humor. Once a neighbor came to him and asked how he could stop thieves from tapping a keg of beer he had in his backyard. “Put a cask of Madeira beside it,” Franklin answered.

  This inexhaustible wit, which bubbled to the surface at the most unexpected moments, was one of the secrets of Benjamin Franklin’s success. His profitable paper was always full of letters to the editor, some of which the editor wrote himself.

  Pray let the prettiest creature in this place know (by publishing this) that if it was not for her affectation, she would be absolutely irresistible.

  The ladies of Philadelphia replied the following week:

  Mr. Franklin, I cannot conceive who your correspondent means by the prettiest creature in this place; but I can assure either him or her that she who is truly so, has no affectation at all.

  Sir, since your last week’s paper I have look’d in my glass a thousand times, I believe, in one day; and if it was not for the charge of affectation I might, without partiality, believe myself the person meant.

  Mr. Franklin, They that call me affected are greatly mistaken; for I don’t know that I ever refus’d a kiss to anybody but a fool.

  Among other enjoyable Gazette correspondence were the laments of Anthony Afterwit, whose wife spent him into bankruptcy, and the harangues of Celia Single, a born shrew who lectured the editor in scorching terms because of his partiality to men. Even better was Alice Addertongue, who announced that she was organizing a kind of stock exchange for calumnies, slanders, and other reputation-wrecking pastimes of the gentler sex.

  Then there was the worried reader who asked Franklin the following question: “If A found out that his neighbor B was sleeping with his wife, was he justified in telling B’s wife and persuading her to seek a little revenge with A?”

  The editor’s reply: “If an ass kicks me, should I kick him again?” Even his news stories had the ring and sometimes the sting of wit in them.

  An unhappy man; one Sturgis, upon some difference with his wife, determined to drown himself in the river and she (kind wife) went with him, it seems to see it faithfully performed, and accordingly stood by silent and unconcerned during the whole transaction: he jumped near Carpenter’s Wharf but was timely taken out again before what he came about was thoroughly effected, so that they were both obliged to return home as they came and put up for that time with the disappointment.

  Franklin carried on a long, lively war with his chief newspaper opposition, the Mercury, winning round after round by making his readers laugh at his rival. He printed a letter pointing out that the Mercury had reported two prominent European soldiers had been killed by a single cannon ball, a remarkable achievement when one of them was fighting in the Rhineland and the other in Italy. Another letter called attention to the Mercury’s claim that a prominent English admiral had died the previous May, which was impossible “unless he has made a resurrection” since his death five years earlier. Moreover, said this same indignant reader, “a long story of murder and robbery” printed in the Mercury as fresh news was actually four years old.

  In tandem with Franklin’s newspaper success was the triumph of Poor Richard’s Almanack. Every newspaper publisher in the colonies tried to produce an almanac. It was an ideal way to make productive use of time when the presses were normally idle. And if the book caught on, it could also be profitable. Everything depended upon the appeal of the “Philomath,” or resident astrologer, who did the writing and predicting. The printer had to share not a little of the profits with him. The going rate was thirty to fifty pounds a year, but it was worth it if the seer was popular.

  Some of the purchasers of almanacs actually believed in their predictions. One day, an outraged farmer rode up to the office of one Philadelphia Philomath, determined to thrash him because the man had promised sunny weather. The farmer had brought his crops to market, only to see them ruined by a rainstorm. But Franklin knew that most people read an almanac for amusement. It was cheap, and the wise publisher filled it with poetry, wry observations, and miscellaneous information aimed more to amuse than inform. Franklin decided to be his own Philomath and created out of his fertile imagination a character named Richard Saunders, who introduced himself to the world with the ingenuous candor:

  COURTEOUS READER,

  I might in this place attempt to gain thy favor by declaring that I write almanacs with no other view than that of the public good, but in this I should not be sincere; and men are now-a-days too wise to be deceived by pretenses, how specious so ever. The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife, good woman, is I tell her excessive proud; she cannot bear, she says, to sit spinning in her shift of tow, while I do nothing but gaze at the stars; and has threatened more than once to burn all my books and rattling traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family. The printer has offered me some considerable share of the profits, and I have thus begun to comply with my dame’s desire.

  Franklin’s predictions were a delightful burlesque of other almanacs. Some samples:

  OF THE ECLIPSES THIS YEAR

  During the first visible eclipse Saturn is retrograde: For which reason the crabs will go sidelong and the rope makers backward. The belly will wag before and the A- shall sit down first . . . When a New Yorker thinks to say THIS he shall say DISS and the people in New England and Cape May will not be able to say COW for their lives, but will be forc’d to say KEOW by a certain involuntary twist in the root of their tongues. . . .

