A-Z 2021 F: The Autobiography and Other Writings (Benjamin Franklin, 1722-1790)

The founding of my country is taught fairly thoroughly in school; we're exposed to the great heroes of the American Revolution early on, though largely in their mythic forms.  George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln and the log cabin, Paul Bunyan and his digging of the Grand Canyon...  well, OK, that last one's not real, but you get the picture.

For the longest time, my idea of Benjamin Franklin was to the effect of 'bifocals and electrified kites'.  It wasn't ever really clear what his position in everything was, and I quite honestly learned more about him from Robert Lawson's Ben and Me (and its Disney adaptation) than I ever did from anything formal in school.  Even then, and even knowing that he was important enough to get his face on the $100 bill, it really didn't give me a solid feel for just what his place in history was.  Even to this day, what I know of the man is largely based on tangential stories, his interactions with the other figures of the day, and less about his story itself.  Unfortunately, reading The Autobiography and Other Writings did little to demystify this.

The first, and perhaps most relevant, reason for this is simply the nature of the work, cut short by the author's death in 1790, and thus not having actually reached the end of his life.  Unfortunately, from what I can tell, the vast majority of his truly important achievements and his adventures in international politics come during the portion that went unwritten.

So, what are we looking at, with Franklin's autobiography, if not an exploration of his place in the Revolution and the early days of the United States?  To begin with, it's a story of his early life and where he came from.  Roughly the first half of the autobiography was written when he believed it was going to serve largely as a set of family anecdotes for a son, and it takes a form akin to that of a Horatio Alger novel, where he begins in a considerably less than ideal financial situation and, through hard work and perseverance, brings himself to respectability and wealth.  It's very much a rose-tinted look at the man, and indeed the work as a whole acts that way, with even the later part where he knew he was writing for posterity focused on his tendencies toward altruism and the pursuit of knowledge.

Franklin's wit is on clear display through all of this; he's self-deprecating when appropriate, pointing out his own faults and making note of when he made mistakes that it would take him years to remedy, both when he made the error of judgment and when he fixed the issue.  His gift for careful writing and ability to think of solutions that are best for everyone involved is shown, largely through his interactions as part of the Philadelphia city council and the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, and as postmaster of Philadelphia (his later positions as postmaster-general not being covered here).  These positions gave him the ability to cross paths with British colonial leadership on a regular basis, and his civic-mindedness leads him to go out of his way to set up defensive sites during the French and Indian Wars, even managing to get the anti-military Quakers to help.

Even so, it's difficult to see in the autobiography a man who would later become an important figure of the Revolution.  At the point where the narrative cuts off, what disagreement Franklin has with British royalty is limited to his ongoing battle with the Penn family over their general refusal to give their share of taxes.  While the problems that led to the Revolution are still present, at the end of the narrative (in 1757), he's still rather firmly a monarchist.  Granted, there are two decades of gap between this point and the later outbreak of open hostilities, but this simply means that the 33 years left out of the Autobiography are perhaps the most important.

The Penguin Classics edition of the Autobiography includes about 60 pages of other writings from across the length of Franklin's life, as an attempt to give a more well-rounded view of the man than what his own writings reveal.  These are perhaps too sparse, though; I found myself wanting more context for where some of the essays were coming from ("Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress" being a particular question, as I had a hard time telling if it was intended as satire or not).  Penguin does have an alternate volume, The Portable Benjamin Franklin, which includes a larger selection of writings, and in fact seems to focus more on his political life.  This is an unfortunate omission in the volume I read; the political writings on display here are the satirical "Edict from the King of Prussia" and more serious "An Address to the Public; From the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage," neither of which serves to give any solid view of the man's place in the Revolution.  For someone who met five kings in person, signed all four of the major documents of the founding of the United States, and, well... is pictured on the largest banknote still in use in this country.

For that, I suspect my best source will come up during my next intermission from the A-Z run; at the library today, I picked up The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, a work compiled by Mark Skousen (who otherwise seems to be an economics/Wall Street writer) in which Franklin's writings and speeches during the 1757-1790 period have been reworked into a continuation in his own words, albeit through an editorial lens that, based on the cover flap blurbs, may be biased toward the founding mythologies and the modern view of American Exceptionalism.