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Franklin was inevitably pulled into colonial Pennsylvania politics, and then into the administrative apparatus of the British empire through his appointment as deputy postmaster-general for the North American colonies, before finally moving to London as agent for the interests of Pennsylvania (and, in time, three other colonies) before Parliament. In 1771, he began composing an autobiography which, with its rollicking, pragmatic account of how the son of a tallow chandler had out-foxed the colonial stuffed-shirts and laughed his way to success and personal triumph, became the premier document of American individualism. In October, 1776, he was sent by the American revolutionary government to France to secure French support. Shrewdly setting aside his reputation as the premier American scientist, he cast himself instead as a charming practical philosopher in homespun and a coonskin cap rather than a periwig. The French court, far from being put off by this refreshing display of American simplicity, swooned over Franklin in delight, and an alliance with the Americans was soon in the offing. He lived long enough to sit in the Constitutional Convention, and, only a few months before he died in 1790, submitted a petition on behalf of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society to Congress, calling for the abolition of slavery. He could hardly have lived a more charmed life than if he had written the script himself.
In one sense, he did write the script, since his posthumously-published Autobiography is the means by which successive generations of Americans have most often come into contact with Franklin. But alongside the bubbling stream of the Autobiography, there has long run a darker current of unease with the Franklin which Franklin portrayed there. Max Weber and D. H. Lawrence turned on Franklin as the original Babbitt: a shallow, self-promoting bourgeois merchant with an eye forever cocked for the main chance, "a wonderful little snuff-colored figure, so admirable, so clever, a little pathetic, and somewhere, ridiculous and detestable." The late Francis Jennings, as acerbic a historian of early America as any who ever wrote, dismissed the Autobiography for being "about as valid as a campaign speech." In 1975, Melvin Buxbaum published a study of Franklin's relationships with the churches of the Pennsylvania colony, and found, not the beaming, tolerant Deist of the Autobiography, but a partisan heretic with a sharp knife for "injuring the Calvinist Establishment" of the middle colonies. And in 1987, a special issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography offered a "re-assessment" of Franklin which emphasized his "dark side"—his pessimism about human nature, his ethnic intolerance, and his Hobbesian notion of society.3
And yet, whatever the damage revelations like these have done to Washington and Jefferson, Franklin seems impervious. John Adams, who cordially hated Franklin, wailed that "The History of our Revolution" would soon become "one continued Lye from one end to the other" in which "Dr. Franklins electrical rod, smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington … and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislatures and War." And so it was, to Adams' unrequited fury. Adoring biographies— by H.W. Brands, Walter Isaacson, Edmund S. Morgan, and Gordon Wood, to which may be added Leo Lemay's two-volume The Life of Benjamin Franklin (2005) and Joyce Chaplin's The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), to mention only the most recent—are but the tip of the celebratory iceberg. Franklin has become part of the dual personae of our culture, the secular, rational alter ego to Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan soul of America. Bruce Kuklick once remarked that Franklin was important to studies of the American mind, not so much for his intellectual value, as for the opportunity he affords modern scholars, possessed by the spirit of pragmatism and by a "presentist bias" toward "thought that foreshadows the non-religious values" of the professoriate, to ignore the larger currents of religious and speculative thought in early America.4 No wonder the Benjamin Franklin tercentary website asks "Do You See Yourself in Franklin?" It is the dream of every secularist that we will.
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