The Local Lens

Published•

Wed, Apr 01, 2015

By Thom Nickels

The myth of Benjamin Franklin is probably greater than that of Santa Claus. That’s because the Ben Franklin that most school children know is nothing more than a jovial, benign Kris Kringle—a smiling, kite-flying granddaddy figure—filled with chuckles, winks and wise sayings that sound like they were lifted from the pages of Readers Digest.

The undisputed fact, of course, is that Ben Franklin really was a genius with a dark history. Born in Boston in 1706, the 10th son of soap maker Josiah Franklin and Abiah Folger, Franklin was many things: a printer, inventor, writer, publisher, adventurer and lover, as well as a man of secrets and mystery. His childhood was difficult, with his father marking him early on as "destined" for the clergy—although that plan failed when the cost of divinity school proved prohibitive. Instead, the precocious, troubled boy who liked to read was farmed off to his older brother James, then-editor and publisher of The New England Courant.

James put young Franklin to work as a printing hand, so the 12-year-old was soon diligently working all the time, setting type. In the end, the ‘technical only’ job proved unsatisfying. Little Ben wanted to write for the Courant, but knew his brother would never allow a lowly print assistant—much less his younger brother—to become a contributor to the magazine. Ben, undeterred, went on to invent a nom de plume, "Silence Dogwood," supposedly an anonymous female writer who wrote letters to the editor criticizing the treatment of women in the colonies. Unaware of his younger brother’s duplicity, James published Dogwood’s letters in the Courant and they became quite famous, on the order of a Colonial version of Dear Abby. Soon, everyone in town wanted to know who Silence Dogwood was.

When Ben owned up and confessed the truth to his brother, James’ reaction was not nice. In fact, it was downright volatile. James became self-righteous and claimed that Ben had harmed the publication, and then proceeded to beat him. But the teenage Franklin had had enough. He found passage to Philadelphia, where he hoped to find a job in printing, arriving with just enough money for a few loaves of bread. On his first day in the city, it is said that he walked the streets soaking wet (it had just rained) and that his "odd" look impressed his future wife who, serendipitously, happened to catch a quick glimpse of him walking the streets. They would marry years later, after her first marriage failed, and after Franklin had established roots working for The Pennsylvania Gazette.

The Founding Father’s life then takes on a mythic cast. He fathered an illegitimate child named William before his marriage, but after his marriage, tales of his flirtations with other women, especially in France—where the spirit of sexual licentiousness always seemed to rule with an iron fist—began to circulate. He also embarked on a number of simultaneous careers, including that of inventor. His inventions included the lightning rod for homes, and the glass armonica. On one sailing trip, he was the first to discover the warming effects of the Gulf Stream. He also resurrected Silence Dogwood in the form of another pseudonym—"Poor Richard," or "Richard Saunders"—when he published the annual Poor Richard’s Almanac, a chapbook of aphorisms, quotations, reflections, weather reports and other oddities that the public found endearing.

Noted by some as America’s first arms dealer, Franklin went to London to work on behalf of the colonies, and stayed at the estate of Lord Snowdon, in East Wycombe, just outside the city..

Here’s where his life takes a mysterious turn: Lord Snowdon was the founder of the "Hellfire Club," a secret society that held meetings and parties underneath the Wycombe estate, where the male members dressed as monks and the women as nuns. The behavior among Hellfire Club members was in perfect alignment with Philadelphia’s own ‘Sin City’ reputation in the 18th century, when bawdy houses (brothels) were common in the city. This may be difficult to imagine now, but in 18th century Philadelphia, most neighbors had a ‘live and let live’ attitude when it came to the local bawdy house. People left the houses alone, as long as no trouble came from them. When trouble did come from these houses, it was often in the form of fights, noise, and gunshots. If a house was too troublesome, it was often razed by neighbors, but it was razed not from a sense of moral outrage, but for practical reasons—too much noise is never acceptable.

In some correspondence, Franklin makes references to Wycombe’s ‘underground’ life, although the extent of his involvement there is unknown. Ben, after all, was the ultimate public relations man. In his book, Benjamin Franklin, Politician: The Mask and the Man, Francis Jennings, wrote: "To begin with, Franklin’s Autobiography is about as valid as a campaign speech. It sounds good. Everything he wrote sounds good. Franklin’s public life was devoted to public relations, of which he became a preeminent master."

Jolly ol’ Ben was a man of so many "different selves." In fact, today there are still a number of people who accuse him of being a British spy, or of murdering and then burying the corpses of women and children under his old house on Carver Street in London. Others even reduce him to a Satanist who worshipped Lucifer in the Hellfire caves at Wycombe.

But it was Franklin’s PR abilities that continue to affect how biographers see him through the present day. These biographies paint too sweet a portrait of the man, an image that thoroughly keeps up with the touristy imitation of Franklin’s walking around Independence Hall. If your knowledge of Ben didn’t extend beyond this Santa image, you would never know, for instance, that novelist D.H. Lawrence found Franklin "a little pathetic…ridiculous and detestable," and that German sociologist Max Weber summed up Franklin’s thinking as a "philosophy of avarice."

Franklin, for instance, called German immigrants "the Refuse of their People," and he referred to the black slaves on American soil of having "a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful and cruel…"

The most evenly balanced depiction of the man is Mark Van Doren’s biography that spells out—quite literally—that when Franklin’s wife was dying in Philadelphia, ol’ Ben was spending his time living it up surrounded by French women in Paris. Van Doren also describes how Franklin and a friend played a prank on a young man in Philadelphia’s Oyster Alley, and then accidentally burned him to death. Then there was Ben’s cynical view of American Indians in western Pennsylvania. It seems that before negotiating a treaty with these Native Americans, Franklin sent them a case of whiskey to "lubricate their compliance."

At his funeral in 1790, 20,000 people paid tribute to this remarkable human being who was really much more complicated than the fake glossy image that’s become popular today.

At age 39 in 1748, Franklin wrote:

"Fair Venus calls; her voice obey;

In Beauty’s arms spend night and day

The joys of love all joys excell

And loving’s certainly doing well."

Life, for Benjamin Franklin, was all about the next conquest, be it political, scientific, or romantic.