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The Long Arm of Benjamin Franklin
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11 The Long Arm of Benjamin Franklin David Waldstreicher IN 1786 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN invented a device “for taking down Books from high Shelves.” He called it “the Long Arm” (fig. 11.1). This “simple machine,” a wooden pole with a somewhat pliable end-piece, extended not only its inventor’s arms but also his legs, since it made mounting a ladder unnecessary. Franklin further anthropomorphosed the machine by referring to its end pieces, which grasped books, as “the Thumb” and “the Finger,” and to the cord pulled taut by its operator as a “sinew.” At several stages of conception (or, at least, description) Franklin—a careful writer—chose to explain his mechanical device as a substitute, or additional, limb.1 A limb for those in need of one, like the aged inventor himself. The eighty-year-old statesman, scientist, and sage suffered from periodic battles with gout. The causes of gout remained obscure in the late eighteenth century, yet the disease had been identified as somehow circulatory and related to diet. There was no cure. Nevertheless, gout was something to be fought, a disease that called on the patient to heal himself . It always returned, but it did at least go away. Franklin found himself “not sure that it is not itself really a Remedy instead of being a Disease .”2 Gout for someone like Franklin was an exception that proved the rule of what Elaine Forman Crane has called “the defining force of pain” in the everyday lives of early Americans. Everyone faced bodily necessity; some, like Franklin, optimistically sought to mitigate the facts of life. Everyone faced the constraints of a hierarchical world; some cre300 atively manipulated selves and appearances, in search of power and autonomy . Gout itself tended to be anthropomorphosed into the gout, to be visualized as a small but dextrous monster or described, in the conceit favored by Franklin’s nephew, as a “troublesome companion,” because it acted like powerful people: an unpredictable and constraining force, yet possibly less a curse than a higher power, a monitor, a warning to heed necessity. Gout had the potential to turn limbs, the servile parts of the body, into not-so-arbitrary rulers, or bearers of punishment THE LONG ARM OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 301 FIG. 11.1. Franklin’s diagram for his Long Arm. From Jared Sparks, The Works of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 1840), 6: 563. Reproduced by permission of Franklin Collection, Yale University Library. [52.205.218.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:51 GMT) for bodily sins, as Franklin described the situation in his “Dialogue between the Gout and Dr. Franklin” (1780). Would good behavior keep the mistress of pain and her “wholesome corrections” at bay? Only careful attention to the gout’s whims could turn the twitching, even speaking foot or hand into a silent, cooperative member once again.3 Franklin had won fame for his own domestic labor-saving devices and for his efforts to make sense of labor and its costs in the Atlantic political economy. He took neither political nor economic arrangements for granted; indeed, he specialized in the relationship between population (working bodies), the economy, and political regulation. His own particular complaint suggested the connections between increasingly numerous and vociferous bodies in the colonies and a growing imperial body politic. The pain of gout, disease of the extremities, could be seen as a warning sign, an early symptom for what might become more lasting pathologies. Pain of the limbs, in short, was a constitutional disorder , pregnant with meaning for the state of the body as a whole. By the time he invented the Long Arm, and decided that gout was simultaneously a plague and a cure, Franklin had pursued the trope of the distressed colony as diseased limb for more than a third of a century. “Oh let not Britain seek to oppress us,” he had written in 1753, “but like an affectionate parent endeavour to secure freedom to her children; they may be able one day to assist her in defending her own—Whereas a Mortification begun in the foot may spread upwards to the destruction of the nobler parts of the body.” In notes for a pamphlet against the Stamp Act in 1766, he made the dangers even more explicit: “”The Empire weaken’d, and the Foundation laid of a total Separation. Mortification in the Foot.”4 Colonial complaints were more than a little pain in the toe of the British empire. Like the...