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David Waldstreicher says Ben Franklin's bad side is neglected

This week, in a nod to the 120th meeting of the American Historical Association, the National Constitution Center hosted three celebratory Ben Franklin biographers: Gordon Wood, Walter Isaacson and Stacy Schiff.

Philadelphia's David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biographer, wasn't among the honored guests. That's despite his well-reviewed "Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

It's not hard to figure out why. Waldstreicher falls into a long line of historians who see the OTHER side of Franklin. The wiry, sardonic 39-year-old author is not a fan of rah-rah Franklin books, especially given his view that "Franklin's anti-slavery credentials have been greatly exaggerated."

He regards Isaacson's "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" as "a good read" with "insightful moments," but sees Isaacson as "already on the stump, talking about why we should find Franklin inspiring, why he's better, why he's neither too far left nor too far right, why he's so reasonable.

"It's been disturbing to see it called the standard biography now," Waldstreicher says, because "it doesn't build on any of the scholarship in early American history."

Waldstreicher labels Wood's "The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin" as "an artful recycling of themes in Franklin scholarship and in his own work. It's not original. It's a minor work by a major historian."

As for Schiff's "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America," Waldstreicher wrote in the Boston Globe that "Schiff stumbles only when Franklin returns to America."

Making his way through the Constitution Center's Franklin exhibition one recent holiday afternoon, Waldstreicher notices things.

A panel, for example, that attributes Franklin's famous bolting from his family and duties in Boston to "ambition" that "got the better of him."

"It takes the conflict out of it," observes Waldstreicher, "the conflict with other people, which is precisely the way Franklin tended to tell stories. ..."

In fact, Waldstreicher says, the 19th-century "language of apprenticeship" employed by the exhibition's panels about Franklin's early Boston life obscures that young Franklin was, in 18th-century terms, an "indentured servant," a labor slave more than a trainee.

"It turns his running away into a virtue," says Waldstreicher, "whereas contemporaries would have seen it as a crime."

The most annoying thing to Waldstreicher is the downplaying of the Franklin who participated in slaveholding for much of his life, and the trumpeting of his alleged activism against it in his final years.

One exhibition panel talks of "the family servants and slaves."

"The servants belong to the family, not to him," cracks Waldstreicher, rolling his eyes.

In his book, however, Waldstreicher argues that Franklin's supposed "prominent stand" and activism against slavery, all in the last three of his 84 years, amounted to lending his name to the cause while "he and [John] Hancock squashed the petition that the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery asked them to present to the convention."

"There's no evidence," says Waldstreicher, "that he said anything in the convention against slavery."

The Constitution Center's exhibition reflects a wave of hagiography in Franklin biography that pooh-poohs criticism of the so-called First American. (Some contemporary historians think that title might more properly belong to a Native American.) It marginalizes such longtime lightning rods for Franklin critics as his slave-trade activities, womanizing, hardball politics, and spinmeister shaping of his own image.

Waldstreicher's critique thus comes at a welcome time. It steers attention from the mind-numbing "Benergy" campaign, and lopsided biographies of Franklin that make him a safe adoptable symbol and hero, to a countertradition.

Isn't this, after all, the same Founder who hoped, in his 1751 essay, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind," that America could be for whites and Indians only, writing, "Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawnys, of increasing the lovely White. ..."

The bad boy who counseled in a famous 1745 letter that a man should "prefer old women to young ones" for lovemaking? (Two of his famous reasons: "(R)egarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one," and "They are so grateful!!")

Read entire article at Knight Ridder