America's Moment: 1918

...The American nation had had little experience with European international affairs since the eighteenth century and the era of independence...

...The little Puritan town of less than 6,000 inhabitants that Franklin's father found when he arrived was still only slightly larger in Benjamin's boyhood...

...He accepted an honorary degree from Harvard, assisted the college library, and when he died left money to Boston for prize medals and loan funds to aid young artificers...

...And if we try, we will succeed...

...Partly because of the publicity generated by the American official propaganda organization, the so-called Committee on Public Information, and partly because he was such an obviously large but still unknown quantity, Wilson in reputation stood far above the leaders of the allies...

...Arthur Tourtellot has splendidly brought to life this Bostonian Franklin and the Boston of his time...

...Norton and Company / $14.95 Robert H. Ferrell In the twentieth century the United States undoubtedly has had some opportunities to change the world, to reconstitute the world's wickedness or waywardness into something approaching the American dream, and it does seem probable that one such chance for change came at the end of the First World War, in the weeks after the armistice of November 11, 1918...

...The University of Chicago, which he joined two decades ago, has embraced them with affection...

...The unfortunate part of story ensued-the part that turned the opportunity, however rightly chosen, into a moment rather than an achievement...

...he wrote it, he said, for the instruction of youth and left out "all facts and transactions that may not have a tendency to benefit the young r e a d e r . " Now comes Arthur Bernon Tourtellot (an eighteenth-century buff and president of the CBS Foundation) with the happy idea of using Franklin's memoir of his first seventeen years--before he fled his Boston apprenticeship and went to Philadelphia--as the core of a larger work, which would sketch the background of Franklin's family and the contemporary life of his native city so as to suggest the forces and events which helped make him the extraordinary world figure who puzzled and attracted so many of his countrymen...

...sions of a single, specific existential situation of man in Western societies...

...we must therefore accept life as it is, as a natural mode of being...

...Upon reading Teilhard, Eliade exclaims in his journal: "What a joy to rediscover in a Western theologian and 'man of science' the optimism of Romanian peasants, they themselves also being Christian but belonging to that 'cosmic Christianity' which has long since disappeared in the West...

...each division contained over 27,000 men...

...Eliade is keeping his native tradition alive abroad...

...The Boston manner," he once wrote, "the turn of phrase, and even tone of voice and accent in pronounciation all please, and seem to revive and refresh me...

...BOOK REVIEW America's Moment: 1918 Arthur Walworth / W.W...

...From first to last the result is an eyeopening, fascinating volume, original in concept, briskly and brightly written, rich in detail, and founded on historical fact...

...America is, indeed, his new land...

...Franklin intended his autobiography only as a partial account...

...The country still prided itself on the ideas of Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe...

...America's more recent moment thus has probably lasted for the past 32 years...

...Pershing wanted to turn them loose-contrary to the British and French commanders, Haig and P&ain, who had had enough...

...Evidently, though, not all limitation is evil...

...Despite Vietnam...

...38 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977...

...As the youngest son and fifteenth child of Josiah's numerous progeny, Ben was far at the end of the list, but Tourtellot says that in him "the Folger line united spirit, zest, rebellion, and thoroughgoing independence" with the "sturdiness, sense of responsibility, self-reliance and incorruptible integrity of the Franklins...

...By the time George Washington was born, Franklin had long since fled Boston for Philadelphia, been to London, and founded the Pennsylvania Gazette...

...He works long hours and has good friends..Joe Kitagawa, Paul Ricoeur, and Saul Bellow gather at his home for anecdotes and good food...

...General John J. (Black Jack) Pershing had 42 huge divisions, 39 of them on the line...

...Creation, as all life, can thrive only beyond arbitrary force and mindless censorship...

