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.

A-Z 2021 D: A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe, 1722)

 

There's a tendency among many people to think that modern culture is more knowledgable about how to handle disasters.  That we've learned from the past, and won't repeat it.  We've got modern technology, we won't have the same kinds of problems arising that were around in the past.  Technology, however, can only go so far.  It doesn't get you past human nature, or sheer bullheadedness, and certainly won't get you around misinformation.  And so, we have a book about the 1665 plague epidemic in London that just... keeps... looking like what the last year looked like.  And thus, we get what we just lived through.

Let's address the nature of this book, first.  A Journal of the Plague Year is not precisely what it claims to be.  It's a work of fiction, and yet manages to be possibly the most authoritative book on the realities of urban life during a plague epidemic.  It was written as a warning of sorts, trying to give the people of London a heads-up as to what it would look like if the plague epidemic that was active at the time in Marseilles were to take hold there, and Daniel Defoe went out of his way to do a vast amount of research.  However, a nonfiction work wouldn't have necessarily gotten to the masses the way he needed; it had to be formatted as a novel instead.

What Defoe crafted here is, ostensibly, a document that relates the experiences of a Londoner who lived through the epidemic, combining statistics and primary documents with anecdotes and narration to create what is less a journal and more a long-form history of the titular plague year, beginning with the first deaths from the plague in early 1665 and finishing with the return to something resembling normalcy at the end of the year.  It's formatted as something akin to the narrator writing down a remembrance after everything has ended; several times the Great Fire of London is alluded to in a religious context.  The narrator (a "Dissenter", as Defoe himself was) posits that the "Visitation" (itself rather a telling word) of the plague is God punishing the sinners of London, and that the Great Fire the following year is a follow-up when everything returns to the old ways so quickly afterward.

Defoe's narrator often goes on tangents, breaking midway through discussing one topic to go to another, but manages to always come back and finish the thought.  This is most obvious in the case of an extended anecdote he delivers, making up close to 1/10 of the book, about several men making their way about the countryside over the months of the epidemic while trying to find somewhere safe to ride it out.  The story, which functions largely as a way to describe the effects of the plague outside of London, is introduced about 60 pages in, but then gets left aside almost immediately, and isn't returned to for another 60 pages.  There aren't any loose ends left of this nature; if something is brought up and left unfinished, it is always returned to.

So, how is this all relevant now?  Well, let me give a quick summary of the overall narrative we see in the book:

• News of the pandemic appearing overseas happens
• A couple of overseas travelers die of the plague in London
  
• Trade and travel from the location where the initial outbreak was occurring is shut down.
• The plague starts to gain a foothold in London
• Numbers are manipulated by those in power to make it look like everything is under control until the point where it's impossible to pretend otherwise
• People start to engage in social distancing, doing everything they can to not breathe near anyone who might be sick
• Most of the people with the means to isolate themselves effectively (e.g. clergy, rich folks) skip town, while poor folks have to take the crappy high-infection-risk jobs to make sure everything keeps working and they have food to eat, and largely get sick as a result
• Everything shuts down
• Quacks start peddling sure-fire remedies for the illness
• Everyone starts looking at everyone else suspiciously, nobody wants to let anyone from out of town into any village
• Death tolls rise, then begin to fall again
• Everyone decides that the numbers falling means it's all over, stop behaving intelligently while the disease is still present
• Numbers go up briefly but then resume downward trend
• Everything's fine, we can go back to normal now, everyone back into London and let's proceed without having learned anything from all this
• Next year, everything burns

So... in the current pandemic, I believe we're at the 'Everyone decides that...' step right now.  And unfortunately, looking outside, I get the sense that we're facing another year of 'everything burns', too.  I could write a lot more about the parallels here, but...  welcome to pandemic fatigue, I just don't want to.

It's no surprise that this book was one of the top classics sold last year.  At least once, UK sellers actually ran out of copies of Penguin's edition.  It's basically a blueprint for... well... exactly what we saw happen this time around.  What's that thing where you don't learn from history?  Oh yeah, you repeat it.

