Benjamin Franklin, episode 1: "The Briton" (Florentine Films, PBS-TV, aired April 4, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After American Song Contest Charles and I watched the first half of PBS’s two-part series on the life of Benjamin Franklin. This is a Ken Burns production and it followed a pretty familiar course, especially for his relatively brief documentaries on a single person (like the one on Ernest Hemingway he did last year, though he was able to get three parts out of Hemingway’s life and only two parts out of Franklin’s) rather than the mega-projects on the Civil War, World War II, baseball, jazz and country music. Burns promised a “warts and all” treatment of Franklin, who remains a fascinating figure in part because he was so much older than the rest of the Founding Fathers (as Burns and his writer, Dayton Duncan, pointed out in their script, Franklin’s son was older than Washington, Jefferson or Madison) he seems to have come off as the cool older guy hanging out with the young people.

The hardest part of Franklin’s life for a modern audience to take is his odd attitude towards slavery, and indeed towards racism in general; he actually owned slaves (no more than six of them at one time, all doing household chores, and it’s possible that he thought of them more as servants than as slaves, but he still owned human beings as personal property) and his newspaper, the Philadelphia Gazette, routinely ran ads for slave auctions and notices offering rewards for the capture of fugitive slaves. What’s more, he never actually freed his own slaves the way George Washington did (Washington’s feeing of his slaves in his will made him a hero among African-Americans who for years named their own kids after him, though historian Joseph Ellis – who appears here as one of Burns’s talking heads – suspects the real reason Washington freed his slaves was they were getting old and towards the ends of their working lives anyway, and he wanted to free his heirs from the burden of taking care of them)), though late in life he presented to the United States Congress the first resolution calling for the abolition of slavery – after having been the architect of the compromise in the U.S. Constitution that slaves would be considered three-fifths of a person for purposes of Congressional representation.

That gave the South a strangle-hold on legislation, especially legislation aimed at preserving and extending slavery, and was ultimately resolved only by the Civil War. It’s also struck me as an attempt by one of the most rational people ever involved in founding a country to rationalize the fundamentally irrational: asked whether a slave was person or property, the answer the Founding Fathers came up with was three-fifths person, two-fifths property.) And when he brought two of his slaves with him on one of his missions to Britain, one of them was docile and stayed put while the other ran away, and Franklin made some half-hearted attempts to find him and bring him back to bondage. Franklin also wrote at least one essay which not only expressed the racist prejudices of the day but went considerably beyond them: he made it clear that he only considered British people as truly “white” and even left out Germans and Scandinavians, whom the Know-Nothings of the early 19th century admitted to the holy grail of “whiteness” along with the British. At the end of this bizarre essay Franklin added a note to the effect that these were his own prejudices and he may be wrong about them – at a time when racism and the inferiority of people of color were considered inviolable laws of nature and as far beyond question as the existence of gravity.

There’s a story towards the end of this episode – which describes Franklin visiting a school for Black children and being impressed by the fact that they were absorbing the course content and learning from it, applying themselves just as well and carefully as white children were – that seems to have shaken his belief in racism even while not turning him into an anti-racist by today’s standards. (Almost a century later, in 1857, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in which he declared, “The Negro is a man” – also a very advanced thing for a person, especially a white person with political ambitions, to say out loud and in public. Even as late as the 1890’s biologists were seriously arguing that Blacks were kind of a living missing link between apes and people rather than true and equal human beings.) Despite his rather creepy (albeit inconsistent) ideas about race, Franklin in other ways was an exemplar of open-mindedness; a century before Horatio Alger, Franklin’s life story – particularly his rise from poverty (his father was able to send him to school for only two years, though he had taught himself to read by age five and he developed an insatiable curiosity that led him to read all his life) to affluence as a printer, publisher and editor – was cited as an example of the American Dream in action and a model for young people to emulate.

At the age of 50 Franklin became one of the greatest scientists of the day, not only figuring out that lightning was a form of electricity but inventing the lightning rod as a way of protecting buildings (especially churches, whose steeples were great attractors of lightning; before lightning rods, churches frequently burned down in storms) from being set on fire and destroyed by lightning storms. Franklin was also unusual by modern standards in that he fundamentally rejected the idea of intellectual property: when he invented something, he insisted that rather than patent it he would put it into the public domain immediately so everyone in the world could use it. (A book about Franklin written while he was alive called him “the modern Prometheus” – a phrase later appropriated by Mary Shelley as the subtitle of her pioneering science-fiction novel Frankenstein.)

