Diario las Américas Newspaper, September 23, 1956, Page 22

Reprinted from AMERICAS, monthly magazine published by the Pan English, guese. American Union in Spanish and Portu- Now, two hundred and fifty years after the birth of Benjamin Franklin, it is not only possible but indispensable to disentangle the reality from the legend that for two centuries has been distorting the outline of this great universal figure. On various oceasions a num- ber of highly qualified people in his own couhtry have tried to re- trieve the true personality of Franklin and accurately explain his meaning in U. S. life and in the history of world thought. Only recently Harold A. Larrabee, in a lively article in Harper’s, called at- tention to how this predominance of legend over reality endangers the contemporary North Ameri- ean’s selfknowledge. After recog- nizing the share of blame for it that Franklin himself must be because of Poer Richard and the Autobiography, he observes: “As a result, some of his characteristics are by now so deeply embedded in the American personality that for us, his fellow countrymen, to con- tinue to misunderstand their signi- ficance is to fail to understand our- selves, and how we came to be what we are.” Among the other aspects of the Franklin legend are two of capital importance. One is what might be called the legend of the rustic phil- osopher, disseminated principally by the French Illuminati with the complicity of the protagonist. The other is that of a character speci- fically and peculiarly North Ame- rican — even provincial, Yankee — to which U. S. historians, with un- derstandable but misleading pa- triotism, have contributed and still do. As Carl Van Doren has noted the French thinkers of the En- lightenment imagined America as being in a “state of nature,” and Franklin, an ambassador anxious to humor the French; showed them what they wished to see — a phil- osopher from the backwoods, home ly, sparkling, shrewd, benevolent, and astute enough to know how much simplicity to put into his skillful characterization. To the sophisiticated Paris of Louis XV, he was the very essence of the na- tural man ceme from the New World: to rejuvenate *he Old. But when the occasion called for it he could transform himself into the mest absolute and cynical Parisian. In a letter from Paris to Mary Stevenson dated September 14; 17 67, he wrote: I had not been here Six Days, before my Taylor and Perruquier had transform’d me into a French- man. Only think what a Figure I make in a little Bag-Wig and nak- ed Ears! They told me_ Iwas be- come 20 Years younger, and look’d very galante; ( So being in Parts where the Mode is to be sacredly follow’d I was once very near making Love to ny Friend’s Wife. The legend of the rustic phil- osopher included the notion of purelyintuitive wisdom acquired directly from the “great book of Nature,” from intimate communion with the woods and the meadows, the mountains and the rushing riv- ers; away from the deforming at- forming atmosphere of schools and cities, teachers and books. The truth was that most of the sixty- one years that Franklin wore so lightly on his first visit to Paris _ {n 1767 had been spent in cities — including ten years in London and brief visits to the Low Countries and Germany — and among books, and that his upbringing, though not strictly academic, had. nevertheless provided him with an excellent education. Pagina 10 Merely to leaf through the first pages of the Autobiography is to become aware o fthis. In his native Boston, he was sent at the age of eight to a grammar school — that of Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-17- 27), it is believed, one of the most prominent women of the later part of the colonial era — and made rapid progress. He then went on, as he says, to a “school for writing and arithmetic kept by a then fam- ous man, Mr. George Brownell, very successful in his profession generally, and that by mild, en- couraging methods.” At ten, Ben- jamin began to help his father, a maker of candles and soap and spent two years at this trade. Since Franklin invented this machine to produce static electricity. he disliked it, his father in an ef- fort to find him a more agreeable one, used to take him to visit the workshops of various kinds of arti- sans and in the end apprenticed him to his cousin Samuel, a cutler. But as with that other illustrious frustrated cutler, his contemporary Denis Diderot, this did not last, and he returned to his father’s house and trade. Meanwhile, he was devouring his father’s small library which con- tained mostly books of religious polemic but also Plutarch’s Lives. His enthusiasm aroused by Pil- grim’s Progress, he made a collec- tion of Bunyan’s works, and later sold it to buy R. Burton’s Historie- HEMISPHERE | Prgwere gerd oe Bay Rin Pewiwg Sacer al Collections. He also read Defoe’s Essay on Projects and Cotton Ma- ther’s Essays to de Good. At twelve he was apprenticed as a printer to his half-brother James, and during five hard-working years completed his literary training, He took to composing ballads, which