But we're definitely a more advanced society now than in the 1600s.  I mean, they didn't even have cell phones or antibiotics or social media to tell them what to believe!

The Stonewall Reader (ed. New York Public Library, 2019)

I'm not really sure why, but one of the common traits that seem to exist among the friends I've made in my adult life is that a majority seem to exist somewhere on the queer spectrum.  Sure, part of that might be because I identify as asexual, which is the eighth letter in the common alphabet soup of inclusive lettering and is frustratingly-often understood as meaning 'ally' or something similarly missing-the-point, but I wasn't even aware of that as a term before 2017 or so.

I know there's a lot of question of the value of labels, whether they're forcing people into boxes, but when you don't have a word to describe how you feel and suddenly learn that there is a box you fit into, it's remarkably freeing, interestingly enough.  It's knowing 'I'm not alone!' that makes all the difference, really.  And even if it's not something that carries any real stigma, comparatively, it does complicate things; I'm not aromantic, I definitely want a life partner at some point, but... sexual desire isn't really part of it, and I haven't the slightest clue how I would even bring up the subject with a prospective partner.

Darn neurodiverse brain.

Anyways, getting back to the topic on hand.  I've had a lot of queer friends over the years, and tend toward being very much in favor of acceptance and normalization and... other words that mean 'bigotry bad' and such.  I'm a millennial, I grew up in a time where queer topics just weren't as taboo as they might have been in the past (Ellen's 'coming out' episode ran when I was in seventh grade, and Will & Grace was on the air during my time in high school), I knew people who were out of the closet by the time I graduated, and my sophomore year in college included someone coming out as the first of many trans* friends I've had over the years.

Even with all that, though, largely because of the media landscape when I came of age, I never really had a solid understanding of just what the struggle for civil rights looked like for queer communities.  You always learn about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when you're in school, and maybe you learn about Cesar Chavez, but that's about it, when it comes to mid-twentieth-century civil rights.  Even with the college history classes I've taken, I never really got a good understanding of exactly what the Stonewall uprising was.  Thanks to the New York Public Library, that particular blank space in my knowledge of history has been filled, at least a bit.

The Stonewall Reader, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, was very much an eye-opening read for me.  It's separated into three sections, and each provides a number of voices to give a feel for what the general feel of the era was like, in a way that is sort of a cross between an anthology and an oral history.  The first section of the book, "Before Stonewall", is designed to give an idea of what the state of queer rights was like in the 1960s, followed by "During Stonewall" that gives accounts by people who were actually there during the uprising, and "After Stonewall" to go over the civil rights movement that arose in the aftermath, and the changes in the culture through the last decades of the 20th century.

There's a distinct lack of voices on display here for gay white men, but that's somewhat by design; there's a definite intention on display here toward amplifying marginalized voices, so that there ends up being a focus on non-white writers and interviewees, but also a noticeable emphasis on trans* voices.  This was particularly surprising to me; sure, I had always understood Stonewall to have been about the police cracking down on a gay bar, but I had no idea of the specific nature of that gay bar, that it was the only one that would really let the drag queens and transvestites in, that the police crackdowns would go differently for pre- and post-op transsexuals...  And the number of accounts that include a mention of a chorus line stretching across the street and singing and doing Rockette-style dancing in front of a phalanx of riot police?  Amazing.

What is rather less amazing, however, is the way that everything kind of changed in the aftermath.  It's easy to look at the news right now and see how trans* rights haven't kept pace with the rest of the queer alphabet soup, and it's kind of obvious why, when you see how they were treated by the movements as a whole.  Several of the interviewees in the "After Stonewall" section are downright bitter about how, after being such a fundamental part of that initial bout of civil disobedience, the trans* community was just kind of pushed aside, always stuck on the sidelines and getting strung along without nearly as much effort put into their rights.  It's honestly infuriating to me.

I'm glad I took the time to read this.  It's one of those important parts of American history that I had somehow never really heard about, and given its relative importance, it feels like it should be better-understood, better taught.  Good on Penguin for publishing this, and amplifying the voices within.