  OF THE DISEASES THIS YEAR

  This year the stone blind shall see but very little; the deaf shall hear but poorly; and the dumb shan’t speak very plain. And it’s much, if my dame Bridget talks at all this year. Whole flocks, herds, and droves of sheep, swine and oxen, cocks and hens, ducks and drakes, geese and ganders, shall go to pot; but the mortality will not be altogether so great among cats, dogs, and horses.

  OF THE FRUITS OF THE EARTH

  I find that this will be a plentiful year of all manner of good things to those who have enough; but the orange trees in Greenland will go near to fare the worse for the cold. As for oats, they’ll be a great help to horses. . . .

  Even wryer was Franklin’s treatment of his chief rival, Philomath Titan Leeds. After professing strong friendship for him (he said he would have written a
lmanacs long ago, but he hated to cut into Titan’s profits), he dolefully predicted his death. “He dies by my calculation made at his request, on October 17th, 1733, 3 Ho. 29 M., P.M. . . . By his own calculation, he will survive until the 26th of the same month. This small difference between us we have disputed whenever we have met these nine years past; but at length he is inclinable to agree with my judgment. Which of us is most exact, a little time will now determine.”

  In the following year’s edition, Poor Richard reported to his readers that his almanac had shown a whacking profit. His wife no longer berated him nor had to borrow her cooking utensils from the neighbors and had bought a new dress. Then he went to work on Titan Leeds. Was Titan dead? Poor Richard wasn’t quite sure. He had been so busy at home; he had not been able to make the trip to the funeral. Also, he was aware that Providence sometimes interfered with the mathematical workings of astrology. The best evidence he had that Titan was dead was the almanac that appeared under his name for the year 1734 “in which,” said Richard, “I am treated in a very gross and unhandsome manner; in which I am called a false predictor, an ignorant, a conceited scribbler, a fool, and a liar.” His good friend Titan would never have treated him that way.

  The following year, Poor Richard complained that he was still receiving “much abuse from the ghost of Titan Leeds, who pretends to be still living, and to write almanacks inspight of me and my predictions.” But Richard assured his readers that whatever Titan’s ghost might pretend, “‘tis undoubtedly true that he is really defunct and dead. First because the stars are seldom disappointed . . . Secondly, ‘twas requisite and necessary he should die punctually at that time for the honor of astrology, the art professed both by him and his father before him. Thirdly, ‘tis plain to everyone that reads his last two almanacks [for 1734 and 1735] that they are not written with that life his performances used to be written with; the wit is low and flat; the little hints dull and spiritless. . . .”

  When Titan Leeds tried to deflate Franklin by proclaiming that there never was such a person as Richard Saunders, Franklin published a preface written by Saunders’ wife Bridget, who assured the world that Richard did indeed exist, much to her distress. The following year Poor Richard published a long letter from the departed spirit of Titan Leeds, admitting that he did die at the predicted time and apologizing for the outrageous behavior of his ghost.

  Along with this ingenious fooling, Franklin larded his pages with dozens of glittering proverbs. He took them from all sorts of sources, La Rochefoucauld, Rabelais, and the Bible, often improving them by sharpening their wit or their point. More than a few of them had the tough, salty wisdom of a man of the world.

  “He’s a fool that makes his doctor his heir.”

  “Neither a fortress nor a maid will hold out long after they begin to parley.”

  “Fish and visitors smell in three days.”

  “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

  “The worst wheel of a cart makes the most noise.”

  “Sal laughs at everything you say; why? Because she has fine teeth.”

  “Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely.”

  “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage; half shut afterwards.”

  “To bear other people’s affliction, everyone has courage enough and to spare.”

  “He that can have patience can have what he will.”

  “When the well is dry we know the worth of water.”

  “In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith but by the want of it.”

  “Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn at no other.”

  “It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.”

  Within a few years, Poor Richard’s twenty-four-page almanac was selling 10,000 copies annually. In 1748, Franklin expanded it to thirty-six pages and, along with history and humorous prophecy, added literary and scientific essays, creating a miniature general magazine. But Poor Richard’s goofy personality and pithy epigrams were still the main sources of reader appeal. The imaginary Philomath became so famous throughout America that many people confused him with Franklin, considering them almost interchangeable.

  But Benjamin Franklin was not all fun. His humor was only one part of an engaging personality that swiftly made him Philadelphia’s foremost citizen.