...OOOOOBOOQQjOOOmJOOOOQUD~alaQIQ800~QQQOOOgOQOQDOgOOIgUQQQDOIggU m60iiiQI0Q000QQ00Qo0060D0OQQ0~oOQ0IQQgO4~44Q0QOta0UaiQ0ODIg0OD000000B0wQqQ0QwDii0j0I00 BOOK REVIEW Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius Arthur B. Tourtellot / Doubleday / $10.95 William Bentinck-Smith One of the most famous American literary works, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is a relatively brief account of the author' s life down to his fifty-first year, when he commenced service in England as the agent for Pennsylvania...

...In a diplomatic sense it was also America's moment, for the Germans had applied to President Woodrow Wilson for an armistice, not to the British or French, and Wilson had set the terms of the armistice according to his own Fourteen Points, announced some months earlier...

...With its face turned to the sea, the port boasted more than a thousand ships of Boston registry, which were (Tourtellot tells us), "five times in number and almost three times in tonnage than registered in all the ports of theBritish Isles combined...

...An opportunity for diplomatic leadership was clearly there...

...no use complaining of having been born in an industrial society...

...At the time of the armistice Pershing's men had just taken the Argonne forest, at dreadful cost--the equivalent, in dead, of one of his big divisions...

...The British and French were too tired from their awful wartime exertions--nearly a million dead for the British, far more for the French...

...Will his "vocation" emerge intact...

...Tourtellot primarily emphasizes the environmental and intellectual influences that contributed to "the shaping of genius" in the many-sided Franklin of later life--his forebears, religious heritage, family circle, schooling, early reading, and particularly his experience as apprentice to his brother James, the printer, who established the weekly New England Courant in 1721...

...Twenty-six thousand dead soldiers in the Argonne had been a high price, and perhaps it would not be all of the price, for a military opportunity...

...And in the face of imminent global destruction, in spite of Western nihilism, with no souvenirs from home, that certitude persists...

...It is a great story, America's moment during the few weeks beginning with the armistice of 1918...

...A source of inspiration to Romanian intellectuals in exile, he meets with the playwright Ionesco, the philosopher Cioran, the critic C~linescu, with the young writers who publish Cabiers de l'Est (an East European dissident literary journal stationed in Paris), for the flame of freedom must be kept kindled...

...Indeed, one of Franklin's fondest boyhood ambitions was to go to sea, an aspiration defeated by his father's wish to see him become, if not a candidate for the ministry, at least an artisan or tradesman...

...Carl Van Doren called it "the first masterpiece of biography by a self-made man...

...The benevolent Samuel Sewall, too, was still flourishing in Franklin's boyhood William Bentinck-Smith is a writer and editor associated with Harvard University...

...His troops had broken out into open country, and the Germans could not have stopped them short of Berlin...

...He senses a "suspicion and refusal toward all the authors protected by the regime...whence the passion of the youth for us who are in exile, who for fifteen years have been the target of all the insults of the official powers, from the literary critics to the political police...

...we must try to live as free beings even in the midst of the most terrible social, technological, psychological conditionings...

...Benjamin's father Josiah (1657-1745), originally a silk dyer from Northamptonshire, moved to Boston in 1683 and became a successful tallow-chandler and soapmaker...

...What was the trouble...

...He and his wife are happy here...

...The waterfront with its towering masts and rows of bowsprits, its bustling shipyards (Boston launched an average of 33 ships a year), its ropewalks and sail lofts, ship chandlers' shops, and busy docks, provided constant fascination...

...And even beyond that, maybe down to the present...

...The trouble with the peacemaking began, and America's moment passed before the Paris Peace Conference opened late in January 1919...

...It was, of course, a grand accumulation of troubles or errors...

...Not if we forget what we are: the only animals capable of worship, the only creatures able to comprehend and question the inevitability of our own death...

...His origins are simple--his father was an army officer of peasant stock...

...For despite all the contentions of the military establishment, and the enormous recent waste of American resources in the abandonment of the draft and the over-payment of the all-volunteer force of officers and men (with their absurdly generous retirement benefits), American military power has stayed well ahead of Russian...

...The work was composed in several installments with many years intervening, and even though it does not treat his whole career, particularly his public life, it has great charm and value and a well.deserved place in American literature...

