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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 1-7



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The Elusive Benjamin Franklin

David Waldstreicher. Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. ix + 315 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper)
Gordon S. Wood. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin, 2004. ix + 299 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.95 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

Will we ever know the "real" Benjamin Franklin? Despite the spate of excellent books about Franklin that have appeared in the last decade or so, we seem no closer than ever to plumbing the depths of this elusive and always fascinating founding father. Historians have characterized him as a man of his time and our own, as a quintessential American and as a citizen of the world, as patriotic and self-serving, as democratic and elitist. He was, as everyone is quick to point out, a chameleon who played his personal cards close to his chest, revealing some parts of himself, consciously concealing others, often trimming his sails to catch the latest breeze. This most popular founder, who seems so accessible on the surface, is perhaps the most consistently misunderstood. Both Gordon Wood and David Waldstreicher have given us new and intriguing ways of looking at this complicated man. Above all, both challenge us to view Franklin, not from the perspective of the man he became in subsequent generations, but in terms of what he did and what he believed in his own time.

Gordon Wood's Benjamin Franklin is above all a product of his own times. To fail to see him in the context of the eighteenth century, Wood argues, is to completely misread both the man and his times. Only with the publication of his Autobiography—which did not occur until after Franklin died—and even more with the appropriation of the "autobiographical Franklin" by the artisans and workingmen of the early nineteenth century, did Franklin become the iconic symbol of the rags to riches story that has captured the imagination of succeeding generations of his countrymen. In death, he became what he failed to be in life—an American. [End Page 1]

Wood's book plows a great deal of old ground as he describes Benjamin Franklin's rise from a precocious apprentice to a man who dined with kings. Fortunately, the author's graceful, lucid prose makes even the most familiar elements of the story come alive. Much of what Wood tells us about Franklin's early years should not come as a surprise. He repeats and expands upon his argument in the Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), maintaining that for the first half of his life Franklin was thoroughly comfortable with a traditional order that privileged hierarchy and assumed that "independent" men, alone had the right or the ability to rule. Franklin entered politics only after he retired from his active role as a printer. It was not long before he had transformed himself into a "gentleman" and embarked upon his life as a public servant.

Significantly, this national icon spent more time living outside America than any other founder. And he did so with obvious pleasure. Beginning his public career as a thoroughgoing monarchist, he eagerly sought the patronage of men like Lord Bute and was completely comfortable hobnobbing with intellectuals and aristocrats—so much so that he seriously considered remaining in England, and later in France, rather than returning to a country that became more alien to him with each passing year. Franklin was, says Wood, "the least American and the most European of the nation's early leaders" (p. 9). Indeed, the more at ease he was abroad, the less his enemies at home trusted him. At his death, it was almost impossible to find anyone to give a eulogy to a man who, with the possible exception of George Washington, had given as much to the patriot cause as any member of the founding generation.

Perhaps because he was at first more English, and then more European, than most American...

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