  He had barely arrived in the city when he organized the Junto, an informal discussion group aimed at stimulating intellectual and social progress. As members of the Junto rose to prominence in various walks of Philadelphia life, the club became a political powerhouse. This was almost inevitable, with the rules Franklin had written for the club. He composed twenty-four questions to be read at every meeting. Among them were: “Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country of which it would be proper to move the Legislature for an amendment?” And, “Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?”

  With the help of the Junto and the Gazette, Franklin founded Philadelphia’s first volunteer fire department and America’s first subscription library and was the guiding spirit behind the creation of the Pennsylvania Hospital and The Philadelphia Academy, which eventually became the University of Pennsylvania. He helped to organize the colony’s first militia, the Philadelphia Associaters, to defend against a threatened invasion by the French and Spanish. He had served, for nearly a decade, as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly and played a key role in the creation of a paper currency in the colony. In all of these projects, he practiced a strategy of leadership that he learned from analyzing his experience.

  When he first began soliciting subscriptions for the library, he met with “objections and reluctances” and swiftly saw that the trouble was the jealousy of others, when a man presented himself as “the proposer of any useful project that might be suppos’d to raise one’s reputation in the smallest degree above that of one’s neighbors.” From that moment, Franklin put himself “as much as I could out of sight” and described the project as “a scheme of a number of friends,” who had requested him to garner the support of “lovers of reading.” The library was soon thriving, and Franklin applied this strategy with equal success in all the other public projects with which he became involved. This “little sacrifice of . . . vanity” went back to a knock on the head he had received as a boy in Boston. The celebrated preacher Cotton Mather was following him down a narrow passage from the parsonage study, when he suddenly cried out, “Stoop, stoop.” Before Franklin could understand what the minister meant, he had banged his head on a low-hanging beam. Mather was a man who never missed an opportunity to provide advice, and, as Franklin tried to regain his composure, the clergyman said, “You are young and have the world before you. Stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps.” Years later, in a letter to Mather’s son, Franklin said, “This advice, thus beat into my head, has frequently been of use to me.”

  Franklin’s engaging personality and his penchant for this style of leadership made him look like “an easy man” to casual observers, but he was not. He had a toughness to him. Once, early in his newspapering days, when he was dueling with his rival, Andrew Bradford’s Mercury, a delegation of his friends warned him to soften his views. Bradford was siding with the Proprietary Party, those who supported the rule of William Penn’s sons, who ran Pennsylvania as their semi-public inheritance. Franklin sided with the people against the self-interested politics of the Proprietors. As soon as Franklin saw what the delegation had in mind, he said he was too busy to listen to them at the moment, but he would be happy to hear their dire predictions if they would join him for dinner at his house.

  That night, the doomsters sat down to eat with Franklin. They were baffled when his wife Deborah served them nothing but a bowl of strange looking mush and a pitcher of cold water. Franklin spooned the mush into his dish, poured himself a glass of water, and began to eat. The doomsters tried to follow his example, but, again and again, they found themselves gagging i
n the midst of their cautionary speeches. Franklin, meanwhile, spooned down the mush without a grimace. Finally, they could take it no longer, and they asked him what in the world they were eating. “Sawdust-meal and water,” Franklin snapped. “Now go tell the rest of Philadelphia that a man who can eat that for supper doesn’t need to be beholden to anyone.”

  Franklin spoke out of an inner confidence that was rooted in the same experimental approach that had led him to his epochal discoveries in electricity. He had paid the same painstaking attention to human nature and had drawn certain conclusions about life. After a youthful flirtation with atheism, he had become convinced of the existence of a God whom “all nature cries aloud thro all her works.” Although he could not accept the theology of any sect, he concluded that the creator of the physical universe had laid down certain moral laws for humankind, his most intelligent creature and the only one capable of freedom of choice, to follow. Interestingly, Franklin saw these moral laws as gateways to freedom, not barriers that deprived a person of this unique human experience.

  At first, he thought it was just a matter of distinguishing right from wrong, then following the lead of his moral intelligence. But he soon found that it was necessary to approach the goal more experimentally. So he drew up a list of thirteen virtues. Among them were silence, order, resolution, sincerity, justice, moderation, and humility. He practiced each virtue for a week at a time, enabling himself to go through a full course four times in a single year. Like a good scientist, he kept a record of his progress in a small ruled book, carefully placing a dot before each of the virtues, which, on reflection at the end of the day, he realized he had violated. In the beginning, he had seen himself moving relentlessly toward moral perfection, which he fully expected to achieve.