his tada adversamente por el mal tiem- which his father criticized semerely This turned him to polemic prose, beginning with a correspondence between Franklin and his friend John Collins on the pro priety of educating women and their ability to learn. Then Franklin set out to imitate the style of Addison; he devoted his mornings, evenings, and any Dundays when he could avoid church to studying and re- writing essays from the Spectator, thus anticipating by half a century the advice of Dr. Johnson, as Stuart P. Sherman has pointed out. He learned mathematics from Cocker’s Arithmetick and from Seller’s and Sermy’s works on navigation; he studied English grammar, rhetoric and logic from a book by Green- wood; and he made a beginning in philosophy with careful study of Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Seerates, Locke’s essay On Human Understanding, and the Art of Thinking, by the Jansenists of Port Royal. He read Shaftesbury and Collins, and his critical attitude and doubts concerning Puritan theo- logy crystallized. At sixteen he be- gan his career as a journalist anonymously on his brother’s New England Courant, and when James was sentenced to prison and order- ed to stop printing the newspaper, it was continued under Benjamin’s name. As can easily be seen, none of the elements of the natural man or the rustie philosopher played the slightest part in Franklin’s upbring- ing. The next phase of his career on- ly completed the education begun during his boyhood in New Eng- land: his move to Philadelphia in 1723, at the age of seventeen; a profitable stay of a year and a half in London (from December 24, 1724, to July 23, 1726,) during which he perfected his skill as a printer and met a number of not- able personalities, among them Mandeville; thirty-one years (1726- 1757) of continuous residence :n Philadelphia de voted to tireless and fruitful work for individual and collective improvement and to correspondence with scholars all over the world. During his years in Philadelphia Franklin learned to read French, Spanish, Italian and Latin; married in 1728; founded the Junto Club that same year, “.r the mutual improvement of ‘ts members through reading, ess: ~- writing, and debating; wrote a-d printed an anonymous pamphlet on The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency (1729), laid tke foundations for the first public li- brary in the colony (1730); begen in 1733 to publish Peor Richar ’s Almanack, which appeared till 17 8 was elected a member of the G-1- eral Assembly and appointed p<°t- master (1736); invented the Frank- lin stove, an improved method of heating houses (1742); began in 1743 to organize an Academy t'>t became the University of Penn: 1- vania; founded the American P™'!- osophical Society (1744); and - > peated in Philadelphia the expe-i- ments with electricity that he hod seen Spence perform in Boston (1746). 7 Meanwhile, ha had not neglected his business. When he had amaseod a competence, he retired from - >- tive participation in the print’ house to spend his last years cultivated leisure and in scient' experiments. It was 1748 and was forty-two. In 1752 he + formed his most popular exr - ment: the one -that proved ‘ 2 sameness of the electric mat. r with that of lighting” by means of a kite with a key tied to its t: 1. It is experiments like these that have popularized the figure of Franklin as a fat, amiable old m:n with long gray hair, fond of fly’ -g kites and of running through t%e: eountryside trying te break vo whirlwinds by striking them with a. whip (as described in his letter ‘o: Peter Collinson of August 25, *7- 55). Just as these nourish the > gend, they distort and even c 1 ceal the reality of the scientific ‘n- vestigator concerned with find'g the theoretical explanation and t:e: laws of natural phenomena. | ut there are always those who pre -r to go on believing it was only txe fall of an apple that enabled New- ton to formulate his law of gravita- tion. : ow OD mm Ud Franklin had planned to devote, the rest of his life to “philosophical studies and amusements.” “But,” he explained, “the publick, now con-. sidering me as a man of leisuze, laid hold of me for their purposes, every part of our civil government, and almost at the same time, im- posing some duty upon me.” Thus in 1753 he was Postmaster Gen- eral; in 1754, commissioner for Pennsylvania to the Congress of Albany, at which his project for uniting all the colonies under one government was approved; in 1755, provisioner of General Braddock’s expedition against the French; in 1756 organizer of a volunteer mili- tia and builder of forts on the northwestern frontier of Pennsyk vania. In 1757 he was sent to England by the Pennsylvania Assembly to defend the rights of the citizens SIDI IDE p ppb fab bbibbibb bb bibbbibbbbbpipbbbbbbbbby Now on the faculty of the University of Oriente, Cuba, José Antonie Portuonde formerly taught Spanish literature at Columbia Unb versity in New York, SAAAIAIIDIIIIIAIINIIIIIIADAIAAIII IA AAI AAAI AANA SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23; 1956 a +