The show described Franklin’s invention of the glass armonica – which he got the idea for by seeing someone rubbing glasses with a wet finger to produce musical sounds, and he thought he could improve on the effect by inventing a machine that revolved tuned glasses automatically so all the player had to do was rub them as they turned. The instrument was a great success (though it soon fell out of use because it was extraordinarily difficult to manufacture), and composers like Mozart and Beethoven wrote for it, though to my mind the most successful use of the glass armonica was in Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti wrote a part for glass armonica into Lucia’s big mad scene in 1835, though for over a century most producers staging the opera didn’t include that part. Conductor Thomas Schippers revived the glass armonica for Beverly Sills’ Lucia recording in 1970, and it gave an eerie presence to the scene (sort of a 19th century equivalent to the theremin) that made it for once sound like the ravings of a madwoman and not, as George Bernard Shaw contemptuously dissed it, “a test of skill with the first flute.”

The first part of Benjamin Franklin concluded with an account of Franklin’s fruitless efforts to negotiate a compromise that could have averted the American Revolution. He had first advocated for some sort of union between America’s British colonies as early as the 1750’s, when he had studied the Iroquois confederation and, putting a typically racist spin on it (especially for the time), wondered how a bunch of savages could construct a confederation to maintain peace and order between their tribes while the presumably more civilized and advanced British colonists couldn’t. Franklin proposed the so-called “Albany Plan of Union” in 1754 and got it approved by the New York legislature, but both the other colonies and the British were opposed and blocked it, As Franklin bitterly wrote later, “The colonial assemblies and most of the people were narrowly provincial in outlook, mutually jealous, and suspicious of any central taxing authority.’ Also, according to the Wikipedia page on the Albany Plan, “Many in the British government, already wary of some of the strong-willed colonial assemblies, disliked the idea of consolidating additional power into their hands.”

Throughout the next two decades Franklin spent much of his time in London, absent from his home and his wife for 10 of the last 12 years of her life, trying to mediate a solution acceptable to both the British government and the colonists. The British position was that the mother country had just spent a lot of money protecting the colonies from invasion by the French, and they needed the colonies to pay it back. The colonists’ position was that Britain was exploiting them to preserve the income and privileges of their own upper classes, and they were sick and tired of being used essentially as Britain’s ATM, with Britain extracting raw materials and exporting manufactured goods which the colonies, a captive market, had to buy from Britain and no one else. The proposed compromise Franklin worked out was something like the Commonwealth of Nations, which the British government set up after World War II and the end of the British Empire: the colonies would be self-governing and have all the powers of independent countries, but the British would still maintain legal and technical sovereignty. (That’s why the British Queen’s picture is still on all Canadian and Australian money.)

Franklin’s position became more and more untenable as the controversy heated up and led to the British sending invading troops into Boston, the Boston Massacre of 1770 (in which the first victim was an African-American, Crispus Attucks), and the Boston Tea Party of 1773 (which appalled Franklin). After fruitless attempts to negotiate a settlement both sides could live with, Franklin was summoned home just as the colonial government of Massachusetts rescinded his official appointment to negotiate on their behalf, and Britain rescinded his appointment as assistant postmaster for the colonies (which had led Franklin to travel between the American colonies, realize that they had more in common than what divided them, and convinced him not only that America needed a strong central government but a postal system to unite the various colonies; that’s one of the reasons Franklin became the first U.S. Postmaster General and why he insisted that this person be part of the President’s Cabinet, which remained true until 1969 when Richard Nixon pushed through Congress a bill to rework the U.S. Post Office as the U.S. Postal Service and created a bastard hybrid of the worst aspects of a government bureaucracy and a private corporation). He arrived back in Philadelphia just as the American Revolution was about to start – and that’s where the first part of this fascinating two-part series, with Mandy Patinkin playing Benjamin Franklin on the soundtrack and other major actors portraying Franklin’s wife and associates, ends. Right now I’m really looking forward to watching the rest of it tonight!