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

Armonica, musical instrument invented by Franklin. Consisting of series of hemispherical glasses turning on an axis, it is played by touching the edges with a damp finger. against the claims of the propriet- aries, the descendants of William Penn. This time his stay in London Jasted five years, during which he carried on admirable diplomatie and scientific labors. By now his name was known and respected in European. intellectual circles, and in 1753 the Royal Society in Lon- don had awarded him a gold medal for his experiments with electricity, He strengthened his friendships with Collinson and other English investigators, begun by correspond- ence, and made new friends among philosophers, theologians, histor- jans, economists, and writers like Hume, Price, Robertson, Priestley, Kames, and Adam Smith — all dis- tinguished representatives of the Enlightenment in England. In 1762 he returned to America, but two years later he was again jn England, sent by the Pennsyl- vania Assembly. This time he was to remain away from his country for eleven years, defending before the British Government the rights of various colonies: Georgia (1768), New Jersey (1769), Massachusetts (1770). He visited Germany in 17- 66 and France in 1767 and 1769. In 1773 he published two of his sharpest and most felicitous. criti- cisms of the colonial administra- tion: “Rules by Which a Great Em pire May be Reduced to a Small One” and “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” in the September and October numbers, respectively, of the Gentleman’s Magazine of Lon- don. In both, Franklin turned back to the satire and humor he had first. displayed in his journalistic work in Boston and Philadelphia. In referring to these writings, critics always cite Swift, but his ironical vision of reality — which he shared with Swift, Voltaire, and Diderot — had already been pre- sent in more than one of those articles of his signed “Silence Do- good” that appeared in the New England Courant between March and October 1722 and in the de- lightful satires in his Pennsylvania Gazette, such as “A Witch Trial at. Mount - Holly” (1730) and “The Speech of Polly Baker” (1747). In 1775, back in Philadelphia, Franklin immediately joined the movement for the independence of the Thirteen Colonies. He repre- sented the Pennsylvania Assembly in the 2nd Continental Congress, went to Canada on a political mis- sion, and signed, after helping to write, the Declaration of Independ- ence. In 1776, at the age of seventy, he was sent to Paris to negotiate an alliance between the colonies and the French Government; and then remained in France as minist- ter plenipotentiary until . the treaty of peace with Britain was signed in 1785. Nine years of tire- less activity and constant riumph in a society in crisis that was mov- ing toward revolution. The years and his wide and fruitful ex- perience had accentuated his hum- or, tolerance, skepticism, and irony (at times amounting to cynicism), very much in accord with the tone established by Voltaire. Besides serious pages on science or politics, he published in those days charm- ing “bagatelles” such as the “Dia- Jogue Between Franklin and the Gout” and “The Whistle”, in which he refined the Voltairean humor al- ready present in such writings as “Advice to a Young Man”. (1745), which the author of Candide would not have disdained to sign. No- “SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1956 me in a cause, wherein my good fame, fortune, and life were all at stake. You conceived, you say, that your duty to your king and regard for your country required this. I ought not to blame you for differ- ing in sentiment with me jn publie affairs. We are men. all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power: they are formed and governed much by circumstan- ces, that are often-as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situa- tion was such that few would have censured your remaining’ neuter, though there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them. This s a disagreeable subject. I drop it and we will endeavor, as you propose, mutually ta forget what has happened relating to it, as well as we can. A month after his return to Phil- adelphia — in September 1785 — Franklin was elected President of the State of Pennsylvania, and was Franklin stove was devised to avoid waste of heat by _— hearth into the room. thing could be more delightful than the. bagatelle addressed to Madame Helvétius, widow of the famous French philosopher, to whom Franklin, a widower of sev- enty-four, had unsuccessfully pro- posed marriage. “Mortified at the barbarous resolution,” he had thrown himself on his bed and dreamed that he was in the Elysian Fields..There he had met and talk- ed with Helvétius and given him news of his wife. Helvétius told him he had taken another wife and forgotten the first. As he finished these words the new Madame Helvétius entered with the nectar, and I recognized her immediately as my former American friend, Mrs. Franklin! I reclaimed her, but she answered me coldly: “I was a good wife to you for forty nine years and four months, nearly half a century; let . that content you. I have formed a new connexion here, ice will last to eternity.” Indignant at this refusal of my Eurydice, I immediately resolved to quit those ungrateful shades, and return to this good world again to behold the sun and you! Here I am; let us avenge ourselves! .But the smiling and triumphant sage had also known hour of bit- terness. His only son, William Franklin, last royal governor of New Jersey, had remained loyal to the British. On August 16, 1784, in a letter that provides a vivid con- trast to the bagatelle to Madame Helvétius and uncovers another rich facet of his extraordinary per- sonality, he wrote to William from Passy: DEAR SON, I received your let- ter of the 22d past, and am glad to find that you desire to revive the affectionate intercourse, that formerly existed between us, It will be. very agreeable to me: indeed, nothing has ever hurt me so much, and affected me with such keen Sensations, as to find myself de- serted in my old age by my only son and not only deserted, but to reelected the two following years. In 1787 he was designated -a mem- ber of the Constitutional Conven- tion, though he did not entirely ap- prove of the result, he recommend- ed its acceptance in a brief and puurS végroes resulted from the fact that they had been deprived of and education rather than from any deficiency i in natural understanding. * For his part, Jef- ferson, in a letter of August 30, 1791, to the Negro inventor Ben- jamin Banneker, wrote that “nat- ure has