...Although he left Boston in 1723, in part because of the Courant's quarrel with the authorities and in part because of the friction between himself and his brother, Benjamin returned in later life "with almost decennial regularity" to "that beloved place," his native city...

...Ben was the child of...

...In a military sense it was as Robert H. Ferrell, professor of history at Indiana University and a leading authority on American diplomatic history, is writing a book on the World War Iperiodfor the "New American Nation" Series...

...The reason for the lead has been the almost diabolic inventiveness of American science, and the willingness of American taxpayers to go the Russians one better with the new hardware on the basis, as Herbert York put it some years ago (Race to Oblivion [1970]), of two to one...

...We must also accept 'progress...

...Yet exile this is...

...Throughout Tourtellot's narrative runs the theme of the changing colony at the dawn of its mercantile era...

...For, ultimately, Eliade is a son of that rich, small land of clear lakes and wide meadows, so tortured now by both God and man...

...That passion is very genuine indeed: On my visit to Romania in the summer of 1975 friends and relatives all begged me to send them Eliade's works from America, for the few books they had obtained, illegally, in French editions, had set everyone on fire...

...Josiah Franklin finally decided to apprentice the boy in 1718 at age twelve to his brother James who had recently returned from England to set up a printing shop in Boston...

...He was five years older than Governor Thomas Hutchinson (whom he helped to bring down), and thirty years the senior of John Adams...

...But it is not in vain that this temptation and this risk exists...

...In a copy of his journal, which he brought last year on the occasion of his birthday alongside a bottle of wine, he inscribed these words: "these pages--from Paris to Chicago, from Exile to a new citizenship...

...as a pillar of the same South Church, presided over by Ephraim Pemberton, which the Franklins attended...

...Certainly the years 1945-49 when the nation possessed a The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 37 monopoly of nuclear power...

...It has been a time akin to those weeks after the armistice of 1918...

...But not if we give up our own essence...

...Franklin's durability, vitality, and contemporaneity so constantly mislead us that we need to be reminded that by the time of the American Revolution, he was the Colonies' senior statesman...

...That is not, however, thank God, one of America's desires...

...Consequently, to disappear as man...

...To deny this, and "to think like a materialist or Marxist means giving up the primordial vocation of man...

...Eliade agrees with Teilhard and Father Danielou that "we have a body and we are here, on earth...

...Born in Boston in January 1706, Franklin was very much a transitional figure...

...Walworth describes it, "America's moment...

...Almost a son of the seventeenth century, he was deeply influenced by the living presence of Increase and Cotton Mather, though he was never their undeviating admirer...

...The peasant believes that the world is good, that it returned to that state after the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Savior...

...Josiah's second wife Abiah Folger (1667-1752), a member of the noted Nantucket family...

...Fascinated by the experiment, Eliade is watching--not disinterested but still detached, as only a sage can be...

...My basic optimism probably finds its source in that certitude...

...What have been the other moments of American power...

...But we are really, truly, sincerely (if anyone can use that word after the Nixon presidency) a peaceful people...

...President Wilson in many ways was a great man, but already had antagonized a majority, perhaps two-thirds, of the membership of the Senate...

...Goaded by his wife who desired to display some new gowns by the famed couturier Worth, and probably not needing the goad anyway, Wilson desired to be a world prophet (to use the phrase employed by Walworth for the second volume of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilson biography of twenty years ago...

...If we had wanted, either at the end of the year 1918, or since 1945, we could have rearranged the world according to our desires...

...The American people had sent two million soldiers to fight in France...

...Wilson properly chose to make the opportunity diplomatic rather than military...

...More than half of Tourtellot's volume concerns the apprenticeship period, and he gives a detailed reconstruction of the Courant's part in Boston's 1721 smallpox epidemic, and the inoculation controversy, of Benjamin's role as Mistress Silence Dogood, and of the famous conflict over editorial freedom that James fought with the Massachusetts government...

...What went wrong...