Volume 43, Number 10 · June 6, 1996
Not So Poor Richard
By Gordon S. Wood
Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies
by Robert Middlekauff
University of California Press, 275 pp., $24.95
The Devious Dr. Franklin, Colonial Agent: Benjamin Franklin's Years in London
by David T. Morgan
Mercer University Press, 280 pp., $34.95
Of all the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin is the most puzzling, the most difficult to understand and explain. He is a bundle of contradictions. At one and the same time he seems to be the most American and the least American of the Revolutionary leaders. He is the classic American success story, the prototypal self-made man, rising from obscure origins to great preeminence. He began as a printer's apprentice, the son of an insignificant tallow chandler and soapmaker, and became so rich and successful as a publisher of newspapers and books that he could retire at the age of forty-two. Despite his dramatic rise, however, he seems to later generations never to have shed his lowly origins. Of all the Founding Fathers he seems the most folksy, the most popular, the one with the greatest common touch. Ordinary Americans today seem to be able to identify with him in a way they cannot with Washington or Jefferson. He remains the most rustic, bourgeois, and democratic of the Founders.
Review, 5294 words
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