Charlotte learned about Benjamin Franklin for the first time last week. She told me all about him on our way home in the car. She was most taken with the factoid that he was the 15th of 17 children, but she also knew that he was a printer and that he lived in Philadelphia and she knew about the experiment with the kite.
As we were discussing this, I realized that probably 99% of Americans don’t know much more about Benjamin Franklin than my six-year-old does. Even though he’s a seminal figure in our history, he doesn’t get a lot of up-close inspection. As we go along in school, we might pick up that he was one of our first ambassadors to France or that he was a member of the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence, or that he wrote the original “Poor Richard’s Almanac”. But for someone so putatively “famous” he’s kind of a blur to most of us.
And, for a change, that’s not all our fault. Franklin only partially completed his own autobiography, and there was very little interest in him from historians until about the mid-20th century. There really isn’t a must-read book about Franklin at all; I remember reading a Franklin bio in graduate school, but not well enough that I can even remember the author’s name. Author Jill Lepore, writing in this week’s New Yorker, in fact, considers this very problem. As she notes, part of the problem is that Franklin was SO important to so many different pieces of the founding of America that it is difficult to squeeze them all in. Franklin was, by turns, a writer, a publisher, an inventor, a scientist, and a politician. He was also a ladies’ man, a philanthropist, a visionary, and a lover of bad jokes.
I shared a few more facts about Franklin with Charlotte to try to give her some more tidbits — I told her about the armonica and the Franklin stove, and how he had been an ambassador to France along with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. When we got home, I played for her the song “But Mr. Adams” from the film version of the musical 1776 (a quick confession: I would LOVE to be in this show someday as John Adams or Ben Franklin). Members of the Franklin family are buried in the Old Granary burial ground in Boston, where Paul Revere is buried, so I made a mental note to take her back there sometime, too.
