Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way university professor at Brown University and one of America’s foremost authorities on the history and philosophy of the American Revolution. His brilliant books “Radicalism of the American Revolution” and “Creation of the American Republic” are essential for an understanding of American politics and its political system from the Founding Fathers era to the present. The subject of this previous post is Professor Wood’s review of University of Pennsylvania professor Walter A. McDougall’s new book, ”Freedom Just Around the Corner,”which is a fine book that I am currently enjoying greatly.
Now, Professor Wood has produced what it appears to be another fine book. In this NY Times Review of Books review, the reviewer points out that one of the most intriguing aspects of Professor Wood’s new book on Benjamin Franklin — “The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin” — is the approach in which it was written:

This study is not a biography, at least not a conventional one. Wood focuses on Franklin’s personal development and constructs his narrative around various turning points in the life, almost like a bildungsroman. We learn the choices Franklin made, the conflicts he had to resolve. This is the most dramatic of the recent Franklin books.

One of Professor Wood’s points is that Franklin was hard to pin down as a personality. For example, many of today’s politically correct on the left would have a hard time dealing with Franklin:

The politically correct would most likely hector him if they could. For Franklin was a slaveholder. It’s true he turned against slavery, and ardently so, at the very end of his life, but he took a long time getting there. He could be a bigot as well. He wrote nativist diatribes against the large German population in his own colony of Pennsylvania. In 1751 he argued for excluding everyone from Pennsylvania except the English; Morgan calls him ”the first spokesman for a lily-white America.” Franklin loved the company of women, but he was no feminist. He treated his wife miserably, and he admonished young brides to attend to the word ”obey” in their vows. He worried that handouts to the poor would encourage laziness, and he was a fervent supporter of a strong military.

On the other hand, those on the right of the political spectrum would also have a difficult time embracing Franklin:

Modern right-wingers would probably be even more uncomfortable with him than left-wingers. Take his religious views. Franklin was a deist; God, in his opinion, was a distant presence in the affairs of men. He was no churchgoer. He accepted neither the sacredness of the Bible nor the divinity of Jesus. His ideas about property rights were similarly unorthodox. Beyond basic necessities, he said, all property belonged to ”the public, who by their laws have created it.” Brands calls such remarks ”strikingly socialistic.”
What most sets Franklin apart from contemporary conservatives, however, is his attitude toward that panoply of issues gathered under the heading of ”family values.” As a young man he consorted with ”low women,” and fathered an illegitimate child. In 1745 he wrote a letter to a youthful friend — long suppressed — offering advice on choosing a lover. (Older women, he declared, were preferable to younger ones.) Franklin was always an incorrigible flirt. How much actual sex was involved is anybody’s guess, but one incident stands out among the rest. When he was in his 70’s and living in Paris, he became enamored of the captivating 33-year-old Mme. Anne-Louise Brillon, one of the leading lights of Parisian society. Even the puritanical John Adams was enchanted by her. She was no less taken with Franklin, and their vivacious correspondence consisted of a determined campaign on his part to bed her and her equally stalwart resistance, based on the customs of the day and what was proper between a widower and a married woman. Their bantering give-and-take, as quoted by Brands, constitutes one of the most charming episodes in early American history and — since as far as the historians can tell they never did sleep together — also one of the most poignant.

As a result of Franklin’s extraordinary nature and accomplishments, Americans tend to sentimentalize him, which Professor Wood cautions against:

The other problematic theme concerns Franklin’s ”Americanness.” He seems almost a checklist for those national qualities Americans take pride in — and others despise us for. Yet Wood alerts us to be careful in how we think about this aspect of his character. For he was the most cosmopolitan of the founders, at home anywhere. Twenty-five of the last 33 years of his life were spent abroad, and those years were anything but a hardship for him. He was wined and dined and celebrated by the Europeans more than he ever was by his own countrymen. Soon after arriving in London he was complaining about the provinciality and vulgarity of Americans. In Paris he was quite simply a superstar, acclaimed as the equal of Voltaire, and he gave thought to settling permanently in ”the civilest Nation upon Earth.” These sentiments did not go unnoticed back home, and Franklin fell under suspicion of being a foreign agent, first for the British, then for the French. When he returned to Philadelphia for the last time in 1785, it was in part to clear his name.

In the end, Professor Wood’s book attempts to answer the difficult question: What changed Benjamin Franklin from a citizen of the world to a citizen of the United States?

The Revolution was not a conflict over taxation or home rule, not even a dispute over the rights of Englishmen. For him it represented something universal, a world-historical event, ”a miracle in human affairs.” That is, Franklin never stopped being the urbane cosmopolitan, the ultimate sophisticate. He stayed true to himself. But by 1776 he had concluded that the only way to remain a citizen of the world was to become an American.

Gordon Wood on Ben Franklin. Don’t miss it.