“Electricity! Yeah, you can all thank me,” Ben Franklin would have sung in “Hamilton” if his song hadn’t been cut. As a result, we don’t associate Franklin with a song whose lyrics included, “Do you know who the f-k I am? I am “I am Poor-Richard’s-Almanack-writing Benjamin “f-king” Franklin.” Instead, we still think of him as a sanctimonious old guy who told us to save our pennies and get up early to go to work.
Franklin, of course, was known for many things including writing “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” which was first published on December 19, 1732 and appeared continually until 1758. The almanac contained a host of proverbs, many of them collected by Franklin into what became known as “The Way to Wealth,” which was wildly successful. Indeed, according to historian Jill Lepore, by the end of the 18th century, that book had been reprinted at least 145 editions and six languages.
Many of the book’s saying are well-known. All of us have been told: “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise” and “a penny saved is a penny earned.” A somewhat less-known aphorism, “fear to do ill and you need fear Nought else,” appears on today’s #stampoftheday. A 4-cent stamp, issued in 1960, it was part of a 6-stamp “American Credo” series that the Post Office Department issued in 1960 and 1961 to “re-emphasize the ideals upon which America was founded and to honor those great Americans who wrote or uttered the credos.”
As Lepore noted in a wonderful 2008 essay in The New Yorker, these famous sayings make us think about Franklin as a somewhat sanctimonious and scolding figure. For example, “Early to bed, etc.,” which is perhaps his best-known proverb, “has vexed generations of the lazy-boned and sleepy-headed,” noted Lepore, who quoted Mark Twain as saying, “The sorrow that that maxim has cost me through my parents’ experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell.”
Lepore argued that while Franklin’s writings, were “useful in the farming, boycotting, non-importing, independence-loving eighteenth century,” they “came to be worshipped in the capitalizing, industrializing, Founders-revering nineteenth century.” The problem, she explained, is while there’s some truth to the view that he believed in industriousness and thrift, “The Way to Wealth,” like much of Franklin’s work “is also a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham.”
But, she added, “The joke fell flat. The parody within the sham became the man.” And the image, she added, was a “frugal, prudent, sober, homey, quaint, sexless, humorless, preachy Benjamin Franklin” who was “loved (by Dale Carnegie), hated (by D. H. Lawrence), and held up (by Max Weber) as the original American Puritan striver, the prophet of prosperity.”
To be sure, she noted, “The vast bulk of Franklin’s writing, and especially of his political pieces, is sober, stirring, and grave, as the occasion, and the times, all too often demanded.” But, she added, “he was also a sucker for a good joke, or, really, even a lousy one. He loved hoaxes and counterfeits and had the sort of fondness for puns that, if he hadn’t been so charming, would have been called a weakness. As it was, his enemies damned his ‘trivial mirth.’ John Adams, who resented him, conceded, ‘He had wit at will,’ and ‘talents for irony, allegory, and fable,’ but characterized his humor as ‘infantine simplicity.'”
Nonetheless, Lepore argued, “Franklin’s best satires are relentlessly scathing social and political commentary attacking tyranny, injustice, ignorance, and, at the end of his life, slavery. Yet reading his letters you [also] get the sense that he couldn’t always govern his wit, as when, striving to collect himself, he began a new paragraph, ‘But to be serious.'”
Part of the problem, she contended was that in selecting the proverbs that were printed in what became his best-selling book, Franklin left out Poor Richard’s many proverbs that made it clear that in addition to valuing hard work and sacrifice, he also “was committed to the principle of silently doing good [and] had boundless sympathy for the common people who bought his almanacs.” That is, the Franklin once wrote, “I would rather have it said ‘He lived usefully’ than ‘He died rich'” is missing from what became his signature work.
Perhaps today, the anniversary of the first printing of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” is a good moment to reclaim the Franklin who got cut from “Hamilton”, the one who called himself “the polymath, bifocal-wearing, Hardened glass-harmonica-playing Benjamin F-king Franklin” who added, “I’m the only American the French wanna see. They call me a genius, I can’t disagree.”
Be well, stay safe, live usefully, fight for justice, and work for peace.