given to our black breth- ren talents equal to those of the other colors of men,-and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded con- dition of their existence, both in Africa and America.” To this dem- ocratic and equalitarian doctrine Franklin was faithful when, in 17- 89, he signed a petition against slavery and sent it to the national Congress. On March 9, 1790, a few weeks before his death, he reaffirm ed his unlimited religious tolerance in a letter to Ezra Stiles — in which moreover, he expressed doubts concerning the divinity of Christ. On this point he reamained faithful to the English Dissenters who played so large a part in the formation of his religious thought. On April 17, 1790, he died in Phil- adelphia at eighty-four. From this simple, factual, chron logical enumeration of events, there unquestionably emerges a larger and richer figure than that systematically distorted by legend. Neither rustic philosopher ‘mor an exclusively Yankee type, Franklin was a universal man, typical of the economically and ideologically transitional eighteenth century. As Vernon Louis Parrington has pointed out, he was a member of a generation that created “a new consciousness of social responsibil- ity.” Parrington also noted that in his pragmatic philosophy, reason and work were the faithful ser- vants of progress, and war was its enemy: “After long years of medi- tation he proclaimed a maxim that experience ‘has not contradicted: ‘There never was a good war or a bad peace.” Certainly, though repudiating war, Franklin recognized the jus- tice and validity of struglles for national, liberation, and participat- ed in one against his only son. But he was a declared enemy of war's of conquest and of the exploitation of peoples unjustly considered in- ferior or less developed. His voice — to use a beautiful image of Lope de Vega’s ~ is the soul of the silence of many. Like all great men, Franklin is the visible figure of a great col- lective movement. In North Ame- rica he spoke for the new, revolu- Franklin (left) confers with Jefferson (holding papers) and others over wording of Declaration of Independence. memorable speech that reveals, like the letter to his son, his eager- ness to be reasonable and under- standing for the sake of collective peace and progress. In a series of anecdotes related to Robert Walsh in Decembe 18- : 18, Jefferson has left an admirable miniature of Dr. Franklin — as he always called him, and so he was, with honorary degrees from various American and European universi- ties. The economic and political doctrines of Franklin and Jeffer- son, representatives of a concept of democracy essentially physio- cratic in origin, were already. be- ginning to be replaced in the days of the Constitutional Convention by the mascent, more aggressive financial capitalism embodied in Alexander Hamilton. Franklin was Still to carry on disinterested bat- tles against slavery and racial se- gregation as president of the abo- litionist association. As Merle Cur- ti notes in The Growth of Ameri- can Thought “In writng to Con- dorcet, Franklin implied that the HEMISPHERE tionary middle class, which rebell- - ed against the last vestiges of the feudal structure as embodied po- litically in the despotism of the proprietaris and the British Goy- ernment and religiously in the re vival of Puritan theology by, principally, his contemporary Jon- athan Edwards. In him culminated a whole tradition of liberal and democratic nonconformism, which had made his English ancestors emigrate to the New World and which then found a more propi- tious atmosphere in Pennsylvania than in Puritan New England. It is the attitude represented in Eng- land by.the physiocrats; in France by Voltaire, Diderot, and the En- cyclopedists; in Spanish America by the precursors of independence — Espejo, Narifio, Miranda, Siméon Rodriguez, and especially the Chil- ean Manuel de Salas (1754-1841), who in so many ways resembles the North American patriot and sage. Franklin, like his clags, advane- ed smiling toward the conquest of his environement, disdaining the gloomy preoccupations with theo- logy that accompanied and sustain- ed feudalism, more concerned with immediate well-being arid with the social order than with the next world. Significantly, it was Frank- lin — the so-called “natural man,” the “rustic p&ilosopher” — whose voice, the voice of his emergent class, resounded gaily and affirma- tively through the cities of the Old World and the New, while the som- ber and burning outcries of Jon- athan Edwards were lost in the American forests, among the In- dians — the true “natural men.” As a representative of “enlight- ened” thought in North America, Franklin is the opposite of all that is Yankee and Puritan, and his con- ception of reality has nothing in common with what is known to- day as “the American way of life.” This has been demonstrated — by Herbert W. Schneider and Harold A. Larrabee, among others. Profes- sor Schneider says in his History of American Philosophy: Puritan virtues, inasmuch as they are not a philosophy of human ideals, were neither a substitute for the Aristotelian ethics nor a glorification of bourgeois commer- cialism. If Puritan morality substi- tutes for anything it is for the traditional “Christian” virtues, for they too, constitute a philosophy of the discipline of life. The Christ- ian life is traditionally portrayed as one of humility, charity, pent- tence, poverty, self-denial, and a forgiving spirit. The Puritan vir- tues, in spite of the fact that they were sanctioned by a Christian theology, were not traditionally Christian. This divorce from the Christian moral tradition, which Franklin made explicit in his philo- sophy, is at the heart of the con- trast between the Yankee and the Christian. It is also at the heart of the American Enlightenment in general. Had the American En- lightenment followed Franklin im to the pursuit of practical bene- volence and secular humanitarian- ism it would have created wha Europe expected of it. But it fol lowed the more conventional pat- tern, engaging in the sentimental cult of benevolence and creat ing a “liberal religion.” Mean- while, Franklin’s “virtues,” divore- ed from his benevolence which led him to conceive them as means to- ward a “free and easy” life, hard- ened into the stuff of unbridled competition and sordid business, Therefore, on this two hundred fiftiethanniversary of his birth, no- thing could be more opportune, nor could better homage be paid, than to rescue the great figure and the still valid thought of Benjamin Franklin from the fogs of legend, Braddock advances against French in Pennsylvania (1755), Franklin — was provisioner of expedition. ,