Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius,
Tourtellot, B.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius," monopoly of nuclear power. And even beyond that, maybe down to the present. For despite all the contentions of the military establishment, and the enormous recent waste of American...
...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...
...The benevolent Samuel Sewall, too, was still flourishing in Franklin's boyhood William Bentinck-Smith is a writer and editor associated with Harvard University...
...add $2.00 per year for all other foreign subscriptions...
...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...
...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...
...But we are really, truly, sincerely (if anyone can use that word after the Nixon presidency) a peaceful people...
...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...
...Despite Vietnam...
...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...
...Also, you've been getting a straightforward analysis and review of literature, music, poetry, theatre, TV, films, art, and dance...
...as a pillar of the same South Church, presided over by Ephraim Pemberton, which the Franklins attended...
...Carl Van Doren called it "the first masterpiece of biography by a self-made man...
...38 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 THE If You've Been Reading Every Week For The Past 112 Years Then, starting back in 1865, right to the present era of Corporation-dominated America, you have not only kept fully abreast of political and social events . . . but you have also had a refreshing, independent, and venturesome perspective of the undercurrents--the dynamics--of events...
...I ~mmmmmmmmmimmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mm mmmmmmlmmmmmmmmimmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmlml The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 39...
...America's more recent moment thus has probably lasted for the past 32 years...
...Josiah's second wife Abiah Folger (1667-1752), a member of the noted Nantucket family...
...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...
...He was five years older than Governor Thomas Hutchinson (whom he helped to bring down), and thirty years the senior of John Adams...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The Nation, America's oldest weekly, has been ahead of the news ever since its first issue in 1865 If You Haven't Been Reading The NATION For The Past 112 Years Ge+ wi+h if m Subscribe +oday mmlmlllmmmmm lmmlmlmm m i m m m m Imm Im mm m m | m | m m | m m m | n m m | u | m | | | | | m a m n m m u ~ m | m | | m n m n m n m a n m e m | | | ~ II , Please enter o subscription to The Nation as checked below for mm m Ill IZ] I year (47 i s s u e s ) l Name (pJease print) $2 J .00 D 2 years (94 issues)$37.00 l 0 Illll m Address m | m m City State Zip WEEKS m II m m TRIAL m m Send a gift subscription to: [ ] Gift 1 year $18.00 m SUBSCRIPTION m I t~l,_ ~ I I l "~am~ ~ I " 85 ' Address g m m m~ m m City State Zip , | m m | ' I~ATION 0 ' l | m | m 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 100i4 m m Add $1.00 per year for Canada and Mexlco...
...Throughout Tourtellot's narrative runs the theme of the changing colony at the dawn of its mercantile era...
...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...
...Arthur Tourtellot has splendidly brought to life this Bostonian Franklin and the Boston of his time...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...You have been reading comment by such of our contributors as William Butler Yeats, Ralph Nader, Henry James, Elizabeth Holtzman, Leon Trotsky, Carey McWiUiams, John Dos Passos, Corliss Lamont, Andre Malraux, George McGovern, Thomas Mann, Emile Capouya, Robert Frost, Robert Sherrill, Emily Dickinson, and a sparkling lot of other writers and thinkers...
...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...
...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...
...Franklin intended his autobiography only as a partial account...
...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...
...It has been a time akin to those weeks after the armistice of 1918...
...Ben was the child of...
...By the time George Washington was born, Franklin had long since fled Boston for Philadelphia, been to London, and founded the Pennsylvania Gazette...
...That is not, however, thank God, one of America's desires...
...Born in Boston in January 1706, Franklin was very much a transitional figure...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 10 • August 1977 • No. 10
