The Lightning-Rod Man: Franklin of Philadelphia

Abstract

On the first page of Esmond Wright's generally engaging biography of Benjamin Franklin, the author summons Hector St. John de Crevecoeur that the Frenchman might utter yet again his hoary question: What then is the American, this new man?' To Wright, the answer is clear: this new man is Benjamin Franklin, who is representative, if not typical, of his American brethren. In so arguing Wright is, of course, not breaking new ground, for Franklin has long been held up as the avatar of America or of American values. To the general public, the self-made Philadelphian has come to embody American simplicity, practicality, ingenuity, folk wisdom, and geniality. To many writers influenced by Romanticism, on the other hand, the bespectacled printer captures perfectly the shallowness, the moral hypocrisy, and the crass materialism of American life.2 Wright, to his credit, follows-or, more precisely, given the omissions in his notes and bibliography, parallels-recent scholarly trends by viewing Franklin and, by implication, Franklin's America, in a more complex and intelligible way. Though Wright's Franklin is still representative of something American, it is neither the vulgarity emphasized by D. H. Lawrence nor the banality that comes across, however unintentionally, in Americana such as the musical 1776. It is rather substance that reemerges in Wright's account, substance that men so diverse as David Hume, Karl Marx, Charles Evans Hughes, and Robert A. Millikan recognized all along.3 Nonetheless,