David Waldstreicher: Seeing Ben Franklin's bad side
Memo to scholarly critics of Ben Franklin: Go fly a kite. At noon today, in a nod to the 120th meeting of the American Historical Association, which has been raising Center City's tweed factor all week, the National Constitution Center will host three celebratory Ben Franklin biographers: Gordon Wood, Walter Isaacson and Stacy Schiff. [They will appear in a show hosted by PBS's Jim Lehrer.]
Philadelphia's own David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biographer, won't be 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."
Wood's The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Waldstreicher labels 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 clearly lacks that "Philly's Got Benergy!" spirit.
He 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.
Read entire article at Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer
Philadelphia's own David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biographer, won't be 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."
Wood's The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Waldstreicher labels 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 clearly lacks that "Philly's Got Benergy!" spirit.
He 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.